Arise and Walk: A Sermon preached at the Festival of the Friends of Pusey House 2007
10 June 2007
Allow me to begin by thanking Father Jonathan for his intriguing and gracious invitation to be with you today. It was about half a century ago that I first came to High Mass here. At Saint Stephen’s House in those days, after the High Mass at 0730 hours, which was somewhat “penny-plain,” some of us would regularly resort either to Pusey or Saint Mary Mag’s for worship which might be described as “tuppence-coloured.” We would then return to Staggers for lunch refreshed by a visit to the Lamb and Flag.
By curious co-incidence the preacher on that occasion was an elderly bishop not long retired from his See in Australia. J. W. C. Wand had been Archbishop of Brisbane, at that time little more than an oil port but with pastoral responsibilities for Papua New Guinea, occupied by the Japanese and wounded by martyrdoms. Wand was translated via Bath and Wells to London before joining the ranks of the has-been supernumeraries. I on the other hand have retired directly into obscurity from what has become the largest inland city in Australia (bar Canberra), Ballarat in Victoria: an historic gold-mining city surrounded by a hinterland of over six million sheep, vast quantities of wheat and lakes of wine, circumscribed by the Great Ocean Road, the South Australian border and the mighty River Murray, and boasting a young and up-and-coming university which is making a noble contribution to the fields of IT and the Performing Arts.
Friends of Pusey House are we all. Pusey stood and stands for all that is at the heart of the Oxford Movement; faithfulness to the great Catholic and Apostolic tradition of Faith, Order and worship, while, by that ingenious paradox which we call Anglicanism, being sustained by sound scholarship and honest study of the Bible and Fathers. In that tradition reading and reflecting on the scriptures is a bit like playing “pass-the-parcel.” Every time the music stops we have to remove a wrapper and are apt to find a little gift. Then the music starts up again, and on we go. Will you then this morning make-believe with me and play pass–the–parcel with the Gospel story of the Lord Jesus at Nain?
Stage 1: The music stops and off comes some wrapping. We find ourselves sometime during the year 26 A.D. or soon after. Jesus of Nazareth has begun to move around in Galilee, praying and preaching, forgiving and healing, and even raising the dead. He has come to Nain, a small Galilean town about eight miles south-west of his home town of Nazareth. Nain is also only about half an hour from Shunem where the prophet Elisha is said, some seven to eight centuries earlier, to have raised from the dead the much-treasured son of his benefactress. With a few of his followers, probably both men and women, Jesus encounters a funeral which has just left the city. Not only is burial required by the climate to be immediate, but it is always outside the city walls, rather than in unsanitary urban churchyards and cemeteries.
The chief mourner is walking at the head of the procession. She is a widow, and deeply distressed. After all, you do not expect to bury your children; that is hard enough; but when your children are integral to your provision for your old age, their loss is the more grievous. She finds herself face to face with Jesus. Her weeping has brought out his compassion. Regardless of the taboo about ceremonial pollution, he touches the bier; a board or perhaps a receptacle of wickerwork; and so halts the bearers. “Stay your tears,” he says, “Young man, get up.” And the dead man sits up and begins to speak. Interesting line that, for the Greek word for “sat up” is rare except among medical writers. A similar English usage might be the word “rally.” But then, after all, Luke was a doctor, was he not?
This particular story has been passed down to us from the pen of Luke alone among the four Gospel-writers. Nevertheless raising the dead does seem to have been part of the general tradition about Jesus; there was the raising of Jairus’ daughter, recorded by Matthew and Mark as well as Luke, and the raising of Lazarus recorded by John. But it is Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, his Book Two of what Jesus continued to do and say, who relates how the dead Dorcas was raised from the dead through the ministry of the Apostle Peter.
The story of Elijah raising to life the only son of a widow has had a profound effect on the way Luke tells his story of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain. It is clear in his choice of words and manner of presentation. He makes a point of saying that Jesus, like Elijah, “gave the son back to his mother.” And more, he writes that the crowd exclaim “a great prophet has arisen among us.” This must refer back to Elijah. Jesus then is being identified as the fulfilment of the promise that Elijah will come to life again, or a second Elijah will appear, to herald and establish a new order. For Christians that new order begins with the Resurrection of Jesus. We have entered into the last era of human history, which will take us up to the final moment, the end-time, the showdown between good and evil, the culmination of human history.
