The Widow of Na’in — Luke 7:11-17

Courtesy of http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18503/18503-h/images/p278.jpg

The Text: Luke 7:11-17It is easy to see why Luke follows up the story of the Centurion’s slave with this one. In the former, the slave was “at the point of death”, while here the young man has already died. In the former, the faith of the Centurion elicits Jesus’ miraculous healing, while here nothing is said of the widow having faith: Jesus is merely moved by her plight and acts unilaterally for her.

Although it was not possible for Jesus in his three years of public teaching and healing to eliminate the sufferings of person in the Galilean countryside, where he lived, his mission was to make possible—by his life, death and resurrection—an ultimate elimination of all suffering and unhappiness in the kingdom of God at the end of history. Yet even so, when a notable case of deep human suffering met him face to face, as it did here, Jesus could not help but intervene to help the sufferer. It was his nature to do this.

The woman was a widow already before her only son died. Now she was without any obvious male protector or supporter in a time and culture in which women did not work outside the family, except as prostitutes. Whether she had a father still living or brothers who might help her is not made clear from the story. But her situation was certainly a bleak one. When Jesus saw her walking sadly behind the coffin of her son in the small funeral procession that filed through the village gate toward him, he knew he had to help her. The text says:

Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still. He said, "Young man, I say to you, get up!" 15 The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

The widow’s reaction is not recorded. We can easily imagine what it was. Rather, Luke gives us the reaction of the onlookers:

“They were all filled with awe and praised God. ‘A great prophet has appeared among us,’ they said. ‘God has come to help his people’” (Luke 7:16).

Now admittedly, Luke does not say they said “the great prophet”, i.e., Elijah, the prophet who was supposed to come right before the Savior-Messiah, promised by God in the Jewish prophets in the Old Testament. But the words “God has come to help his people” certainly refer to the great and final intervention of God in human history predicted in the Old Testament prophets. That the divine intervention was to be directed to Israel (“his people”) is also clear from these words.

What was there about this particular miracle of Jesus that led people to such a conclusion? Perhaps it was in the raising of a dead man, which could not but remind those familiar with Ezekiel’s (37:1-14) and Daniel’s (12:2) prophecies of the End of History, which spoke of a massive resurrection from the dead of God’s people.

I would certainly not deny that this deed showed more than Jesus’ kindness. It showed that he was a “great prophet”, indeed much more. For who but God raises the dead? And nothing indicates that Jesus needed to call upon God for the power to raise this young man: he merely acted as God, commanding the dead man to rise.

So in a real sense, but one different than what the crowd intended, the miracle did show that “God has come to help his people”. For Jesus was God, and his whole being longed for nothing so much as to help his people, not only the ethnic Israel, but all those who like the Roman Centurion showed themselves by faith to be “his people”.