Homily for Saint Luke and the Widow of Nain in the Orthodox Church

 Luke 7:11-16

Yesterday was the feast day of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke, the patron saint of our parish.  As the author of both a gospel and Acts, St. Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else. He was also the first iconographer.   Luke was a Gentile and emphasized that those who responded best to the Lord were often those least expected to.  He is the only evangelist to record the parables of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and the Pharisee and the Publican.  He reports that St. Zacharias, an aged priest who should have known better, doubted the word of the Archangel Gabriel that he and St. Elizabeth would conceive a child, St. John the Forerunner, despite their barrenness and old age.  In other words, he and his wife would be blessed as were Abraham and Sarah, whose story he surely knew quite well.  Then Luke tells us of the Theotokos’ humble acceptance of the Archangel’s astonishing announcement that she would be the virgin mother of the Savior: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.  Let it be to me according to your word.” (Lk. 1:5-38) Who would have expected that a young virgin girl would have responded better to this incredible news than an old priest had to a continuation of what God had done at the foundation of the house of Israel? 

St. Luke was a physician, which may be part of the reason that he records the meeting of the Theotokos and St. Elizabeth during their pregnancies, when John leaped in the womb in miraculous recognition of the presence of the Lord.  Elizabeth was then filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaimed, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”  In response, the Theotokos speaks the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.  For He has regarded the lowly estate of His maidservant; for behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” (Lk. 1:39-48) Luke describes the interaction of two pregnant women, both in unlikely circumstances, who literally embody how God’s salvation is coming into the world.  They embrace their roles at the very center of the story in ways that challenged dominant assumptions about the relative unimportance of women in that time and place.

St. Luke writes that the Theotokos’ song of praise continues with bold prophetic speech about God’s reversal of the standards of our corrupt world: “He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.  He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.  He has filled the hungry with good things and the rich He has sent away empty.” (Lk. 51-53)  It is no surprise, then, that Luke alone records the Savior saying: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger.  Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.  Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets.”  (Lk. 6:24-26) The gospel according to St. Luke portrays the Kingdom of our Lord in ways that challenged dominant assumptions about power, wealth, and fame in this world as a sign of God’s favor and a reward for virtue.  Indeed, Christ teaches that they are often the complete opposite.    

In St. Luke’s description of the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, He fulfills this prophecy from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, and to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Lk.4:18-19)  We would have to be spiritually dense not to comprehend that the Lord came to share His gracious mercy with those in great need in every dimension of their personhood as living icons of God.  We will fool only ourselves if we assume that malnourishment, homelessness, disease, trauma, imprisonment, and injustice are spiritually irrelevant.  Were that the case, why would the Savior teach that however we treat “the least of these” is how we treat Him?   St. Luke interprets our Lord’s ministry in a way that highlights how His salvation is a blessing especially for those who are weak and suffering in this world.  If we are truly uniting ourselves to Christ in faith and faithfulness, we must manifest His love in practical, tangible ways to our neighbors who are in need.  If we refuse to do so, we risk falling into an illusory spirituality that has little to do with how salvation has come into the world through the God-Man, born of a woman.

St. Luke knew that our Lord’s Kingdom is not only a future hope, but also a present reality, for as He reports Christ saying, “the kingdom of God is within you.” (Lk 17:21)   Remember how the Lord responded to the question of whether He was the Messiah: “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the   lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (Lk. 7:22) Those are the words of the New Adam who came to heal all the infirmities of His suffering sons and daughters. Today’s reading from the gospel according to St. Luke comes right before that passage.  The widow of Nain was having the worst day of her life and had no reason to hope for a blessed or even tolerable future, for in that setting a widow who had lost her only son was in a very precarious state.  Poverty, neglect, and abuse would threaten her daily; she would have been vulnerable and alone.  When contrary to all expectations the Lord raised her son, He transformed her deep mourning into great joy. He restored life itself both to the young man and to his mother.

The Lord’s great act of compassion for this woman manifests our salvation and provides a sign of hope in even the darkest moments of our lives in our fallen world.  We weep and mourn not only for loved ones whom we see no more, but also for the brokenness and disintegration that we know all too well in our own souls, the lives of our loved ones, and the world around us.   Death, destruction, and decay in all their forms are the consequences of our personal and collective refusal to fulfill our vocation to live as those created in the image of God by becoming like Him in holiness.  We weep with the widow of Nain not only for losing loved ones, but also for losing what it means to be a human person as a living icon of God in a world that seems so far from transformation into the Kingdom of our Lord.

           The good news of the Gospel, especially as interpreted by St. Luke, is that the compassion of the Lord extends especially to those who endure the most tragic circumstances and the most profound sorrows.  Purely out of love for His suffering children, the Father sent the Son to heal and liberate us from slavery to the fear of death through His Cross and glorious resurrection. The Savior touched the funeral bier and the dead man arose.  Christ’s compassion for us is so profound that He not only touched death, but entered fully into it, into a tomb, and into Hades, because He refused to leave us to self-destruction.   He went into the abyss and experienced the terror of the black night of the pit.  The Theotokos wept bitterly at His public torture and execution, not unlike mothers today who weep at the loss of their children.  When He rose victorious over death in all its forms, He provided the only true basis of hope that the despair of the grave will not have the last word on the living icons of God. 

            The widow of Nain wept bitterly out of grief for the loss of her son.  Christ wept at the tomb of his friend St. Lazarus, not only for him, but for us all who are wedded to death as the children of Adam and Eve, who were cast out of Paradise into this world of corruption.  We weep with broken hearts out of love for those whose suffering is beyond our ability to ease, those who are no longer with us in this life, and those from whom we have become otherwise estranged due to our common brokenness.  We must learn to weep for ourselves as those who have caught a glimpse of the eternal blessedness for which we came into being and who know how far we are from entering fully into the joy of the Lord.  The corruption that separates us from God and from one another takes many forms and the same is true of our healing and restoration.  The particular paths that we must follow in order to embrace Christ’s victory over death as distinctive persons will certainly vary.  But they must all be routes for gaining the spiritual clarity to learn to mourn our sins and take the steps that are best for our healing and restoration as whole persons in the world as we know it.  If we refuse to take those steps and simply wait passively to ascend someday into heavenly peace, we will only weaken ourselves even further as we refuse to do what is necessary to lift up our hearts to receive the Lord’s healing today.  There is no way around the truth that we must do the hard work of taking up our crosses and following Him, especially in the service of our suffering neighbors in whom He is present, if we want to share in His blessed life.  For as St. Luke saw so clearly, His Kingdom stands in stark contradiction to the corrupt ways of our fallen world.  The same must be true of us.