Since today is Mother’s Day, I thought I would begin with some possibilities for a list called “Murphy’s Laws of Parenting.” Murphy’s law is the idea that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. So these are kind of some laws of how things can go wrong for moms or parents in general.
1. The later you stay up, the earlier your child will wake up the next morning.
2. The gooier the food, the more likely it is to end up on the carpet.
3. The longer it takes you to make a meal, the less your child will like it. (Don’t they just love those instant meals?)
4. A sure way to get something done is to tell a child not to do it.
5. For a child to become clean, something else must become dirty.
6. Backing the car out of the driveway causes your child to have to go to the bathroom.
7. A child's greatest period of growth is the month after you've purchased new
school clothes.
8. Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word
what you shouldn't have said.
Do any of these sound familiar? There are probably more we could add to that as well. Moms and dads have to handle a lot of frustrating and difficult situations. So we need to be sure to thank our moms today.
This morning I want us to take a look at a mother probably facing the worse thing a parent can face, and having Jesus turn around that situation. This is the story in the passage from Luke that I read this morning. This passage is probably not one of the most well know passages of the Bible. I honestly do not remember studying it before. I am sure I have read it before, but I don’t know that I had paid much attention to it. I just stumbled upon it this week as I looked at passages with mothers in them, but thought it was worth our attention today.
This story happens just after the Luke version of the Sermon on the Mount. We spent Lent looking at the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew, which is three chapters long, but in Luke’s version it is less than a chapter long. Luke apparently did not think we needed everything that Matthew included. So Luke’s version is in chapter 6 and then in chapter 7 there is a story of a person being healed by Jesus, and then he is moving on to the next town. And that town’s name is Nain, which means pleasant.
Jesus and his crowd of followers are heading into the city as another crowd meets them on their way out. Jesus is being followed by his 12 disciples, but then many other people are following him as well. He has just given them some inspired teaching and then Jesus heals the servant of a centurion without even seeing or touching the servant. So this crowd around Jesus is just buzzing with excitement and anticipation for what Jesus will do next.
Then at the city gate they run into a different kind of crowd. This crowd is probably just as noisy as the joyous crowd around Jesus, but this crowd is not happy, they are mourning. There were probably people crying and wailing because this was a funeral procession.
A mother may have been leading this crowd because it was her one and only son who had died. There is nothing I can think of that would be worse on a parent than to have to bury their own child. We know this is not the way God intended life to be, but we also know that the reality is that too often this happens. And it was happening to this woman in Nain. She and the body of her son were in the midst of this crowd heading out of the city to the cemetery.
And to make things worse for her, we are also told she was a widow. The way a family survived back in these times was through the work of the men. The women could do things around the home, but the men provided the income and necessities to live. This son had most likely been supporting this mother. This son had been her means of survival and her hope for the future. With her husband gone and now her only son, she would be in a very difficult place. Luke mentions this situation for the woman to let us know the weight that this crowd would have felt in their procession.
Jesus and his crowd notice this funeral procession coming and they probably reverently stepped aside. I imagine they had such a larger crowd that they probably had to split in two and parted like the Red Sea and this woman and her mourning crowd would have had to go right between them. I don’t who that would be more awkward for. Would Jesus’ crowd have been embarrassed or mortified for having been laughing and joking and then all of sudden they try to be quiet and respectful for this families loss? Or would this mother and her crowd felt like they were ruining the day for other people? They were sad, but then to interfere and walk through a gathering of joyful people adds a little extra frustration to the situation.
The next thing that happens is Jesus says, “Don’t cry.” I am still trying to figure out how this would have played out. Did Jesus say this right away? Maybe it was before all the awkwardness of her crowd walking through his crowd. Or maybe Jesus was trying to stay out of it, and she went on by him and then he could not hold it in any longer and he calls out to her to stop crying. I don’t know when Jesus reached out to this mother, but we know his heart was touched by her pain and he did reach out to her.
My next question then is how did she respond to Jesus’ command? Don’t cry. Did she ignore him? Or did she get furious? He told her not to cry. It was not bad enough in her life to have lost her husband, but then to have lost her only son as well, and this stranger she has never met before is going to tell her not to cry? Crying was probably the only thing she could do.
But Jesus does not seem to wait for her to respond to his comment. Instead he walks right up to the coffin and reaches out and touches it. As he touches it he calls to the dead son, get up.
Now many things would have been happening in this moment. First, Jewish people were not supposed to touch dead things. This would have been considered an action that would make Jesus unclean, so people did not reach out and touch coffins. Besides that I can feel the tension rise after he tells the mother to not cry and then tells a dead person to get up. In the mother’s crowd Jesus was talking about the impossible. Mourning mothers don’t just stop crying and dead men do not just get up.
But Jesus’ crowd may have seen things differently. I don’t know that all of them saw this, but those who knew Jesus well, knew he did not try to hurt people like this, so their eyes probably turned to the coffin in anticipation of the impossible because Jesus had done the impossible before. He had not raised anyone from the dead yet, this would actually be his first, but they may have thought anything was possible with Jesus around.
And then the dead son sat up. The coffin was probably just a box without a lid, so there was nothing on top of it, but the son sat up and the men let him down. Then Jesus gave him back to his mother. What a mother’s day! For that mother there was probably not another day of her life that compared with that day. It was the day her son’s funeral was to take place, but then Jesus cancelled it and instead they celebrated new life. Jesus brought these two crowds who were going different directions and joined them together. They now went in the same direction. There was no need for the funeral procession to go to the cemetery outside the city. Now these two groups went into the city and celebrated together that Jesus had done something amazing.
Mother’s Day can bring two crowds. Some here are excited for this day. Mother’s Day is a special day for them. Many mothers are ready for a day of pampering. They are ready for a few homemade gifts and cards. Or there are children enthusiastic about telling their moms how special they are. They can’t wait to cook that meal, clean their room or…(ask for moms if they have other things I should encourage their kids to do today).
But there is another crowd that comes to this Mother’s Day. Actually some of this crowd probably skipped church today because they did not feel like celebrating. They may be mourning or hurting today. I think about my mom because this is her first Mother’s Day without her mom, since Grandma died two months ago. There are many other people missing someone today and it is a reminder that they are not here.
Some may not like this day because their mother was not the woman they needed. Their mother may have hurt them instead of encouraging them to grow, so today is another reminder of what they missed.
And still others might mourn this day because they have longed to be a mother and for one reason or another that has not happened.
My prayer for us today is that those two crowds who have gathered here will leave joyfully together. I hope those who are excited for this Mother’s Day will also be mindful of those who have a tough time on Mother’s Day. That you might look for a way to encourage, lift up and include those who struggle with this day.
I also pray that those who struggle might look for a way that Jesus might enter your situation and bring you some joy. I wish I could say Jesus will come and just bring life back into you, but I don’t know that he will work a miracle like he did for the mother in our Scripture. But I do know he will not hesitate to meet you were you are. And it is okay to be frustrated and irritated with your situation, just never think you are alone. Maybe this Mother’s Day could be a turning point.
Most of all, I want all of us to recognize that when Jesus saw the broken heart of a mother he was moved to offer a miracle. There is something about a mother’s heart that really connects with Jesus and with God. I think it is because they are so similar. God’s heart for his children is full of unconditional love and grace and this is at the core of an ideal mother. As people we do not always live that out perfectly, but God’s unconditional love for us is amazing in how it reaches out to us. So I hope we can leave this place as one crowd that can praise God today for his heart for us, his children.
