WHAT FAITH CAN DO FOR YOU

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A priest from Ireland was assigned to a Texan diocese.

One morning, Father O'Malley rose from his bed, looked out of the window of his bedroom, and noticed there was a jackass lying dead in the middle of his front lawn.  He promptly called the local police station.

"Good morning, this is Sergeant Jones, how might I help you?"

“This is Father O'Malley at St. Brigid's. There's a jackass lying dead on my front lawn. Would you be so kind as to send a couple your men to take care of the matter?"

Sergeant Jones, considering himself to be quite a wit, replied "Well now Father, it was always my impression that you people took care of last rites!"

There was dead silence on the line for a long moment.

Then Father O'Malley replied: "Yes, that is certainly true, but we are also obliged to notify the next of kin."

Humour is one way in which we try to cope with death, together with aphorisms, rituals or even plain denial.

Death may be the narrative of the OT & gospel readings & the psalm, but the underlying theme of those readings and the epistle is FAITH.

Let us start by looking at the OT story from the 1st Book of Kings. It is the story of the increasing faith of a widow in Zarephath, but we need to look firstly at the faith of the prophet Elijah. He had stood against King Ahab, who worshipped Baal, & told him that there would drought in the land whilst this continued. Elijah then, following the word of the Lord, went into hiding at the brook at Kerith where he was fed by ravens.

When the brook dried up the Lord told him to move on to Zarephath where a widow would supply him with food. The only drawback with this was that the widow had left only a handful of flour & a little oil in a jug & was preparing to make a final meal for herself & her son. The widow had sufficient faith to trust Elijah & miraculously the flour was not used up & the oil did not run dry so there was food for every day.

We might expect the widow to be rewarded for her faith & trust but her son fell ill & died. Her first reaction was that Elijah, for what reason we are not told, had brought judgement on her. Clearly this was not a part of Elijah’s plan for his response was emotive & accusing of God. “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” Without waiting for reply Elijah acted, God listened & the child was brought back to life.

As a consequence the widow acknowledged wholeheartedly that Elijah was a prophet, a man of God who spoke God’s word & was obedient to God.

St Luke presents the story of the widow’s son at Nain in a way that evokes the story of Elijah at Zarephath. Here the crowd reacted by calling Jesus a great prophet.

Jesus had been in Capernaum where he had healed the centurion’s servant in a response to his faith. The next day he moved on to Nain. Incidentally it was very close to Shunem where Elisha had raised another widow’s son from the dead.

As Jesus arrived with his disciples & a large crowd of followers they met another group, a funeral procession. The story of the widow’s son being raised from the dead was described by William Barclay as perhaps ‘the loveliest story in all the gospels.’

The story firstly reminds us of the pathos & poignancy of human life. The dead man was the widow’s only son. In a time without any social security system, in a patriarchal society, a widow was vulnerable, weak & without much opportunity for economic support, & that is apart from the distress & grief of losing her only son.

It is the nature of the world that we experience times of great joy & of loss, despair & heartbreak. Just over a year ago we experienced the joy of the birth of a healthy granddaughter despite the concern that she could have had a heart defect. This was followed shortly afterwards by the death of my mother. Most of us can only guess the feeling of losing our child.

When Jesus saw the widow he had compassion for her; he was moved to the depths of his heart in response to the tragic situation. This does not seem to have been any pre-planned act but an instinctive response. Jesus went up to bier, touched it & the bearers stood still, an action would have made Jesus ritually impure. Luke inserted the story at this point in his gospel to highlight the compassion of Jesus & that the law of love & mercy was higher than the law of uncleanness.

To the compassion of Jesus Luke adds the power of Jesus. In a moment of stillness Jesus spoke “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up, spoke & Jesus gave him to his mother.

It is interesting, perhaps not surprising, that the crowd’s first reaction is that of fear, followed I am sure by joy. Jesus was recognised & acknowledged as a great prophet. The raising of a man from the dead validated Jesus as a prophet, a man of God who spoke God’s word.

Luke’s purpose in his gospel is to make it clear that Jesus is nothing less than the Messiah. That is very different from being a prophet, although this did not exclude him from being seen as a prophet. Islam honours Jesus as a great prophet but not as the Christ the Son of God. In the gospel Jesus is tied to the long story of Israel, the chosen people of God, & shown as bringing that story to its triumphant climax. The Nain story enables Luke to point forward to the resurrection narrative when Jesus the prophet & Messiah emerges from the other side of death so validating all that he had said & done earlier.

But prophets are not always proved by words of power. St Paul in his letter to the Galatians makes a passionate defence of his gospel. We must assume that his opponents were insinuating that his gospel was his own invention, independent of the truly authoritative apostles in Jerusalem. Paul insists that his apostolic commission went back to Jesus himself, rather than being dependent on the Jerusalem church. He admits that did not have much contact with Jerusalem but he did not avoid it either. He did not go to Jerusalem because he had no need to, for God revealed his Son to him without any intermediary.

Paul could of course have appealed to the words of power he had spoken to prove his prophetic status. Although he had performed some miracles in Galatia he did not mention them in his letter, an obvious defence. What could be the reason for such omission, & how does it speak to us today?

Perhaps the reason is that true faith never rests on proof.

• The widow at Zarephath had to trust that Elijah was a true prophet before her son could be restored to life.

• The grieving widow & the bearers at Nain did not resist Jesus but stopped the procession for him.

• Faith receives its confirmation after the point of no return, & not before.

In our scientific, doubting & disbelieving world today this is a real challenge for most people, including Christians.

• We started with humour, but death is literally a deadly serious matter. And in facing death we have our greatest challenge.

• We cannot seek proof before committing ourselves to the power of Christ.

• There is no ‘approval period’, ‘no money back if not satisfied guarantee’. Unlike the widows’ sons we are not going to get a second chance at life. We cannot opt out like Woody Allen & say “It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

No, to claim the faith of Christ means we have an absolute belief in the promise of the resurrection, the promise of an eternal life with Christ. Amen

Fr David Fentiman
Visiting St John the Evangelist, Pevensey Rd, St Leonards on Sea