The Funeral Jesus Stopped

Soon after the Roman soldier's servant got well, Jesus left Capernaum and walked to a hill town called Nain. His friends came with him, and so did a big, chattering crowd. (Once word got round that Jesus could heal a man without even going to his house, a great many people found they had nothing better to do that day.)

The road climbed toward the town gate. Before they reached it, they heard flutes, and women wailing, and a whole crowd of people crying.

"It's a funeral," one of the friends said.

Out through the gate came men carrying a wooden stretcher. On it lay a young man wrapped in cloth. He was dead. (In those days people were buried on the same day they died, and half the town walked behind the family to the grave, crying loudly so everyone would know how much the person was loved.)

Behind the stretcher walked his mother. Her husband had already died, and now her only son had died too. There was no one left to look after her. She walked with her hands over her face, and she could not stop crying.

So two crowds met at the gate of Nain. One was following Jesus. The other was following a dead man to his grave.

Jesus saw the mother. The Bible says his heart went out to her. (Luke uses a word that means he felt it deep in his stomach, the way a big sadness can make your tummy ache.)

He walked straight up to her. "Don't cry," he said.

The mourners must have stared. Who tells a mother not to cry at her own son's funeral?

Then Jesus reached out and laid his hand on the stretcher. The men carrying it stood still. The flutes stopped. The wailing stopped.

"Young man," Jesus said, "I tell you, get up!"

And the dead man sat up and began to talk.

(Luke does not tell us what he said first. Perhaps he wanted to know why he was lying on a stretcher in the middle of the road, with the whole town crying at him.)

Then Jesus gave him back to his mother.

Everyone there was filled with a trembling kind of wonder, the kind that comes when God is very close. Then they began to praise God. "A great prophet has come among us!" they shouted. "God has come to help his people!" The news about Jesus spread through the whole country and beyond.

Some of them may have been thinking of Elijah, who once gave a widow's son back to her alive. But Elijah had to cry out to God and stretch himself over the boy three times. Jesus only spoke, and a dead man heard him.

Even so, the young man of Nain would grow old one day and die again, and so would his mother. From Nain, Jesus went on toward Jerusalem, where he would die outside the city gate, be laid in a grave, and come out of it alive. Jesus once promised that a time is coming when everyone in the graves will hear his voice and come out. For everyone who belongs to him, that will be the end of dying and crying for good, and there will never be another funeral.

At Nain he turned one funeral around at the gate. When that day comes he will do it for all his people, and for them the road to the grave will turn out to be the road home.