On the Road to Nain - Road Trip With Jesus Series

This devotion is written by N.T. Wright and is entitled “Raising of the Widow’s Son.” This article can be found in Dr. Tom Wright’s Luke for Everyone biblical commentary.

Raising of the Widow’s Son

11 Not long afterwards, Jesus went to a town called Nain. His disciples went with him, and so did a large crowd. 12 As he got near to the gate of the city, a young man was being carried out dead. He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. #ere was a substantial crowd of the townspeople with her. 13 When the Master saw her, he was very sorry for her. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said to her. 14 Then he went up and touched the bier, and the people carrying it stood still. ‘Young fellow,’ he said, ‘I’m telling you—get up!’ 15 #e dead man sat up and began to speak, and he gave him to his mother. 16 Terror came over all of them. They praised God. ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’ they said. ‘God has visited his people!’ 17 This report went out about him in the whole of Judaea and the surrounding countryside.

Consider This

So where was the faith this time? The centurion’s servant was healed because of his owner’s faith, but in this story the only person who has any faith that the dead man can be raised is Jesus himself. #ough Jesus loves to see the signs of faith, he isn’t always bound by it, and in this case he acts freely, from sheer compassion, to do something nobody had imagined he could or would.

Luke certainly wants us to make a connection between this scene and the later one, when Jesus is himself carried off, his widowed mother’s eldest son, for burial outside Jerusalem. In the present case, of course, the young man is brought back to ordinary life and will have to die again one day. Luke will eventually tell of Jesus’ new life in which death is left behind for good.

Come inside the story and allow its force to sweep over you. Walk in the crowd a few paces behind the bier, on a hot day in Galilee, with the bright sun sparkling on the tears which are streaming down everyone’s cheeks. Death is common enough, and everybody knows what to do. The professional mourners and wailers are there, making plenty of noise so that friends and relatives, and particularly the poor mother, can cry their hearts out without the embarrassment of making a scene all by themselves. (How much kinder a system than the clinical, detached solemnity of a modern Western funeral!)

People are coming along with spices to anoint the body, ready to wrap them up in the grave-clothes to offset the smell of decomposition. You make your way from the family home, through the streets, to the town gate. A death in a small Middle-Eastern community touches everyone. The family burial plot will be a little way outside the town: probably a small cave in the side of a hill, where the husband and father had been buried some time before, and where now his bones, folded with care and devotion, lie stored in a bone-box, leaving the main shelf clear for the next burial. That’s where the procession is going.

Then, quite suddenly, some strangers arrive. A man leading a small group of followers. He seems vaguely familiar: Upper Galilee isn’t such a large place, and perhaps he grew up in a neighboring village (Nain is about five miles south-east of Nazareth). He is looking at the widowed and now doubly bereaved mother, and something inside him seems to be stirring. He comes up and says something to her—and then, to everyone’s surprise and horror, he touches the bier. (Nobody would normally do that except the official bearers; touching a corpse or the bier, or even the bearers themselves, would make you unclean.) Then—the biggest shock of all—he’s telling the lad to get up … and he’s getting up. The whole funeral procession goes wild with astonishment, delight, disbelief.

They don’t know which one to look at, the no-longer-dead boy, his amazed and ecstatic mother, or this stranger who has done what the old prophets, Elijah and Elisha, used to do. (Luke has told the story with deliberate echoes of 1 Kings 17 and 2 Kings 4.) ‘God has visited his people,’ they say: not in the sense of paying them a social visit, but in the old biblical sense, where this phrase was used to refer to God ‘visiting’ Israel at the time of the Exodus and other great events. It means, ‘God has come near to us, to save and rescue us.’ It means, ‘This is the time we’ve been waiting for.’

Now go through the scene again; but this time, instead of it being a funeral procession in a small first-century Galilean town, make it the moment you most dread in this next week or next year. Maybe it’s something that you know is going to happen, like a traumatic move of house or job. Maybe it’s something you are always afraid of, a sudden accident or illness, a tragedy or scandal. Come into the middle of the scene, if you can, in prayer; feel its sorrow and frustration, its bitterness and anger. Then watch as Jesus comes to join you in the middle of it. Take time in prayer and let him approach, speak, touch, command. He may not say what you expect. He may not do what you want. But if his presence comes to be with you there that is what you most need. Once he is in the middle of it all with you, you will be able to come through it.