Sunday
10th. – Year “C”: THE
WIDOW OF NAIN
The
Homily: Jesus’ sympathetic heart went out to widows. In today’s
Gospel he works a miracle to help a distraught widow. He once publicly
commended a widow for putting a few coppers into the Temple collection box. One
of his parables was about a widow insisting with a magistrate to redress some
grievance. It seems certain that when Jesus was well into his ministry his
mother Mary was then a widow. Widows were representatives of helplessness in a
society that refused them any personality and protection. A woman had no
personality apart from her husband; and when he died she had no status. Two
things at least are clear from the reading of the Gospels. 1. Jesus was on the
side of the widows. The way he spoke about them and treated them gave them
status and self-respect. 2. To prove that it was not just a matter of words,
Jesus himself entered into the hapless condition of those who had no security.
From the moment he expelled the business men from the Temple he knew he’d have
to go it entirely alone. His friends would abandon him and the Temple police
would run him to earth and beat him up.
There is a Greek word in
today’s Gospel that is rendered too casually by the English phrase: “he felt
sorry.” The Greek word signifies more than that. The word is “splanknenzein”. Let me explain. You
see on TV policemen and soldiers beating up demonstrators. The bloodied corpses
of innocent women and children brutally massacred by terrorists; or you
actually see on the streets of Calcutta a child being smashed by a speeding
truck. Your stomach turns, your blood curdles. You feel a deep reverberating
revulsion and anger, despair, a sense of the uselessness and frustration of it
all, a sort of hatred for those old politicians who hold on to power at the expence of young lives. We felt
like saying things like, “These things shouldn’t happen, I won’t allow it, I
won’t stand for it.” That is how Jesus felt as he stopped the funeral
procession of the widow’s son. Jesus is God and Creator, and here was a fine
young specimen of his creation cut off in his prime. So, as the Greek verb
tells us, he groaned deeply, which must have meant something like this in so
many words: “Whereas I am preaching that I have come that they may have life
and have it to the full, here is a dead boy seemingly challenging my manifesto,
calling me a liar, as it were. So I’ll show them what I intend for my
creation.” “Young man, rise.”
Every miracle of Jesus was
an anticipation of his own Resurrection. Every miracle was life-giving:
feeding, healing and raising to life. And, please note, those miracles were not
thrown at people from the mountain top: Mt. Olympus of the Greeks or Mt.
Kailash of the Hindus. Jesus Christ, Son of God, acted from within his people.
He would know hunger and thirst and feed the hungry. He’d know physical hurts
and wounds, and heal sickness. St. Paul says that he who was sinless was made into sin for us. No religious leader knew
sinners as intimately as Jesus; and finally he died to lead us into eternal
life. Jesus was a man who tested life and was in turn tested by it; and he
discovered that life was not a bad joke. The more deeply we are involved in
life the more deeply we can redeem it - from within.
When the war has been won
and he boys come marching home, we don’t clap for those who sat in front of
computers pressing buttons to launch missiles from a distance at targets 2,000
miles away. No, we cheer and clap for those who were in the mud, who went over
the top with bullets falling every inch of the way.
That’s Jesus. He didn’t see
a funeral procession from a distance; he came upon it, went right up and put
his hand on the cot bearing the deceased. I pray that he lay his hand on each
one of us and take away the death-dealing poisons like self-hatred, anger, low
self-esteem; and far from that temptation to rip life away, make us givers of
life and saviours of
the helpless.
(The Catholic Church is a
widow in regard to many of her priests. They are dead: morally and spiritually
dead. Causes of death: cynicism, hatred, anger, and self-indulgence. And most
of these are causes of moral suicide).
Prayer:
Dearest Lord
Jesus, Son of the living God, through your death and Resurrection you have
achieved eternal life for your followers. Lord of life and victor over death,
we beg you to point our bodies in the direction of your Resurrection which
death will open for each one of us, sweetly and swiftly. And may you come soon,
as you have promised, to convey us to your eternal dwellings. We ask this in
the power of your name. Amen.
“Swing low,
sweet chariot
Coming for
to carry me home.
Swing low,
sweet chariot
Coming for
to carry me home”
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