I am sure that many people today
reject or have no interest in the Christian faith because they have not seen in
others the healing of the human person brought by Jesus Christ. Perhaps they have heard Christians speaking
primarily about morality, politics, emotion, or a view of salvation that has
nothing to do with the realities of life in the world as we know it. Or they may have seen many examples of
hypocrisy on the part of those who identify themselves with the Lord, but who live
their lives in opposition to His teachings even as they look for opportunities to
condemn their neighbors. Regardless, many
today have concluded that there is nothing in the Christian life worthy of
their devotion.
Today’s gospel reading provides a different
and powerful image of Christ’s salvation in the midst of the tragic realities
of life and death. 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 time and place 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 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. 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.
The good news of the Gospel is that the compassion of the Lord extends even to
those who endure the most tragic and miserable 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. 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. His Mother and the other Myrrh-Bearing Women
were the very first to receive this unbelievably good news.
Death is not only a physical
reality, but also a spiritual one. It is
possible to have physical health, material possessions, high social standing,
and innumerable other blessings while being enslaved to self-centered desire to
the point of spiritual death. Thankfully,
Christ said that He “came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
(Luke 5:32) Today we commemorate our
Righteous Mother Pelagia the Penitent of Antioch. She was a beautiful woman from a pagan family
who became quite wealthy as a prostitute. Having heard part of a sermon on
divine judgment as she passed by a church, she was overcome by remorse for her
way of life, repented, and was baptized.
She then gave away all her wealth to the poor, went to Jerusalem, and undertook
the great ascetical labor of living alone in a cave as the Monk Pelagius, devoting
herself to fasting, prayer, and all-night vigils. That she was a woman was discovered only when
her body was prepared for burial.
The paths that these great saints
trod were unusual and surely hard for people of our time and place to
understand. They took the identity of
male monastics not out of a rejection or denigration of how God had created
them as persons of female biological sex, but in order to embrace in their particular
circumstances the type of asceticism that they needed for the healing of their
souls in light of the spiritual maladies that they had suffered as unique
persons due to their sins. The Church
certainly does not impose their vocations on anyone, for as free persons we must
all discern the path to the Kingdom that is best for us with the guidance, but
never the compulsion, of our spiritual father or mother. For example, we also commemorate today St.
Thais of Egypt, who repented of her debauchery by burning all of her riches in
the city square and then spending three years in seclusion as she prayed for
the Lord’s mercy. She did not take on
the identity of a male monastic. “From
the moment I entered into the cell,” said St. Thais to St. Paphnutius before
her death, “all my sins constantly were before my eyes, and I wept when I
remembered them.” St. Paphnutius replied, “It is for your tears, and not for
the austerity of your seclusion, that the Lord has granted you mercy.”[1]
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. 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. 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.
St. Paul wrote that “he who sows
sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap
bountifully.” That is true not only in
terms of almsgiving, but also in terms of how deeply we invest ourselves in what
is necessary for the healing of our souls.
Many people today surely do not take the Christian faith seriously
because they have not encountered people who do precisely that. In ways appropriate to our own circumstances,
let us take Saints Pelagia, Theodora, and Thais as examples of those who fulfilled
in their own lives the teaching of our Lord: “Blessed are they that mourn, for
they shall be comforted.” (Matt. 5:4) The
widow of Nain provides us all a sign of the hope that is ours in Christ. Through our humble repentance, may we open
ourselves to receive the joy that overcomes both the dark night of our
spiritual blindness and even of the grave.
