Earlier this month, we heard at Mass the Gospel in which Jesus raises a young man from the dead (Luke 7:11-17). This event is full of meaning, especially for those who grieve a loved one. Luke’s account portrays two crowds approaching one another: Jesus, accompanied by a multitude of followers, nears Nain at the moment a funeral procession is passing out of its gates. The mourners are many, but even surrounded by them, the weeping mother is very much alone. Her only son, described simply as a “dead man,” leaves his city for the last time.
Death’s relentless momentum is such that, though Jesus finds and speaks to the mother, the litter bearing her son’s body keeps moving — moving, that is, until Jesus touches it. Only then do its bearers stop; they are likely shocked that a Jewish man would defile himself by contact with the dead. Little do they expect the shock that awaits; this is no mere man, and, instead of being defiled by death, He tramples upon it. Swiftly, with authority, Jesus, who has just commanded the mother to stop weeping, and whose command has the power to effect what is commanded, now tells the corpse to arise. The son’s first act is speech. That voice, whose unique cadence and tone his mother knew she would never hear again, now rings out. And the crowds, moments earlier passing one another in opposite directions, now paused and united in awe, exclaim, “God has visited His people!”
Zechariah said the same — “God has visited His people” — when expressing his rapture at his son John’s miraculous birth. He knows John heralds the coming Messiah. The verb “visit” has the homely sense of “checking in on” or “looking in on.” This is the God who hears the cries of the Israelite people enslaved in Egypt; it is the God who feeds them in the desert; it is the God who saves them from captivity in Babylon and brings them home again. This God now walks among them, His touch healing the sick and His voice raising the dead.
For us, two thousand years later, it is unlikely our loved one will rise before our eyes. And yet we know with certainty that our departed are actually alive — and this because our God has conquered death. We will see them again. And, in our grief, our God is with us. He looks in on us. He numbers our tears. Luke says that Jesus, on seeing the widow, was inwardly wrung with pity. He was touched to the depths of His soul — just as when Lazarus died and Martha and Mary came to Him weeping. Jesus knows our sorrow, and He can command us “Do not weep” precisely and only because He knows that, in the end, we will not weep. In the end, “He will wipe every tear from [our] eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain” (Revelation 21:4).
Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.
