Of all the things involved in being a good cook, being a good baker is probably the most difficult. Flour, after all, has a mind of its own, and anything you might add to it--eggs, baking soda, baking powder, sugar, salt, and any form of liquid--basically has to bow before the flour.
Just about anyone can make a sauce, but I can think of ten people who can make a mean marinara sauce to every one person who can bake a mean bundt cake. And when it comes to baking bread, real honest-to-goodness stir all the ingredients and knead it into a roll and let it rise and toss it into the oven and pull it out looking like an ad for a Betty Crocker cookbook photo, then the ratio goes to about thirty-to-one.
The kicker in baking bread is how to work with yeast. Flour and yeast don't get along. If flour and yeast were people, one would be a Palestinian and the other would be an Israeli. If flour and yeast were people, one would go to Iowa and the other to Iowa State. If flour and yeast were people, one would be Hilary Clinton and the other would be Rudy Giuliani. If flour and yeast were embodied by something else, one would be death and the other would be life.
Flour is made from something that is very much dead. Jesus says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24)." On the other hand, yeast is made from something that is very much alive. Sometime I love reading ingredient labels, especially when they contain my old friends, "active cultures." Do you think they'd ever put dead cultures in these things? Active ingredients include sugar, Yellow Food Dye No. 114, and Ancient Mayan Civilization.
No, it's amazing that bread--the staff of life, the basic food of most civilizations--is something that is, in and of itself, a struggle between life and death. And as we walk through life, from Point A to Point C with hopefully a lot of Point B in between, we're always going to find ourselves walking with these two things looming on either side of us.
In last week's scripture lesson, Jesus walked into a city called Capernaum. In this week's scripture lesson, Jesus walks into a little village called Nain. Last week, He was confronted by an advance team asking Jesus to come to the home of a Roman Centurion. This week, He is confronted by a funeral procession.
If life is a journey from Point A to Point C, it's interesting that you view point B so much differently when you're closer to Point A than Point C. I remember being a kid, out in the car with my parents, and having to stop for a funeral procession pulling into Cunningham Memorial Cemetery. Every time this would happen I would be immersed in a font of mystery and solemnity. But now that I'm probably closer to Point C than I was back then--and who among us isn't?--I get more immersed with a feeling of "Hey, don't you know I'm in a hurry here?" when I have to wait for a funeral procession to cross. I look at my watch and say, "Come on, don't you people know I've got someplace I've got to go?" all the while oblivious to the fact that the guy in that coffin has someplace to go as well. (I need to add that I don't have this attitude when I'm riding with Craig Dennis in the hearse and actually part of the funeral procession. Then I don't mind making others wait.)
Be that as it may, here's Jesus on His way from Point A: Christmas, to Point C: Good Friday and Easter, and His Point B on this particular day takes Him through this little village called Nain, where His entourage encounters a funeral procession.
Two entourages collide in time and space: a crowd following Jesus, a man who is very much alive, and a crowd following an unnamed young man, a gentleman who is very much dead. Jesus is walking; the young man is being carried. In the crowd following Jesus is His mother; in the crowd following the young man on the way to the cemetery is his mother.
Mary the mother of Jesus and the dead man's mother have a lot in common. They are both widows. They both depended on their son to provide for them after their husbands died. They both knew the grief of losing their husband, their mate, and their soul friend. But at this point, the widow in the funeral procession knows something that Mary will have to wait a few months to know: the utter depth of despair that comes from losing a child.
Though the two widows may have much in common in terms of their grief, every person's grief is different. You and I may think or say to someone undergoing something tough, "I know what you're going though." But that's not true. Every individual's grief is different. Every individual's pain has its own nuances, its own character, and its own depth.
So here the two processions intersect, both following a man, both wildly emotional, one filled with life, one emptied and dead, both with a prominent widow in tow, both about to encounter a life-changing event.
In the funeral procession, all eyes are on the dead young man being carried through the streets. There's something about looking at a dead person that has, for many people, a certain morbid fascination. Tabloids will pay big dollars for photographs of prominent passed away people posed in their coffins. In addition, if the death has spiked emotion, or if the demise was particularly tragic, people seem to be more self-justified in gawking at the dead.
This is the case here. This is the only son of a widow. This is a small town. All eyes are on the casket. Everyone wants a last look before the young man is buried and all have their eyes affixed on the deceased. But not Jesus. His eyes are somewhere else. His eyes are not on the dead but the living. His eyes are not on the object of grief but upon the chief griever.
In the Presbyterian way of doing things, the casket has to be closed while the funeral worship service is taking place. There's a very good biblical, theological and practical reason for this: during the service, the focus is not on the deceased but upon God. The focus turns from grief to hope, from despair to triumph, from death to eternal life.
