Hilton Head Island, SC – April 10, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 7:1-10; Luke 7:11-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” – Matthew 5:4 (RSV)
Blessings for Mourners
Many years ago I knew a couple who lost their only child, a teenage son, in a car accident. Forever afterward, they left his room just as it was on the day he died; nothing was ever added, nor was anything taken away. To look at their home, it was as though nothing had ever changed, but of course everything had changed. They remained in mourning for the rest of their lives.
I once knew a woman who had her leg amputated above the knee. If a leg is going to be amputated, it is much better that it be taken below the knee than above it. This lady often felt phantom pain in what had been her lower leg and foot. Apparently it is not an uncommon occurrence among amputees. But because the lady was never able to master the prosthesis of her new leg, she particularly mourned the loss of her leg until she died a few years later from diabetic complications. Because part of her leg died, part of her also died.
I knew a couple who appeared to be very much in love for their entire marriage of 50+ years. They did everything together, and had a wonderful time doing it. When she died suddenly, he was almost like a young child bereft of his mother. He could scarcely function. And for the rest of his life (and he lived another dozen years or so), he was like a man lost in the desert or adrift at sea. To him, every day was as agonizing as the day his wife died, and he never got over it. It was as though he luxuriated in his grief.
If mourning becomes Electra, as Eugene O’Neill suggested in the title of his famous play, mourning affects millions of people, whether or not it becomes any of them. We normally think of mourning only in conjunction with the death of someone. But mourning results from many other factors as well. The lady who mourned her lost leg is an example. Those who deeply mourn the death of their spouse may mourn because they miss that person, but they also may mourn because they wish, too late, that they had done more to make the marriage better than it was. Many people permanently mourn because their marriage ended in divorce, and they realize if they had tried harder or been kinder or had not gotten so angry so often that the marriage might have been saved. But it wasn’t, and what is is, and they live in constant sorrow because of it.
Some people mourn because of the sorry state of the world. And the world is in a sorry state. But it has always been in a sorry state. Individuals take advantage of other individuals, churches and denominations fly apart into warring factions, nations attack other nations. Equanimity enables us to live peaceably with dissention, but perpetually mourning the dissention can lead us into perpetual sorrow over things we cannot possibly change.
Some people mourn not because of the sins and shortcomings of the world but because of their own sins and shortcomings. People can literally as well as figuratively become “sin-sick.” We have a friend who often says, “Get over yourself!” It is very wise advice for all of us. We need to get over ourselves, especially when we can’t get over ourselves because we refuse to allow our grievous mistakes be buried in the past in order to prepare ourselves for a better and more productive future.
Besides being a master theologian, Jesus also was a master psychologist. He understood the human heart better than anyone else who ever lived. He could look into the essence of a person at a glance because of his extraordinary gift of instant and deep intuition for human beings and their wide variety of personalities.
According to the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus delivered the Beatitudes as the first part of what the Church has always called “The Sermon on the Mount.” The first verse of Chapter 5 says this: “Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain.” Maybe Jesus wanted to be in an elevated place so that he could look down into the eyes and inner beings of everyone who came to hear him. Many preachers make it a practice to preach to individual faces. There are people whose faces tell the preacher that they are with him or her, that they are absorbing every word. Jesus could preach to everyone, regardless of whether or not they had expressive faces. He could look into every soul, not just every face. And on that long-ago day on the Mount of the Beatitudes, wherever it actually was (and no one can know for certain), he saw souls who were poor in spirit, or in mourning, or meek, or pure in heart, or peacemakers.
The 7th chapter of the Gospel of Luke begins with two miracle stories. There are similarities but also important differences between the two narratives, but both have this in common: the central character in each story was in mourning, although for very different reasons.
In the first story, we hear about a Roman centurion who had a very pressing problem. First, note this: this was a Roman centurion, an officer in the Roman occupying army who was in charge of a hundred men. In our military terms, he would be a captain or perhaps a major. The pressing problem is that the centurion had a slave who was near death from an unnamed and unexplained illness. The narrative says this slave “was dear to him” (7:2). The soldier was not Simon Legree; he was a man who respected and cared for his slaves in that universal time of slave ownership, and he was mourning the fact that his beloved slave was about to die.
Luke tells us that the Roman soldier did not brazenly come to Jesus to beg him to heal his slave. Instead “he sent to (Jesus) elders of the Jews, asking (Jesus) to come and heal his slave” (7:3). The Roman didn’t want to impose himself on Jesus, in case Jesus resented or hated all Romans. But the man was beside himself with worry over his slave’s worsening condition. Obviously the soldier was well thought of by the elders in Capernaum, because they told Jesus, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he built our synagogue” (7:5). This was a very extraordinary man. Nineteen centuries later, Jews called people like this Roman “a righteous Gentile.” On the walk leading up to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, there is a row of trees with plaques at the base of each tree. There is one for Oskar Schindler, and another for Corrie Ten Boom, and another for the people who hid Anne Frank and her family and friends in their attic in Amsterdam. The Roman centurion was warmly recognized as a righteous Gentile 1900 years before Hitler began to attempt the extermination of the entire Jewish people. He was what is called in Yiddish “a Mensch,” a genuinely admirable man.