Step 2: Another halt in the music … and more wrapping comes off. We are in the year 75 A.D. or thereabouts. Luke is getting on a bit now and preparing his material together for publishing. He has Mark’s Gospel in front of him, records of Jesus’ teaching and notes from witnesses who were present when Jesus was alive. And then he has more material from the time immediately after the resurrection as well as notes on the missionary journeys of Paul and his own notes and personal recollections on which to draw. There will be at least two books, perhaps three. They will cover Jesus’ initial ministry incarnate in his human body, and then go on to record his continuing ministry through Jesus’ mystical body the Church. This must be an accurate, scholarly work and be designed for a wide readership, for many audiences. It will be a source for instruction in the infant Church, and it will be a defence of the Christian claims to the leaders of the Jewish community with whom there is now a widening and increasingly acrimonious divide, and it will be an Apology, a formal defence directed to the Roman authorities.
Luke is writing after the Resurrection of Jesus, and he cannot help but write in the light of the Resurrection. There is no way that he can transport himself heart and mind back to the days before the Crucifixion. He must write with the benefit of hindsight and of the Church’s experience of the companionship of the Risen Lord. It is true that all scripture must be read in its historical context, as we have tried to do today. But that means reading it in the context in which it is written, and in which it is believed and forms the life and prayer of the Church. In other words, it is written and to be understood in the context of a Church confident in the Resurrection.
Now this story of the raising from the dead is unique to Luke. It bears the marks of an eye-witness narrative and has many other of his trade-marks. Among them, he gives a high profile to women, he is concerned at the plight of widows, and he writes of good news for the poor. And by that he means “the poor” as they figure in the Hebrew Scriptures, not just those who are short of a bob or two, but those who are always at the bottom of the heap, always come off worst. So this widow is one of the poor in the fullest sense of the word. She is embarrassed emotionally as well as economically.
And Luke makes connections also with the pagan Romans among his readers. Ancient writers tell similar stories. In each case the wonder-worker meets the bier and halts the funeral procession. A unique feature of this story among the Gospel writers, but common among the pagan miracle stories, is that Jesus performs the miracle unasked. While in the Gospels Jesus’ miracles are apt to be a response to a prayer of faith, in this case neither the mother nor the dead man’s friends play a part. The miracle proceeds directly by, as it were, “the spontaneous combustion of Jesus’ own compassion,” and is a sign that Jesus is the prophet-Messiah sent from God.
Stage 3: Our parcel is getting smaller, but there is still some wrapping left: as the music stops yet again we find ourselves in fourth century North Africa. Monica is the mother of a wayward son. Even though she was once airily dismissed by a rather modern clergyman as a prime example of the worst kind of possessive mother, she is for the faithful the model of and patroness of all Christian mothers. In a nutshell it was her prayers and influence which brought her son, the great Augustine of Hippo, back to the true faith, to a deep discipleship and to pre-eminence as a Doctor of the Church, a Teacher of the Faith. From time immemorial the Gospel reading for her commemoration is the story of these events at Nain. Augustine will be raised from the death of sin to the life of righteousness by the power which brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ.
The point, of course, is that the Resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of our faith, of our understanding of the meaning of life and the eternal destiny of humankind. The Resurrection is an historical reality. The tomb of Jesus was empty: it just had to be. No one would have believed if there had been a corpse in the tomb. The only debate could be when, why and how, had the tomb become empty? Luke presents the view of the Church in the form of story while Paul presents it in the form of argument. They come together when in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul refers to the story and lists the witnesses who had seen the risen Lord. He offers, so to speak, their names, addresses and telephone numbers. Most are still alive and may be questioned about what they saw.
But this story is not really just about a physical raising of the dead, although that was in itself remarkable enough. And it is not enough for Richard Dawkins, David Starkey and other glum present-day Sadducees to say, “Well, it is all a bit far-fetched isn’t? People just don’t rise from the dead, do they?” Heavens above, the people of Nain and the early followers of Jesus were no more likely to believe that the dead were raised than we are! But in this case they were convinced. Of course, the physical miracle is not just an historical report with a message for the dead and the dying and the bereaved (although, of course, it is indeed that), but a sign of what it is to repent and be converted, to become a Christian or to be renewed in discipleship, to be raised up by Christ from a life so hopeless that it amounts to death, and to be given back to ordinary life and relationships by his hand.
Have you ever heard of Quadratus? He makes only one recorded appearance in history. Alive at the beginning of the second century he wrote an apology for the Christian faith addressed to the Emperor Hadrian. Only a single fragment survives:
“The works of our Saviour were always present (for they were the genuine article): namely, those who were healed, those who rose from the dead; who were not only seen in the act of being healed or raised, but were always present; and not merely when the Saviour was on earth, but after his departure as well, they lived on for a considerable time; insomuch that some of them survived to our own day.”
Then Quadratus had met some of them, and perhaps like Saint Paul he even had a few names and addresses. Is it possible that among them was an old man who was once the young son of a widow in Nain..?
The Rt Revd David Silk Sometime Bishop of Ballarat