In the ancient world, you wouldn’t want to be a widow. These were highly patriarchal societies, in which women were reliant upon husbands or sons for economic, social, and legal security. Without their protection and standing, women had little means to provide for themselves or to protect their property, which would revert to their husband’s family if they had no male heirs. To be a widow whose son died compounded the problem. Your son was your only hope to ensure your economic and social well-being. To lose your husband and your son was catastrophic. There was no one more vulnerable, more dispossessed than widows without sons in that world.
This is exactly the situation facing two women in our readings today. The first is from the time of Elijah the prophet. Elijah is a colorful figure who lived during a time of spiritual apostasy, when the Israelite king, Ahab, married a Sidonian princess, Jezebel. Jezebel is infamous for introducing the worship of the fertility god Baal into the life of Israel. Elijah predicts that Baal will not deliver the rain that he was expected to deliver, and a drought ensues. Elijah flees out into the wilderness, where he is provided with food and water until that too dries up, and he must seek the hospitality of strangers. God tells him to go to the Sidonian town of Zarephath to live with a widow.
This does not seem to be an auspicious development for Elijah. Not only is he sent to the same people who have corrupted Israel’s religious life with other gods, but he’s sent to a widow. In a time of drought, this widow would have even less to provide than others in the town, and indeed she is on her last handful of meal when Elijah arrives. Amazingly, as she offers hospitality to him, the meal and oil last, day after day after day, even as the drought persists. Elijah is sent to the least of the members of Sidonian society, a widow whose only son is not yet grown up. He lives there for ‘many, many days’—a powerful relational encounter across lines of religious, cultural, and social difference.
That brings us to today’s moment, when after having been sustained all this time, the widow’s son falls deathly ill. She is afraid that the prophet has done something to bring death upon her household. But Elijah calls out to God, literally covering his body over the dying child as a sign of God’s protective care, and the son rises, healed. As the prophet relies upon the hospitality of a stranger, one of society’s most vulnerable, sustenance is provided during a time of hardship, and healing emerges in their midst.
What happens in our reading from Luke echoes this earlier story. Let’s focus there for a moment. Jesus approaches a town near Nazareth called Nain with a crowd following him, only to meet a funeral procession leaving the town for burial. It is a widow’s son, whose grief can only be compounded by the economic destitution that losing her son will bring. What happens is remarkably simple. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” The Greek word means that he was literally moved in the gut.
In the Greco-Roman world, being moved by another person was a sign of weakness. What was valued was stoic detachment. But Jesus has compassion, and this is visible to those around him. Then he moves closer and touches the bier. This would render him ritually unclean according to the Jewish purity laws. Jesus has just compromised his own social standing on two counts in order to draw close to this widow and her dead son. He crosses lines in compassion to bring healing to someone with the least social status.
At the heart of today’s stories, and indeed of the gospel itself, is compassion, God’s compassion for the lost, the weak, the vulnerable, the dying, the dead, for those dispossessed and disenfranchised. Compassion literally means “suffering with.” A son of former slaves named Rufus Watson, who knew his share of hardship, once said, “God meets us at the bottom of the barrel. God meets us when we’ve gone so low that all we can do is look up.” God meets us by descending there, into that place of loss and disorientation, of grief and pain. The Christian story tells us that God himself experienced the loss of a son, and these stories we hear today prefigure the resurrection.
What have you lost? Where are the places of grief, pain, and disorientation in your life? We know that resurrection and healing aren’t always immediate, that sometimes we’re left at the bottom of that barrel for a long time. Sometimes it may not feel like God there is with us.
This is where these stories invite us one step further. We are recipients of God’s compassion so that we might share it with others. We have been identified with by God in Christ in the worst of our human circumstances so that we can identify with others in theirs. We have received God’s promises so that we might walk alongside those in need of hearing them as tangible signs of God’s presence and love. We are to share in that compassion that spreads from God to cover every place of hurt and death in our world. It is through the concrete touch and presence of others that we know and taste God’s compassion for us.
In less than two months, we will have a particular opportunity to share hospitality compassionately with some of our society’s most vulnerable, homeless families, through Project Home. The majority of our guests will be children. There are countless other opportunities in our neighborhoods and city. I know of one church planter who went door to door asking people who on the block was most in need of help and grace. He would go to those homes first. He understood something really central to the gospel, and the other neighbors noticed it.
We live in a world that has all kinds of barriers dividing people, just like the ancient world of today’s bible stories. God’s movement is constantly across those barriers, whether religious, national, cultural, economic, or social. May we know God’s compassion for us, and may we be caught up in God’s compassionate love for all in our world. Amen.
