Sermons
10th June 2007 - Trinity 1
A story about miracles…
A priest is sitting on top of a roof during a great flood when a man comes by in a boat and says ‘get in, get in!’ The priest says, ‘no, I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’ Later with the water up to his waist, another boat comes by and they say, ‘get in, get in!’ but the priest says ‘no, I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’ Then, with the water around his chest, a third boat comes past and offers to help the priest but he says again ‘no, I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’ Finally with the water up to his chin, a helicopter throws down a ladder and they tell him to climb up the ladder, but the priest is adamant saying ‘no, I have faith in God, he will grant me a miracle.’
So the priest waits for his miracle, but it doesn’t arrive, and he dies a watery death and finds himself at the gates of Heaven, and he says to St Peter ‘I trusted in God to grant me a miracle but nothing happened and here I am’. And St. Peter says, ‘listen mate, we sent three boats and a helicopter, what more do you want’.
Miracles need to be seen to be believed, and I suspect that if we had our eyes more naturally open to the miraculous, we might see that it is occurring all around us.
The story in today’s gospel reading of the miraculous raising from death of the son of the widow of Nain shows us the miraculous compassion with which God deals with his people. In this story, only recorded by St Luke, Jesus acts to liberate the young man held captive by death because he has compassion on the young man’s mother. ‘When the lord saw her he had compassion on her and said, weep not’.
Left alone in a patriarchal world with no male agent to act for her, the widow’s plight would have been desperate, so Jesus bypasses the law of purity which forbade contact with a dead body and follows the higher law of mercy. Jesus touches the dead to show that the dead are not beyond the reach of God.
He sees the deep sorrow of the mother and widow, and his act of pity and of power shows us that those who sleep in Christ may also receive his compassion and rise again, and hence Christian sorrow at death can be shot through with Christian hope of new life.
In this miraculous action of Jesus, the crowd clearly sees an echo of the actions of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and they acclaim Jesus, saying ‘a great prophet has arisen amongst us’. The people fear the goodness and the greatness of what they have seen but they do not acclaim Jesus as a wonder-worker, a performer of tricks. And Jesus does not act in the hope of producing amazement; the principle of his action is compassion.
But what are we to make of miracles themselves? TV news sometimes speaks of people in desperate situations praying for a miracle to deliver them and the popular use and understanding of the term miracle stretches the Christian concept to its limits, a miracle for Christians is not a stroke of good luck or simply something inexplicable, if miracle meant no more than good fortune then winning the lottery would be a miracle and if miracle meant no more than something inexplicable then pronouncements of bishops would be miracles.
Christians have normally seen miracles as signs of disruption in the ordinary course of events, disruptive signs that reveal something of a deeper reality. In the Old Testament there are many miraculous stories associated with the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt and with the powers given to Elijah and Elisha, and in the New Testament Jesus performs the disruptive actions of the miraculous breaking-through of God’s kingdom into this world. And it is in this world that miracles occur and miracles do not stop with Jesus, the history of the Church rejoices in the history of miracles associated with her saints; disruptive signs of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the body of truth which is Christ on earth, the miraculous recreation of the life of the body of Christ which is the church.
In the fourth century after Christ, St Augustine developed the Christian idea of post-biblical miracles as agents of the missionary endeavours of the Church and set miracles within the creative nature of the God we worship. Nature itself, Augustine says, should be seen as a miraculous work of God and specific miracles associated with the saints seen within this work. Miracles and nature are alike within the work of God and miracles should be seen then not as contrary to nature but truly supernatural, that is, above what humans know of nature.
The story of the raising of the widow of Nain’s son points us towards the greatest miracle that the scriptures lead us to acknowledge. That within this great work of creation God has brought into being humankind which uniquely has the ability to respond with amazement to the wonder of his works and further, that God has visited and redeemed his people in Jesus setting them free from the constraints of death and sin which mar the goodness of the created order until the fulfilment of all things. This most awesome God, wholly other than us, yet stooping down to share our life and having compassion on the widow of Nain, this most supernatural God, walks with us in our sorrows and offers us his compassion when we see our loved ones constrained by death. When the lord saw the widow of Nain he had compassion on her and said unto her weep not, so when we face sorrow we must listen for the compassionate voice of Our Lord, for says to us in our deepest sorrow, weep not, and he says to those who sleep in him, Arise.