NOTES for Luk 7:11-16

Jesus' raising of the dead has always drawn special attention. This is no surprise: all such events are usually understood in the context of biblical ideas about the universal resurrection, the Last Judgment, and, in the New Testament context, about the Savior's return and the final triumph of the Kingdom. Of course, such parallels are entirely possible. And yet it is important to see not only the similarity but also the difference between these raisings and that universal resurrection on the day of Judgment of which, for example, the Book of Revelation tells us.

Indeed, when the issue is the Last Judgment and the triumph of the Kingdom, one must also speak of the complete transformation of the nature of this world, including the nature of the human person himself. In relation to the human person, the Church Fathers directly called this process "deification," not, of course, in the sense that a person becomes God, but in the sense that his nature becomes compatible with the nature of the Kingdom of God.

Meanwhile, the people whom Jesus raises return to their former life, to the life of the untransformed world in which they lived before they died. But this return, too, was a consequence of the action of that power of the Kingdom without which there can be no life either in the Kingdom or in the world not yet transformed by the power of the Kingdom.

Why, then, do the people raised by Jesus rise not to the life of the Kingdom, but to the life of the untransformed world? The reason is that the Kingdom itself has not yet been revealed in fullness. We live in the age not of a Kingdom that has fully arrived, but of a Kingdom that is arriving. And those living in our age are not born as inhabitants of the Kingdom and do not find themselves in it automatically; they must make their choice and make an effort to enter this Kingdom.

Therefore those who come into contact with the Kingdom receive the fullness of life that is proper to them as inhabitants of their age. What follows depends on them, on their choice and their desire. For some, the return to the life of our world, into which the Kingdom is entering, can become only a delay on the way to death, which is inevitable in the untransformed world. For others, it can become the first step on the way into the Kingdom.

The evangelist Luke gives special importance to the healings performed by the Lord Jesus. For him, as a physician, perhaps better than for other people, the miraculous character of these healings is visible and important. All the more, the raising of the son of the widow of Nain could not fail to draw his attention, and he is the only one among the evangelists who reports it. It is therefore very important to read his account closely in order to understand what matters most to the evangelist himself.

Luke speaks of the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ over death, and we clearly see the divine character of this authority. Christ's words sound like a command: "Young man, I say to you, arise" (the Slavonic "arise" conveys much more precisely here the meaning of the Greek egertheti, which is the imperative form of "to rise"). This has nothing in common with what used to be called "galvanizing a corpse": the Lord is not commanding him merely to stand up, but to return to life from beyond the threshold of death. If we imagine ourselves in the crowd around the funeral, we can easily understand why the evangelist emphasizes the fear that seized everyone. In this raising, God Himself enters our life, and the evangelist deliberately draws our attention to this.

As we read his account, it is important to look closely at the individual details. The evangelist says that this young man was the only son of a mother who was a widow. Therefore, with his death this woman was losing everything. Not only had her son died, which is in itself an inexpressible tragedy for a mother, but with his death she was deprived of every legal standing. A woman at that time was not an independent member of society, as is still the case now in some Islamic countries. Without the protection of a father, husband, brother, or son, she was not considered a person at all. This is precisely why, in particular, the Lord from the Cross entrusts His Mother to the beloved disciple.

And here the evangelist Luke says that the Lord had compassion on the orphaned woman. The evangelist offers us three key moments: "a terrible tragedy; Jesus had compassion; rise!" Thus, together with His divinity and inseparably from it, we see in the Lord what is familiar to us and what we therefore call human. The old theologians of the time of the Christological disputes loved to separate the divine and the human in Christ's actions. Here we see how inseparable one actually is from the other.

And, of course, in our practical life it is enormously important for us how Christ acts. The Lord does not launch into explanations; He does not speak about the purifying meaning of suffering or the inevitability of death; nothing like our "God gave, and God has taken away" comes from His lips. After all, all these are words that cannot console a weeping woman. What does she care about those theological depths? Jesus pities her and her son, and His compassion overturns all the laws of this world. After all, the young man had perhaps been sick, or there had been some other "natural" cause of this death. But all of that proves insignificant, because the Son of God pities these people and grants them life. This, in fact, is what is central in the Gospel, the Good News of the Creator's mercy.

For the Jews, death and everything connected with it were considered unclean: the dead were buried before sunset, cemeteries were located outside the city, and an observant Jew was not supposed to touch a dead body. But when Jesus meets a funeral procession at the gates of the city of Nain, He unexpectedly breaks the traditional prohibitions before everyone. He addresses an unfamiliar woman with words of comfort and touches the dead boy. This alone should have astonished those around Him. But for the Lord there are no prohibitions when the poorest and most deprived are involved, as was this widow who had lost her sole provider. He does not wait for the woman to approach Him; He goes to meet her Himself, not only comforting her but performing a true miracle—returning to her the son for whom she mourns. Sometimes we are so deeply immersed in our grief that we cannot see Jesus walking beside us. We notice Him only when He has already worked in us the miracle of His Resurrection, when the joy of His presence unexpectedly begins to grow in a place of sorrow and pain.

In the raising of the widow of Nain's son, one may see a messianic sign given to the people, or one may see a visible prophetic act, a sign of the resurrection to come. Such interpretations are unlikely to be wrong, yet it is still worth noticing that the man who was raised was the widow's only son, and she had no one else to support her in old age. The hour of the universal resurrection and victory over death had not yet come; those few who were raised returned to temporary life, and for this reason someone might regard their restoration to life as pointless. But His mercy and His genuine love for people are not pointless: already in earthly life they show that life and mercy have one Giver.

Jesus' fame is growing. But the people still regard Him as a prophet and do not see that He is more than a prophet. For a long time they will continue to demand practical miracles from Him, refusing to understand that what He has brought into the world is greater than anything accessible to human imagination. But can we claim that even today we understand this in all its fullness?..

Today we return again to such a fundamental concept as faith. In the Bible this word most often means not simply trust in some information, but the ability at a critical moment to "take hold" of God, to lean on Him as on a firm pillar or rock.

Today's story about the Roman officer who asked Jesus to heal his servant, and whom Christ sets as an example for His disciples, illustrates this well. He is a military man, trained in army discipline, and he is absolutely certain that his order will be carried out, just as he himself is ready to carry out the order of his commander. In his relationship with God, such confidence rests not on discipline and military order, where a soldier is punished with death for disobedience, but on something no less strong: namely, on faith.

Strictly speaking, when Scripture speaks about faith, it is speaking about faith that is stronger even than death, so that the sick are healed and the dead are raised.

We all believe that the Lord, who created this world, has complete power over nature. That is as easy to imagine as an officer commanding soldiers on a parade ground: at his command they all turn right, and at another they all turn left!

But do we believe that the Lord can heal a sick person before our eyes—just like that: He speaks, and the person recovers? “Well,” we might say, “in theory we believe that too...” Do we see the enormous difference between theoretical belief in God's omnipotence and faith in a miracle that directly concerns us? No such gap existed in the military mind of the Roman centurion: his faith was not theoretical but living—and a miracle occurred. Perhaps the Lord would not find such faith not only in Israel...