A Powerful Imagination

Text: Luke 7:11-17

Preacher: Paul Stansifer.

A while ago, I watched an episode of a goofy defunct television show that struck me as weird, even weird in comparison to the kind of goofy defunct television shows that I tend to like.

Usually on TV, the person who’s in trouble this week has been designed to be totally sympathetic. But the focus of this episode was a sour, ungrateful, whiny teenager, who has been confined to a wheelchair and a life of misery by a bad heart. A cheerful – Oh, and he’s a bit of a poser, too. A cheerful and energetic employee of the “Wish-A-Wish Foundation” has been assigned to make him happy, which turns out to be a completely futile task.

I’ll skip past the murder and the raising from the dead of a couple of insurance adjusters and ruin the ending for you: a van driven by a pet monkey runs over the Wish-A-Wish Foundation employee, and in accordance with her wishes, the teen gets her heart as a transplant.

I kind of liked the episode, because it made a happy ending out of saving the life of a completely unlikeable person.

The story that Luke tells is weird in the exact opposite way: unlike most of the people that Jesus helps, the widow of Nain is surrounded by a crowd of people who already sympathize with her.

When the widow’s only son died, her life was essentially over. In her society, a woman without a household had no work, no income, no purpose in life. The crowd of mourners knows this. They know that the scriptures repeat over and over again how despicable it is to cheat or deprive widows and orphans. And they also know that it gets repeated because people disregard even that. She couldn't have been a more heart wrenchingly helpless victim.

When Jesus walks into the story, and raises up the widow’s son, the crowd immediately celebrates and declares Jesus to be a prophet, and says that God has come to save his people. They are correct.

But it is rare for Jesus's actions to receive universal approval this way. Jesus tended to get a lot of flak for working his miracles. He did them on the Sabbath, he did them to people who deserved their illnesses, he put lepers and lunatics back into a society that didn’t know what to do with them.

When a miracle of healing occurs, those onlookers who who see the recipient in a abstract, dispassionate way are able to stand around and have a debate about details of the law. But the people who before the miracle were weeping over the tragedy now feel an overriding joy.

And so, the mourners ignored minor issues such as the fact that Jesus became ceremonially unclean when he touched the boy's coffin (contact with the dead was the most serious form of uncleanliness). Did Jesus is properly purify himself afterwards? The widow could not possibly care, and, as for the crowd, they gave up their chance to be sticklers for the law when they joined her in mourning.

I'm not trying to say that all actions taken to comfort someone who's suffering are necessarily good actions. The murdered insurance adjusters in that television episode would probably argue, with good reason, that murdering an insurance adjuster is wrong, regardless of whether it might cheer up a wheelchair-bound teenager.

What I am trying to say is that Jesus viewed the suffering of the people he met as a legitimate crisis regardless of the form that the suffering took, what caused it, or who the sufferer was. You could say Jesus has a powerful form of imagination called "sympathy". The people Jesus meets in the Gospels, and the people Jesus meets today, are often alarmingly deficient in their ability to imagine how others are feeling. This miracle was an easy test, and the people pass it. But usually, we don't do so well.

A few verses later in Luke, Jesus will be criticizing the people who fail to accept John the Baptist as a prophet, because John shuns worldly things and lives alone in the wilderness, and who fail to accept Jesus as a prophet, because he eats and drinks with dishonorable people. Jesus says “They are like children sitting in the marketplace. One group shouts to the other, ‘We played wedding music for you, but you wouldn’t dance; we sang funeral songs but you wouldn’t cry.’” If those people could have imagined the urgency of carrying a message from God, it would have seemed perfectly reasonable to them to either separate oneself and stand as a beacon in the wilderness, as John did, or to go and seek out the people most in need of the message in their native habitat, as Jesus did.

The Pharisees Jesus is talking about have a lot of the same beliefs as Jesus, but as long as they see him as a freak, as someone they don't have to sympathize with, they will never learn anything from him.

To fail to sympathize with someone—to fail to regard their feelings as legitimate—that is the fast track to getting on with one's life and not learning, not helping, and not caring.

I like to think that the crowd in today’s story won’t be making that mistake any more. They’ve fallen into Jesus’s trap. He showed up when their compassion had rendered them completely vulnerable to his compassion. Now, when Jesus drives the demons out of the man who called himself “Legion,” they’ll see past the disruption caused by the death of all the pigs, and try to see the man, and feel his relief not to be hurting himself any more.

I don’t feel like I’m very skilled at mourning with those who mourn; it's pretty easy for me to think about the suffering of other people as a problem to be solved if the cost is not too high, rather than as an offense against the humanity of someone who might as well be me.

But Jesus is thinking about the sufferers. In order to make them well, by the end of time or sooner, he is trampling all over cute notions and pure principles. He's making a mess of things for those of us who are already doing fine.

But let us look at this a different way: blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted! Those who suffer and those who mourn with them understand the oppressiveness and evilness of pain. In an instant, that can become a full-hearted commitment to the joy and the goodness of the Kingdom of Heaven.