ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

Finding in the Scriptures an Image of Ourselves

Sermon preached by Bishop Basil of Amphipolis at the Parish of the Dormition, London, 2 November 2008

Luke 7: 11-16

Today we have heard the Gospel of the Widow of Nain and the bringing back to life of her son. This village of Nain still exists. Someone who came back from Israel recently showed me a photograph of it. It was not very distinguished, at least in the present period, but we do not really know what it looked like in Jesus’s time.

Since we live the Church’s year over and over again, this is a familiar Gospel. It is  one of the many Resurrection Gospels that are read – as is appropriate – on Sundays, and the story is a very simple one. Christ, followed by his disciples and crowds of what we can really describe as  ‘hangers on’, approaches the city, and as he approaches, a dead man is carried out to be buried. We learn from the Gospel that he is the only son of a widow.

Those of you who are familiar with the Middle East will realise that this is not a silent scene. People are crying, wailing, and this would be really quite overpowering, given the circumstances and the tragedy which has taken place. The only support for this woman has died. Christ just tells her, ‘Weep not’, and moves over and touches the bier. By touching it, of course, he in effect stops the procession. One thing to realise is that the dead body is ‘impure’. Touching it is like touching the lepers; it is like touching the woman with the issue of blood – and if you touch a corpse you yourself become ritually impure. This is, then, a rather dramatic thing to do; but Christ does it, and he says to the young man, ‘Arise!’ And the young man sits up and begins to speak, and Christ hands him over to his mother.

I would like to look at this sequence of events because of the parallels with other events in the Gospels. Remember the way in which Peter’s mother- in-law stands up when she has been healed by Christ. She was ill with a fever and she stands up and serves Christ and the disciples (Mark 1:30-32). Peter himself, in Acts 9:40, says to a young woman, ‘Tabitha, arise’.  She was dead and she gets up.  In other words, there is a pattern here in what Christ does and what the Apostles do.
Again, the young man in today’s Gospel, having been brought back from death, begins to speak. Now, his rising up in response to Christ’s invitation is a kind of personal resurrection, and it is paralleled by that experience of the gift of the Spirit on the Apostles at Pentecost. They rise – they become resurrected people – on that day. And what do they do? They begin to speak. In other words, you have the same pattern here.

More difficult perhaps is the next parallel: the way Christ delivers this young man to his mother. Anyone who knows the story of the Crucifixion will immediately think of that scene on the Cross when Christ says to Mary, ‘Woman, behold thy son’, and to John, ‘Behold, thy mother’.  There is a kind of ‘handing over’ here of son to mother and of mother to son, Mary herself, of course, also being a widow who is in the process of losing her only son. There is, however, a further analogy between that scene and the story of the widow of Nain: there is the way in which Mary represents the Church, and Christ, in handing that young man, now come alive, to his mother in Nain, is, in a strange way, handing him on symbolically to the Church, which is the Mother of us all and has given birth to us all.

This kind of interpretation is used by the Fathers, and it is also the kind of interpretation that one finds in contemporary Jewish texts from the time of Christ. The interpreter sees the pattern; he sees the logos, that link that binds two events, and allows one of them to illumine the other – backwards and forwards. The truth of the matter is that this is also something we do in our daily lives. We are constantly looking for patterns: we look for patterns in other people’s behaviours, or, if we are inward looking, we might even look for patterns in our own behaviour. We look for patterns in the society around us and we pay attention to these: they become formative influences in our understanding of ourselves, of other people and of the world.

That ability that we have to see the deeper structure in events around us is something that we, along with the Fathers, need to apply to the Scriptures, and for this of course we need to ‘peruse the Scriptures daily’, as it says in the service for the Ordination of a Reader. To be able to see the analogies in Scripture, between passages of Scripture, and between the Scriptures and our own lives, is in fact the result and the consequence of our having been ‘born again’, of our having arisen with Christ in Baptism, being ‘born from above’, we who ‘have seen the true Light and received the Heavenly Spirit’, as we sing at the end of the Liturgy.

If we apply today’s story to ourselves we see that we are being invited to rise and to speak. Speak about what? About what we know: that once we were dead and now we are alive – alive in Christ. We are also being invited to speak of what we have seen: what we have seen of the power and presence of Christ in our own lives.

Let us enter, then, into the depths of this story, seeing it against the background of the whole of Christ’s life, his Resurrection and the gift of the Spirit to the Apostles on Pentecost: not simply as an event in the past, a miracle that took place – interesting, but that is the end of the story – but a miracle which is also capable of being realised in our own lives.

May God enable us to be reborn, to be reborn again in the Church:  to read the Scriptures, to open our eyes to the patterns in the Scriptures – patterns which we can find in our own lives – and so to find in the Scriptures an image of ourselves, for the Scriptures are always about ourselves, as well.

Amen.