Jesus saw the widow walking in the funeral procession and he approached her. Interestingly, the text says nothing about the woman’s faith or lack of it. Maybe she was a faith-filled woman of God. Maybe not. Maybe she was still so down from the loss of her husband, and now the loss of her son had added to the weight, that her faith in God had dwindled. Maybe she doubted that God existed. Maybe she never had faith in God. We don’t know. Luke doesn’t mention it. I think this was intentional.
Whatever the case may have been, the widow could never have deserved what Jesus was about to do for her. She could have been the holiest woman in Nain, and still she could not have deserved the mighty love and grace of God. But God’s love for us is not dependent on our love for him. We don’t know the state of the widow’s heart. What we do know is that when Jesus saw the widow mourning over the death of her son, his heart broke for her and he was compelled to act.
Jesus walked over to the bier and touched it. “Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still.”
Now, before we go any further, we need to understand that under Jewish law, interacting with dead bodies was strictly forbidden. If a person touched a corpse, he was considered “unclean” for an entire week: “Whoever touches a human corpse will be unclean for seven days” (Numbers 19:11).
When Jesus touched the stretcher and the men carrying it stood still, I’m guessing they were shocked. “What is Rabbi Jesus doing?” they must have thought. They knew that touching a dead person would make Jesus unclean. So what was the point?
I think that in this moment Jesus was (as usual) teaching something about God and the gospel. Jesus is showing that no power — not sickness, not grief, not people’s expectations, not even death — can separate us from his love. He wasn’t afraid of walking right into the middle of a mess to demonstrate his love. He went right to the edge of uncleanliness in order to love this widow and her son. In fact, that is largely what the gospel is all about: a divine Savior who chose to walk among humanity, not to make bad people good, but to make dead people alive.
What a picture! The message of the gospel is that when we could not get to God, he came to us. Jesus initiated. He pursued. He did not care what it looked like to everyone else. He knew the risks, and he knew they were worth it.
Many people make the story of Jesus all about morality. Jesus was a great moral teacher, they say, and he taught many wonderful things. Love your neighbor as yourself, forgive people when they hurt you, turn the other cheek. And they tell us that Jesus’ life is an example worth following, like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. If we can just be a little more like Jesus every day, they say, we will be better off. We should try to do more nice things and less bad things. It is like they think that Jesus came to earth to give us a little makeover.
But Jesus did not come to earth for a makeover. He came for a takeover! He came to defeat sin once and for all. He came to conquer death, the consequence of sin. Sin doesn’t just make you immoral. It’s worse than that. Sin makes you dead. Spiritually, we are dead because of our sins, but God gives us new life through Jesus Christ (Ephesians 2:5). It is all well and good to try to live like Jesus. It’s great to do nice things, and we are all better off when we try to be more like Jesus. But make no mistake, Jesus is more than just a great moral teacher or an example to follow. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. He is our Savior. He is the Son of God. And when he reached down into humanity, it was to rescue us from the things that have plagued humanity since the Garden of Eden incident: sin and death.
The dead young man in the story, lifeless and therefore helpless, is a picture of humanity apart from Jesus. We all fall short of God’s standard because we all have sinned. And our sin has left us spiritually lifeless and helpless. Do you know what a dead man can do to make himself alive? Nothing. He’s dead. In our sin we are utterly unable to make ourselves alive. To accomplish that we need God’s intervention. So Jesus stops the funeral procession and walks straight to the young man. What a beautiful hint of what was to come, for the son, for the widow, and for us.
Later, when Jesus went to the cross, he went far beyond just getting next to death. He took on death itself. He would not simply test the limits of ceremonial cleanliness. He would become sin and also defeat death so that we might be given new life and be called the sons and daughters of God. Only an author gets to rewrite his story. Only God gets to throw away death. And he did. Jesus pursued us when we had nothing to offer in return. In our sin and shame Jesus died for us. Romans 5:7-8 tells us: “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Jesus is not afraid of a mess. He is not intimidated by the dark and dead areas within you. In fact, you could say that he is the Messiah of the mess because the mess is where he does his best work. Jesus is in the business of resurrecting, redeeming, and restoring. And if he can do it for one, he can do it for everyone.
Watch Rich this Monday on LIFE TODAY. Reprinted by permission. Sandcastle Kings by Rich Wilkerson, Jr. Copyright ©2015 by Rich Wilkerson, Jr. Published by Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved.
