This morning's short Gospel reading shows us Jesus engaged in a very real situation of life and death. As he and his disciples enter the small town of Nain, they encounter all the drama and tears of a funeral procession. And what happens next causes such a stir that the story was spread far and wide.
Some scholars think the boy wasn’t really dead, but in some sort of catatonic trance so that he appeared dead. So what, is my response: what difference would that really make to this miracle event? The important thing about this remarkable story is this: that in how he reacts, Jesus shows us something vital about the nature of God. Perhaps we can trace in this story some sense of what St John meant when he wrote that though no-one has ever seen God, Jesus has made him known among us: as God's only Son, the nearest to the Father's heart.
That's a lovely phrase: "the nearest to his Father's heart" - but many of the philosophers of those times would have been shocked at the very idea of a God with a heart capable of feeling. Their argument went like this: to feel for someone, to feel happy or sad or sorry for them, is to allow that person to influence you, and if you are influenced by someone then that person is somehow in a higher place than you are. Put simply, they are in that small sense greater than you. But no-one can be greater than God, not even for a moment. To feel emotion is an expression of human vulnerability, but God can’t be vulnerable. Emotion is weakness; God cannot feel it.
That’s how some of the Greek philosophers thought. But the Gospel stories provide a very different view, of a God who is like Jesus. And Jesus is vulnerable, he feels for others, and in this chance encounter with human grief and tragedy we see him react with compassion and sympathy to a woman in need, we see him feeling something of her pain.
For Luke tells us that Jesus was "moved to the very depths of his being" by what he encountered there. That’s what the original Greek implies - Luke uses the very strongest word possible, to describe how Jesus reacted to the child and his mother. So this is what we Christians believe God is like. We can’t believe in a God who is apathetic and unfeeling, because in Jesus we see God’s compassion and mercy the divine heart allowing itself to be vulnerable to our tears and our needs, as the son of God takes the road that will lead to the cross. The God of Jesus is the God whose whole nature is love.
Our other reading this morning shows us Paul getting things wrong about God. In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul writes about his young self. He was Saul in those days, and he was the zealot, the keenest student in his class, wanting so much to serve God, but serving a wrong idea of God. Not the impassive, immovable God of the Greek Stoics, but God the law-giver and rule-maker. Well, that is God: he does indeed give law and make rules, but he does it with purposeful intent: the commandments he gives us are intended to ensure and enable our love for one another as his people.
Sadly, for many of the Pharisees - the strict sect among which Paul had been educated and trained - respect for the Law had become a "rules for rules' sake" understanding of what God wanted from his people. The Law was given to help us love and serve and care for one another; but for them the Law was about dividing those in God's favour who kept the Law, from those outside God's favour who didn’t or couldn’t keep the Law. What might they have made of the woman at Nain? They might well have looked for a reason for the tragedy: someone must have broken God’s Law, that’s why the woman and her son to have earned God's disfavour. But Jesus simply responded to the woman's need; her plight had touched his heart.
So compassion didn’t have much of a place in Paul's life while he was still Saul, before he encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was full of zeal for the Lord, he wanted to serve him, he was striving for holiness, but none of this connected in any way to the heart of God; and the only way God could break through was to strike him down and leave him blind; only then could the eyes of his heart be opened.
But the Damascus road changed Paul from a persecutor of the Church into its greatest apostle. And in the Church he helped to build rules still exist, for you have to have them in any human organisation, but rules and laws need to be doing what they’re supposed to do: helping people live together in community - with compassion and service, in a way that will be a witness to the world of the God of love.
If only that were true of the Church as we see it! Too often the Church is closer to Saul the Pharisee than to Paul the apostle of Christ. If we get too hooked on rules and laws and traditions and rituals, love gets squeezed out of the picture. Our intentions may be good, and like young zealous Saul we want to serve, but we can lose touch with the heart of the one who calls us. He is the God we see in Jesus, the God who makes himself vulnerable to us, and offers himself in love for us, the God who feels to the very depths of his heart our need and our weakness, and our rejection and scorn.
Many years ago I was taught in Sunday school that you must “seek God in the morning, if you would find him through the day". Everything we do begins with our seeking the heart of God, and allowing him to reach us and to speak to us, making ourselves vulnerable to his heart of compassion. Ministry based in this will be true to the mind of Christ: loving, compassionate; and with a heart to be moved by human need.
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