the-widow-of-nain

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In this gospel (Lk 7, 11-17), Jesus does what he does best and what he enjoys doing most, which is to raise the dead to life. Some people like playing golf; some people like going fishing, some like camping, but Jesus, he likes raising the dead to life. He raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), he raised Lazarus from the dead, and in this gospel today he raised the only son of the widow of Nain. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5). 

Consider too that if a person is dead, he or she cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process; for he’s dead. So, if we are raised (justified), we who were dead in our sins, it was not as a result of anything we might have done. It was all his doing. That’s the God we worship, and that’s the good news. Everything is sheer gift. We don’t have to earn anything. We can’t earn anything. We just have to receive it, which can be difficult. It is difficult to open ourselves up to God’s generosity; we don’t feel we deserve it, and of course we don’t, but that’s besides the point. It’s not about us, but about his love for us. In the letter to the Colossians, we read: “And even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims,…he removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (2, 13-15).

This is important because we have a tendency to slip back into the legalism that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But we are not saved by our works; we are saved by Christ’s generosity, his initiative, his incarnation and death on the cross. All our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked–we are free to go. No charges are hovering over and against us. If we could only believe that good news, our lives would change radically; we’d be living in the joy of Easter. Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive the forgiveness that was previously not there; rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us; we have a very hard time believing that we’ve been forgiven, and the reason is our awareness that if we were in God’s place, we’d likely forgive very few people, until they earned it in some way. Our limited love keeps us from receiving God’s forgiveness of ourselves. Incidentally, that is why some people would like me or whoever is preaching to preach hard, for they would like the preacher to be a conduit of their anger at the world. That is the kind of Pope some Catholics today would like to see as well.  

But this is a clue to the difference between the saint and the non-saint. It’s not that the one is so holy and the other is not. No, the saints have a profound awareness of their own sinfulness, like the tax collector we heard about last week (Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner), and they admit it–the saint would not think for a second that he or she is a cut above anyone. The difference is that the saint believes the good news and receives it, allows himself or herself to be touched by it. 

There won’t be any sense that we deserve heaven nor any sense that we will be given our rightful due. That wouldn’t be heaven; it is much better than that. Heaven is unimaginable gratitude and joy, and a pale image of that joy might be the joy that the widow received in getting back her only son from the dead. Just consider the pain of losing your only child, and then your child is restored to you. That’s a small taste of the joy of heaven. Think of the sadness we felt after losing someone we were close to: a sibling, a parent, grandparent, a son, daughter, or close friend. We are all going to experience such a loss if we haven’t already, but the good news is that all that we lost will be restored to us. Their happiness, the happiness of those who have died but whom we will see again, will be our own happiness. And our love for God will be made perfect, and so God’s happiness will be our own as well, and if our love for God is perfected, our love for all who belong to him (everyone) will be perfected, and then their happiness will also become our own. It is just not possible to get our heads around the joy that awaits us. This life is precisely about preparing for the joy of heaven, but we prepare for this joy by expanding our capacity to be loved and our capacity to love.

The first reading from Wisdom (3, 1-9) mentions the furnace and the dross. That’s kind of what suffering does to us in our lives, similar to the furnace burning off the dross so that in the end, we are left with pure gold. Human beings seem to be at their worst in times of prosperity, but we are at our best in times of suffering, which is why God allows suffering to enter our lives, that is, in order to shape us, like a blacksmith shapes the iron, by heating and pounding it into a beautiful sword, or whatever is he is making. So when we find ourselves engulfed in darkness and despair, like the widow of Nain would have experienced at the death of her only son, we need to keep in mind that sunrise always follows the darkness and a joy we cannot conceive will soon be ours.