16th Sunday after Trinity + Luke 7:11-17

Grace and Peace be unto you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Christ, his disciples, and a large crowd following Him, approach the city of Nain. But as they enter they’re met with another large crowd, a funeral procession on its way out of the city. The dead man being carried out was the only son of his mother. To make matters worse, she was a widow. She had already buried her husband. Now she goes to bury her son. As the two crowds meet, Jesus sees the woman and has compassion on her. He tells her, “Do not weep.” He doesn’t say this in a “You’ll get through this” way, or a “You have my condolences” kind of way. He tells her not to weep in the “My heart goes out to you and I’m going to do something about this” kind of way. He goes to the open coffin and touches it. The pallbearers stand still. Generally, this sort of thing isn’t done. He says, “Young man, I say to you, arise,” as if the corpse could hear Him. And the young man hears. He sits up, alive! He sits up in the coffin and begins to speak, of what, we’re not told. He wouldn’t have spoken about what he saw in paradise. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:4, “It is not lawful for a man to utter” the things he sees and hears in Paradise. Most likely he sat up and praised Christ as the eternal Son of God for raising him from the dead and giving him back to his mother. What the resurrected man said isn’t important. If it were, the Holy Spirit would have recorded it. What is important is that Jesus had compassion and by His Word raised the dead.

This teaches you, dearly beloved of God, that everything Christ teaches about death and resurrection in the Scriptures is true! This great miracle is a small model of what He promises to do for all mankind on the Last Day. He says in John 5:25, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live.” Just as this young man, dead and on his way to be buried, hear the voice of the Son of God and lived, so too will all believers hear the voice of the Son of God on the Last Day and live. St. Paul tells the Thessalonians, “The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess. 4:16). When Christ returns He will raise all mankind from their graves. The sea will give up its dead as well. All mankind will be resurrected. Those who believed the Gospel, repented, and endured unto the end in faith, will rise in glorified bodies. Those who rejected the gospel, or believed for a time but fell away from faith, will rise as well, though not in glorified bodies. They’ll go to Hell to suffering eternally, body and soul, while the believing will dwell in the new heaven and new earth Christ will create on that day. All this passes before our eyes as we see Christ raise this dead young man, the only son of his mother, today in Nain.

Fear falls on the crowd outside of Nain that day, a crowd which is really two large crowds combined into one even larger crowd. They glorified God, as they should, and said, “A great prophet has risen among us,” and “God has visited His people!” You can see why they’d say these things. It’s a fantastic miracle. A man who was dead, not just ill, infirmed, or sick, but dead, is raised back to life. If you remember back to the First Sunday after Trinity we heard of the rich man and Lazarus. The Rich man, being in torment in Hell, wants Abraham to send Lazarus back to his five brothers. He imagines that “if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.” (Luke 16:30). They wouldn’t, actually, since a man has risen from the dead and most don’t repent and believe the Gospel, but the point is that even to us as we hear this miracle today, the resurrection of a dead man is a great, if not the greatest, miracle we can think of.

For now, in the age of the church, until Christ returns, we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. We bury our dead, trusting in Christ’s promise to raise believers on that day. We mourn our dead, not without hope, as unbelievers mourn, but in the sure and certain hope of that because Christ is risen, He is true to His word and will raise the dead. It’s important and vitally necessary to know that a miracle just as amazing as happened at Nain still happens today, and every day, in the Holy Christian Church. Jesus speaks of it in John 5:24. Just prior to speaking about raising the dead on the Last Day He says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” The promised resurrection of the body is the result of the spiritual resurrection that He brings about in sinners when they believe His gospel and flee to Him in faith.  The one who hears Christ’s word and believes has already passed from death to life.

This first resurrection, the spiritual resurrection, happens when the Holy Spirit works faith in your hearts through the Word and Baptism. Paul says we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). Because we’re descendants of the first sinners, Adam and Eve, we are “sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2) and “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). Everyone born in the natural way is spiritually stillborn though physically alive. But God makes us alive through faith in Christ! He rebirths us in Holy Baptism, so that we’re born again, not of the flesh but of water and the Spirit. In Holy Baptism the Triune God adopts us so that we’re not long children of wrath but sons of God. We’re no longer sons of disobedience, following every whim and fancy of the sinful flesh. We’re motivated by the Spirit who saved us through baptism, beginning to live as sons of righteousness and holiness. This spiritual resurrection, this regeneration that happens “through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5). Today’s epistle lesson shows us Paul’s prayer, and the Holy Spirit’s will, for all who have been rebirthed spiritually. He wants you “to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man” (Eph. 3:16). The inner man is the new man, the man of faith, it’s who you are in Christ because Christ dwells in your hearts by faith. Paul wants you to be strengthened in this inner man, the new man, the man of faith, so that you grow in faith in toward God in the midst of your trials and difficulties, and that you grow in love, not only for God but for one another. He’s raised you to new life and it’s His will that you grow in the new life that He’s given you, growing in good works, growing in patient endurance, growing in holiness, and growing in the knowledge and appreciate of the love of Christ which has brought all this about in you, by sheer grace and unmerited favor.

Christ has done for you spiritually what He did for the young man at Nain physically. Because you believe Christ and flee to Him in faith, trusting His mercies and merits, you have already passed from death to live. He’s raised you from the dead, so that each day you are to continue to crucify your sinful flesh with its desires and passions. He’s raised you to new life and called you God’s sons and daughters. Because you are alive to God by faith in Christ, He will physically do for you what He did to the young man at Nain that day, raising you up from your grave, no matter where it may be, no matter whether you’ve been interred in the ground, cremated and buried, He will put you back together and raise you to be like He is, glorified for all eternity, without the stain and taint of sin, without the possibility of temptation, to live with Him the everlasting bliss of the new heavens and new earth. Now, and each day, let us glorify Him for the new life to which He’s raised us through the Gospel, and for the promise of the resurrection of the body when He returns. Amen.