Jesus is not looking at the young, dead man: He's looking at the widow. He's not looking at what once was: He's looking at what is. And what He sees is a woman overwhelmed with grief. She's been through this once before, and that was bad enough. But here she is again. And Jesus looks at her and FEELS something. Something stirs inside of Him that the text calls COMPASSION. Let's face it: it's natural to have feelings for those going through grief. We will probably experience our own sorrow. We may even experience sympathy, but sympathy is not compassion. The word compassion in Greek comes from the word that means spleen, intestines and bowels. It means the absolute depths of an individual. The pain that we feel for a person going through loss is akin to being scratched by a thorn. It hurts, for sure. It cuts, for sure. It probably even bleeds. But as we said before, we can't possibly know all that a grieving individual is enduring; every grief is unique because every person is unique. But having compassion for a person means entering into their suffering. We enter into the guts of what they are going through. We crawl down into the hole with them.
Everyone else is grieving for the dead young man, but Jesus feels compassion for the young man's mother. The book of Hebrews says, "We don't have a High Priest who is numb to our weaknesses; Indeed, He has, in every respect, been tested and tempted as we are with one glaring exception: He did not sin (Hebrews 4:15, translation mine)." In other words--because Jesus bore each of our sins, because Jesus is intimately acquainted with all our ways, because He experienced life with all the pathos that a person could endure--if anyone who could ever legitimately say, "I know what you're going through," it's Him: because He has. In our community Lenten services this year, we;re exploring some of the whys of the Passion, the reasons that He suffered for us. One of the major reasons He did so is so He could experience the pain we go through.
But there's more to this than simply saying, in a general way, "I feel for you, I know what you're going through." In this very specific instance, Jesus knows exactly what the woman is going through because He knows what His own mother will be going through. In the not so far future from when all this takes place in Nain, a Son will experience death and be paraded through the streets in Jerusalem.
I still haven't seen "The Passion of the Christ" yet. If all goes well, I'll see it this week. Yet one scene in the movie, told to me by my daughter Sarah, is haunting before I've even seen it. In the movie, there's a scene where Jesus, carrying His cross to Golgotha, slips and falls. Watching Him carry His cross is His mother, Mary. When He slips, the movie cuts back to a scene where Jesus as a little child is running and falls. And here is Mary, caught in this time warp between the then and the now, between watching her Son as a child suffer and watching her Son as a fully grown adult about to suffer and bear the sins of the world.
Jesus looks at the dead young man's mother and feels indescribable compassion for her. So He walks up to the funeral bier and touches the dead young man. In front of everyone there, the young man sits up. The word that Luke the beloved physician uses here is a medical term that describes a patient who sits up in bed after having overcome a deathly illness. You couldn't get any sicker than this young man. You can't get any sicker than death. But just as the verbalization of a word brought the Roman Centurion's beloved slave back from the brink of death, the touch of Jesus brings the widow's beloved son back from the bowels of death.
Have you ever thought of all the sickness and disease that Jesus encountered? We can be certain that He didn't heal everyone with whom He came in contact. Why did He heal this one but not that one? All we can say is that Jesus, in His infinite wisdom, had reasons for doing so and not doing so.
I'm sure Jesus had all kinds of reasons for raising the widow's son from the dead, but I get the sense that underneath the impending miracle, this was His way of looking over His shoulder. He's looking at the widow of Nain and raising her son from the dead. But all the while, He's looking at the widow of Joseph and saying, "Your son will be raised from the dead too."
Jesus has one eye on the dead young man and one eye on the widow of Nain and one eye on the widow of Joseph, but I've also got the sense that He's got one eye on you and me. If we listen carefully, we can hear Him saying, "One day you too will go through this. You will die. But you've got to know that I've gone through it too. And I'll be with you on this side when you go and I'll be waiting for you on the other side when you arrive and I'll be with you every step on all the paths in between."
It's very interesting that this rising takes place in Nain. To the east is a place called Shunem and to the west is a place called Endor. In each of these places, three towns in a row, people were raised from the dead. In Endor, King Saul coerced a witch to raise the dead prophet Samuel from the dead. This was a very illegitimate resurrection. In Shunem, the prophet Elisha raised another widow's son from the dead. This was a very legitimate resurrection, as was this one in Nain.
The point is that life is a journey from Point A to Point C with a lot of Point B in between. Some of the things we experience will be difficult, but God will walk us through them. We will be in parades that stroll through the streets in triumph at the same time that we're in funeral processions going in the opposite direction. Yet no matter which way we travel, it would serve us well to remember that, "I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5)."
These words come to us from Jesus, the Bread of Life, the One who very much died and was very much dead, like flour. These words come to us from Jesus, the Bread of Life, who--very much like yeast--rose from the dead and is very much alive.
© Rev. Duane Brown, 2004
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