With this encouragement and inducement, Jesus went with the elders to the centurion’s home. Before they got there, however, the soldier sent friends to meet Jesus, asking them to give this message to Jesus from the Roman, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed” (7:6-7). Then the centurion gave Jesus a remarkable observation, telling Jesus that he, the Roman, was a man with authority, and that people did what he ordered. He implied that Jesus also had authority, which is why he dared to ask him to heal his slave. Jesus was astounded. “Not even in Israel have I seen such faith!” he exclaimed. The episode ends with the notation that the Roman’s friends returned to his house, where they discovered the slave had miraculously been healed just a few minutes earlier.
Sometimes we mourn not for ourselves but for others. This is what this noblest Roman of them all was doing; he was mourning for his slave, who was his friend, because he thought he was sure to die, and he assumed Jesus could restore him to health.
The Gospels deliberately make it appear that it was Jesus who performed miracles. It was not. It was God. But the miracles were performed through Jesus, by means of Jesus. God is always wanting to remove whatever conditions cause us to grieve and mourn, but we, like the centurion, must trust that God through Jesus is able to turn our mourning into joy.
Immediately following the healing miracle of the centurion’s slave in Luke 7 is an even more astonishing miracle. Jesus and a large crowd of his followers were going into a town called Nain. (This incident, incidentally, is found only in Luke.) Just as they arrived at the town gates, they were carrying out the body of a young man who had died. It says that he was “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow” (7:12). I take that to mean that he was her only child, not just her only son. But listen to the next verse: “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep’” (7:13).
Christian people, Jesus had compassion for her! God had compassion for her! God and Jesus always have compassion for everyone, even for the most disreputable and unworthy of us! There is no one outside the Beatitudes of God! He wants to bless all of us! We cannot avoid being blessed, unless we ourselves prevent the blessings!
I’m sure you have seen televised video footage of Israelis or Palestinians or other Middle Easterners carrying a pallet on which the body of a young man who was just killed lies. It is always so graphic and emotional and heart-rending. Somehow death in the Middle East seems so much bigger and bleaker and terrible than it does in our culture. When death comes in the Middle East, it comes with loudly manifested sorrow attached to it.
Jesus merely touched the pallet on which the man’s body lay. He did not touch the body itself, for the law of Moses forbade that, but he did touch the wooden frame on which the body would be lowered into the grave. Speaking directly to the deceased, Jesus said, “Young man, I say to you, arise” (7:14), and the widow’s son sat up, and began to speak, and Jesus happily turned him over to his mother. It was an echo of Isaiah 55:12: “For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” The Harvard University faculty composer Randall Thompson used that text in his glorious oratorio The Peaceable Kingdom. To hear it is inspiring, but to sing it in a choir is to be lifted into the seventh heaven.
Nothing generates mourning the way death does: the death of a spouse or parent or child or friend. This lady had lost her husband, and now her son, and she had no one; no one. And at the moment her son was being carried to his grave, along came Jesus, and in an instant he turned her grief into joy.
But what of the dead who die whose deaths we mourn greatly: there is no Jesus to resurrect them to life once again, nor does God visibly raise them to newness of life. What then?
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Mourners are blessed because they mourn! At such agonizing times, they know they have no one other than God to lift them out of their chasm of grief! Furthermore, they shall be comforted! It is a guarantee from God! However, we must internally allow it to happen if it is to happen. We can thwart God’s gentle blessings if we refuse to accept His beatitudes.
As we age, we discover there are things we can no longer do that we once did with ease. Last Monday Lois and I happened to walk by an outdoor basketball court where there were two basketballs just sitting there, waiting to be shot. We aimed at the basket, many times, and both of us were pathetic; pathetic. Back in the day, I’m sure she was better than I, but we both were hopeless. We scarcely got the ball up to the backboard, let along into the basket. After about fifteen attempts, we gave it up as a cause that is forever lost. Back when I shot my last basket in very amateur competition over fifty years ago, I at least could get the ball to the backboard almost every time, hitting the basket itself many times, and it went through the hoop on occasion. But now, now …. If you can’t get a basketball at least ten feet up into the air, then what can you do? Not nearly as much as once we could do! And when by happenstance we discover this inability, we mourn the loss of physical oomph.
We also mourn the disabilities of others. Living in a retirement home, Lois and I regularly observe people who slowly or rather quickly are faced with disabling problems because of worn-out body parts: feet, knees, hips, hearts, shoulders, eyes, ears, minds. And when such degenerations afflict any of us, we also mourn our own loss.
We mourn a world that can no longer be, where children could go to play with other children anywhere in the neighborhood and parents did not have to worry about them, where teenagers were not tempted by a deluge of drugs, where few young adults were unemployed or owed thousands of dollars for college loans, where divorce was uncommon and marriages seemed far more stable, where politics seemed more honorable and politicians appeared to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Our government deports illegal immigrants, and in so doing, knowingly breaks up families. Citizens seek justice in our courts, but if they are black or Latino or poor, they are less likely to be granted judicial justice. How shall we survive in such a world, and more than that, how shall we thrive? How can anyone not feel burdened by such societal dilemmas?
In each of the Beatitudes, Jesus tells us that God has already come to our assistance. But if that aid is to be experienced, we must avail ourselves of His blessings. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus said. God also says it; “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” However, only we can open the door. Mourning shall continue unabated unless we welcome God into our lives to bring healing and wholeness to us. If we are poor in spirit or if we find ourselves mourning the countless factors which pull the rug out from under us, we need only to affirm the willingness of God and His Messiah to assist us, and then we shall be comforted.