And this week’s. Cheers, kids!
Luke 7:11-17; Galatians 1:11-24; Psalm 30; 1 Kings 17:17-24
This is one of those weeks when our lessons have a rather specific and coherent theme. It doesn’t happen all the time, and sometimes the theme between the lessons isn’t as obvious, but this week, it kind of stares you in the face, so let’s jump right in, shall we?
We start in 1 Kings. Ahab had just become king of Israel after the dearth of his father Omri, and he “did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him.” Elijah had recently prophesied to Ahab, at the beginning of chapter 17, that there would “be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at [his] word.” This of course angered King Ahab, and God warned Elijah to get out of town quick. After a bit of wandering, he ended up, at God’s prodding, at the town of Zarephath in Sidon. He encounters a widow, and asks her for food. She mentions that she’s nearly out of food, but Elijah multiplies the food and everyone is fine.
Well, everyone is fine until this week’s reading. Her son became sick and eventually died. The widow blames Elijah’s presence for her son’s death, but Elijah prays and God restores him to life. It’s rather remarkable really, as the woman, who likely worshiped Baal and not God, believes that Elijah is really a prophet from God.
The gospel text has Jesus encountering another widow, this time in the town of Nain. He had just finished a round of teaching, during what is called the “Sermon on the Plain”, and had recently been met by a Centurion of Capernaum whose servant was sick and Jesus healed, without even being in the house. Then, Luke says, “soon after ward, Jesus went to a town called Nain.”
As he got to the city gate, he and his disciples noticed a funeral procession – for the only son of a widow. Jesus’ “heart went out to her”. He went to the coffin, told the young man to get up, and he did! And then, just like the widow started to trust what Elijah was a prophet, the people gathered starting to think Jesus was a great prophet like Elijah, and word about him spread throughout the region.
In Psalm 30, we sang with the Psalmist of God’s power to heal and save – “I cried out to you, and you restored me to health.” It’s how we respond to God when we encounter him, like the people in our First Lesson and Gospel. Of course what’s interesting in the Psalm is we don’t know exactly what God did for the Psalmist, only that he is very happy with whatever it was, and giving him thanks.
Galatians 1 is the reading that at first glance seems the odd one out. It’s not about raising someone from the dead, like the other two. It’s not actively praising God, like the Psalm. It’s basically Paul’s resume, as he shows the church in Galatia who he is and why they should listen to what he’s writing to them. But at the same time, it is about saving a person from death, just not quite in the same way.
Paul was not the friendliest person to people who believed in Jesus, as you might remember he went out of his way to persecute the church. He was dead in his sin, as he’ll put it in other letters, but God pulled him out of that, and you could even say he was resurrected, even without the physical death.
Now, I didn’t mention this earlier, but when it came to widows, the way the system worked in older times is their children, specifically their sons, were supposed to look out for them. It’s not a bad system, when it works, but instances like the First Lesson and Gospel, where a widow’s only son died, did happen. This would leave the widow with no one to care for them, leaving them trapped in poverty with very little to live on. So the death of these widows’ sons could very well lead to the death of the widows not long after. So when God, through Elijah and Jesus, raised these two sons, he wasn’t just saving them, but their mothers as well. They also experienced a sort of resurrection.
This is the kind of thing that God does all the time; he meets people in situations that are “deadly”, physically or spiritually, and he resurrects them. He brings them new life where there wasn’t life before. And then, when he does this, we can sing with the Psalmist praising the things he does for us.