June 9 -I Kings 17, L. 7:11-17
In the days before Social Security in the ancient world, widows were among the most vulnerable in society. Socially, they may well still be so in our time. Widows take up lead roles this morning. Zarephath is between Tyre and Sidon on the coast of Lebanon. Elijah is on the lam from Ahab. We get a miracle., where a family at the edge of despair gets enough to eat. No they survive, only now the boy dies.. The widow asks a wonderful question, here they have lived, and now she who has seen too much death already, loses her son. so, they were kept alive only for the boy to die too young anyway? Some think that Elijah is risking his life by taking on the boy’s ailment, a sort of exchange could be going on in ancient thought.Three times, he places himself on the child, and the boy’s spirit, the breath of life, re-enters his being, and the boy is raised. for wha tkind of life will he be rasied?
As we all know, Joseph disappears from Luke’s narrative after Jesus is 12. Either Joseph divorces Mary or perhaps he dies. I have a feeling that Jesus reacts the way he does as he sees his mother in the widow. Nain is south of Nazareth about 8 miles. It seems to me that Jesus performed this miracle without much forethought. Seeing the consternation of the widow, he restores the child to her. We are told Jesus is moved by compassion, but a better rendering is that the sight was gut-wrenching forJesus; he was torn up by the sight.Of course, the widowed mother of Jesus will see her son dead and buried. She is also with the disciples at Pentecost.Luke is clearly using the Elijah story as a template and uses the exact words, he presented him to her.
In the back of my mind I recall a poem or story about the son raised at Nain but cannot locate it. Maybe it was a story that the nuns told us at school. At any rate, I wonder what both figures did with their gift of new life? Were they haunted by it like Buffy in the TV show? Did they yearn to go back? Were they even more afraid of death? Did life have more savor. part of me suspects that after a while, they fell back into routine and rut. did they waste their new lives? Did death continue to have its fears or were they now able to face it resolutely.
I do not know what to make of the spate of accounts of people who report similar experiences after death. Not everyone has them. My sense is that we continue to be Doubting thomas and seek empirical proof for life after death. I recall inventors around the time of Edison wanted to try to measure the soul leaving ghe body as they imagined it had some sort of weighable substance.
At the very least, eternal life means life in full relationship with the eternal, in this world and the next. As baptized Christians, we are promised eternal life. Paul sees baptism as dying with Christ and rising to new life with Christ. Why do we so often live such insecure, fragile lives. Why are we so timid, so mundane, in such a partial embrace in life, like the hug you give a rarely sen aunt when you are little.? In baptism, we live a new life as full as the new life given the boy by Elijah and the son of the widow of Nain. The mothers were given new life too, to see their child restored. So can our lives be, surrounding not by the living dead, but those of the new life.
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