Trinity XVI Sermon 2025

Jesus did not come to explain away
suffering, or to remove it.
He came to fill it with His presence.
Paul Claudel
      
Suffering is something that past ages endured courageously and our own flees from in cowardice. Perhaps the advent of modern technology has not been able to fulfill its promise that we won’t suffer. The problem is while technology has tried its best to enslave us to a kind of robotic insensitivity to those passions and feelings that make up human nature, still we have souls that cannot help but be touched by sorrow and sadness because something in us still suffers. Modern science eliminates babies in the womb and euthanizes pestiferous old people, and yet still a mother feels the loss of her child, and children suffer the loss of their parents. Science promises to tidy up the world and eliminate what it treats as nuisant lumps of flesh, but our souls suffer the loss of real people whose lives were cut short prematurely. Technology might do its best to desensitize us to suffering, but the soul protests. The closer the natural soul in every man is to his parent, child, or friend, the less it can avoid suffering and sadness.
         
Of course, what technology and the scientists want to generate in our world is a kind of death to suffering and sorrow. And, even more, technology encourages us to treat death itself as nothing. The funeral industry insists upon cremation as better than bodily burial because the body, our last connection with the earthly life of the deceased, must be removed swiftly so as not to cause undue suffering and grief. For all practical purposes, ashes scattered to the wind are more pleasant than bodies in the grave calling us to remember lost love and surrendered joy. Burial plots are a gruesome reminder that man was made for joy and woe.  

But for Christians, suffering and death are part and parcel of an honest assessment of human life. So significant are they to spiritual development that Christ Himself consecrates them by His own suffering and death. And more than that, He comes into our suffering and death, and rather than trying to eliminate them, He promises that for believers they can be made good or redeemed into the service of new life and lasting joy.

Of course, to the ordinary natural man without faith, such a proposal seems absurd. Most men think that with earthly death, all is lost, and there is no reason to think that anything can be made out of it. But there is something demonic in this assessment. Such a view would hold that human life has no lasting meaning to God beyond time and space or that man was made to suffer and die and to live on only in others’ suffering and grief.

So, we turn to today’s miracle to find a sign of what Jesus intends to do with suffering and death. Today, we find ourselves in the ancient city of Nain. Nain is an abandoned place, bereft of any civil society, and reaks of death. Even today, its only monument to Christ’s visitation is a Franciscan Church, reserved for occasional services that escape an otherwise oblivious village of few Muslims. The village and its church seem rooted in spiritual death. So, we read that when Jesus came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city was with her. (St. Luke vii. 12) Jesus comes into suffering and death. He finds a funeral procession with the body of an only child of a widow and gathered mourners. There seems to be an eerie silence. The mourners silently respect the sorrow of a woman who is now without husband or child. The wound was fresh because her nearest and dearest were gone. The loss is heart-wrenching, and the grief must be allowed to run its course. For now, there seems to be no consolation, relief, or hope.

But it is into this suffering of soul that Christ comes. And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. When Jesus approaches, we must cease our mourning to anticipate His love. He says, with St. Paul this morning, I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which is your glory. (Galatians vi. 11) Christ comes to take on our suffering and death. He came and touched the bier, and they that bare him stood still. (ibid, 14) We too must be still to allow the Lord to make something good out of our suffering and death. Christ’s mercy is on the move. And He said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. (ibid, 15) Christ speaks the Word, and He breathes in new life into the boy’s living soul, which now quickens his dead flesh. Christ repeats the word of the prophet Ezekial, O ye dry bones, hear ye the Word of the Lord. (Ez. xxxiv. 7) And with St. John, the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they who hear shall live. (St. John v. 25)

The only words that emerge out of this situation come from the resuscitated youth. The young man speaks and mirrors the thoughts of his mother’s suffering heart. Oh, if only he might speak again now becomes a reality. The young man now speaks and can declare the Word of the Lord which has given him a new lease on life and the possibility of following Jesus into salvation. The mother’s suffering and spiritual death become new life in that of her resuscitated son. Both can follow Jesus into new life. And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying that a great prophet is risen up among us; and, that God hath visited his people. (ibid, 16)
         
The point of this morning’s Gospel is about far more than bringing a dead boy back to life. Jesus’ miracle invites us to consider that suffering and death are common to human life, and they are not immune to His healing Grace. Think about the widow of Nain. Like her, we must endure suffering, sorrow, and death before we can be rewarded with new life. She is confronted with a spiritual problem; on the one hand, she can mourn, despair, and give up on life because the last source of her earthly happiness has been taken from her. Perhaps she has forgotten the power of God in human life. Perhaps nothing short of a dramatic surge of this power in her son’s resuscitation would pry her out of the jaws of his death, a death that even now is consuming and killing her. One thing is clear: Jesus will use the miracle to draw both her and us away from earthly mourning over earthly loss so that we might learn to lean solely on His eternal power to carry us through to another kind of suffering and death.
         
The Widow of Nain did not seek out Jesus. Jesus found her. He, the Lord of Life, encountered a train of suffering and death and reversed its course. Earthly suffering and death will visit us all. Sometimes it happens sooner and sometimes later. No matter how hard we try, in the end, it will get the better of us all. The best that technology can do is to delay its imminent arrival. But to what use? Today’s Gospel leads us into a far more difficult truth. Christ is Lord of life and death. True life involves suffering and death. He who comes into the Widow of Nain’s suffering and death comes into ours also. If we are alive to ourselves spiritually, we ought to be suffering and dying to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Beyond suffering the loss of other lives, which is valid enough, we must be suffering spiritually and dying spiritually to our sinful selves. Only those who are suffering so that the Word of God might come alive in them, dying to themselves and their sin, will be saved.

What kind of suffering does Jesus invite us into today? Jesus invites us to consider that without Him we are not better than those suffering in sin and spiritually dead. The suffering and death that should matter most to us are the Son of God’s suffering and death. This is the suffering and death found on the Cross of Calvary, which reveals that true Goodness and Love can come alive only once Christ has suffered and died for our sins.

Finally, we return to what St. Paul says to the Church at Ephesus: Faint not at my tribulation for you, which is your glory. (Eph. iii. 13) St. Paul is suffering to die to himself so that Christ may come alive in him and lead him beyond it. St. Paul has gone through his own funeral. Christ has enabled him to bury his old suffering and dead spiritual self. But, he suffers too that others might join him in the spiritual death that is the first step towards salvation. St. Paul is being sanctified and now suffers and dies in a new and quickening way. Having put off the old man, the man suffering in sin and spiritual death, now St. Paul, with Christ alive in his heart, suffers and dies to himself positively so that others may join him in following Christ home to heaven. Now suffering and death have been redeemed and made good as the safety of [Christ’s] succour with His necessary help and goodness. (Collect, Trinity XVI) This alone can enable us to resist the lies of Satan and the false promises of modern technology as we learn to suffer gladly for Christ and die to ourselves so that we and others might reach His Kingdom. 
Amen.
©wjsmartin