Love Looks and Acts -- Luke 7:11-17 • Geoff Bradford

So as David just prayed, we want to encourage you in your prayers and your participation in the launch of Reconciliation Church. Next Sunday is the launch service, the first service for Reconciliation, and there's so much that's been happening in the last six weeks. We're excited. I'm not going to share Russell's story. He's going to do so on a podcast coming up. But I'm really encouraged to hear about all that's happening, all the momentum going into the start of Reconciliation. And I want to issue an invitation again to our members and visitors at CTK. We're encouraging folks for the next ten weeks, if you're able and willing to do this, to give a Sunday or even ten Sundays and go be a part of Reconciliation's launch and go to Knightdale Station. They're meeting outside just like CTK is doing, and we want to encourage people to go at 09:00, Knightdale Station, and be a part there at the YMCA pavilion. Just your presence alone is going to be helpful. They need bodies, but they also need welcomers and bringers and gatherers. And so we'd encourage you to show up, bring your lawn chairs just like you've been bringing them here at our building, and be a part of that. That is going to be an exciting start for them.

Today, we're going to read from Luke chapter seven. We're reading verses 11 through 17. So listen as I read God's word.

Soon afterward, he—that's Jesus—went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep." Then he came and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still, and he said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Fear seized them all, and they glorified God saying, "A great prophet has arisen among us, and God has visited his people." And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country. — Luke 7:11-17

Would you pray with me? Father, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. You are our rock and our fortress and our redeemer. In the strong name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.

The Story of Charles and Susanna Spurgeon

Susanna Spurgeon, also called Susie, was the wife of the great preacher Charles Spurgeon. And after his death, she made contributions to the biography about his life, and this is a story from that biography. When they were engaged, Charles was invited to go preach at an afternoon service, and this is what she recalled. She said, "We went together happily enough in a cab, but by the time we had reached the landing of the stairs, he had already forgotten my existence. The burden of the message that he had to proclaim to that crowd of immortal souls was upon him, and he turned into a small side door without a moment realizing that I was left to struggle as best I could."

So Susie navigated the crowd and ended up leaving and going back to visit her mother. And she returned home to express her griefs, and her mother at that point gave her some marriage advice. She said that Charles was no ordinary man, that he was a man of God given to the ministry of God, and that Susanna must never hinder him by trying to put herself first in his heart. I know those words were difficult to hear. Susanna decided from that day forth she was going to align her desires with his and put the Lord's work first in her own heart. From that day forward, she concerned herself with the internal implications of her husband's ministry. She wrote this:

It was the ever settled purpose of my married life that I should never hinder him in his work for the Lord. Never try to keep him from fulfilling his engagements. Never plead my own ill health as a reason why he should remain at home with me. I thank God now that he enabled me to carry out this determination.

You know, it's funny. I read those words over twenty years ago when I was a student in seminary, and I aspired to be like the great Charles Spurgeon, and his biography really stirred me. I wanted to be a man who was no ordinary man, caught up in the Lord's work. But you know, twenty years later, I read those words, and I read them really differently. They kind of make me sad. And the reason it makes me sad is how much they are in contrast with what we just read from Luke seven.

You know, I wonder if you noticed the similarities and differences between those two stories. In both stories, there's a man of God. In both stories, there's a woman. In both stories, there's a crowd. But that's where the similarities kind of end. I mean, it's the differences actually that are so important.

Here's Spurgeon who ignores the woman that he's actually engaged to at the time. He ignores that woman, and he's sucked into the crowd, caught up in the moment in the sermon that he's about to deliver. By contrast, Jesus, he doesn't even have a sermon to give. He ignores the crowd, all for the sake of one frightened woman. One woman who was grieving, someone he hadn't even met before. In fact, we don't even know this widow's name. But she seems so important to Jesus, doesn't she?

We're starting a new series that's gonna take us through the fall up to Thanksgiving called Vintage Jesus. By that title, I don't mean like we worship the old Jesus, the vintage one versus the new one. I guess what I'm trying to capture in that title is like saying something is vintage so and so. Like, that is so that person. So as we go through these gospel accounts of Jesus's pursuit and his love for people, I want us to get a feel. As we read these stories, like saying, man, that is so Jesus, the way he shows love.

You know, I was supposed to be starting a series this week on the vision of our church. And as I got ready to do so, I just can't do it right now. I just want to talk about Jesus. And I think we just can't get too much of Jesus. So today, we begin with Jesus at a funeral. But I think we're gonna need to bring some creativity to this text, and I'm gonna ask for a little imagination from you. I want you to imagine that you're a filmmaker, and you've been tasked with making a movie of the life of Jesus, and you're handed this passage as a scene for you to film.

Directors and filmmakers don't just roll up somewhere and start filming. They have to answer lots of questions. They do a lot of planning going into filming a shot, filming a scene. They ask questions like, what was this town like? What time of day was it when all of this happened? They think, like, who would we get to play the grieving widow? What were funerals like back in the first century? Did they have caskets and flowers like we do? So you imagine a film crew. They're getting ready to make the scene, and for you, the director, what do you want to see through the lens? That's where I want us to start.

The Setting and Scene

Let me give you some information on this. First, the setting. Nain is a little town nestled in the southern hillside overlooking the beautiful Jezreel Valley. It's a beautiful place. The name in Hebrew actually means pleasant, but it's a small town. I mean, maybe at most 500 people in the whole town at this point.

Time of day, it's dusk. Funerals in the first century were carried on at early evening around 6 PM, and we know that Jesus had left the town of Capernaum 25 miles away, and had gone there on foot, walking all day long starting at sunrise early in the morning. 6 PM is about right for his arrival. So imagine, sun's beginning to set.

The Actors and Funeral Rites

Let's talk about the actors. Who's in this scene? Jewish funeral rites, modern and ancient, both require a body to be buried within twenty-four hours of death. And first century Jewish funerals, like our modern American ones, they take the funeral to the graveside, the place of burial, and there's a parade along the way, a processional along the way. In fact, this was really important.

You know, if you go to an American funeral, we use our inside voices. We whisper. It's very quiet. It's like going to a library. Not Jewish funerals. Jewish funerals were loud and boisterous, and people would be openly grieving and wailing. In fact, it was so important to them that it was emotional and loud that they would hire mourners and people playing the flute who would go with the front of the processional to call attention to this event.

So imagine the scene. There's this crowd. The whole town would be gathered. The entire town would come out and parade outside of town to the place of burial. The family, even a poor family, would be required to make sure they had at least one professional mourner and two flute players to make sure that this was a big event. And the body would be placed face up, arms crossed, in an open wicker basket. People would be carrying this over their heads, different pallbearers, and they would actually pass it around from person to person, like different groups of people would be carrying this as they go down the street. There'd be no flowers. Flowers are part of the Christian celebration of a funeral because they symbolize the resurrection.

So picture that scene. Now who are the actors? A funeral is a big deal. As I said, Nain's entire population would have been there, so it's no surprise that Luke calls this funeral procession a considerable crowd. But that's not the only crowd. There are actually two crowds in this story.

Two crowds that intersect right on the border of this little town of Nain. The funeral crowd that's going out, and a group coming in with Jesus. The crowd is called, by Luke, a great multitude. Now Luke uses that same terminology to refer to when Jesus feeds the 5,000. So this is a lot of people. Let's say a thousand people coming into town, 500 people going out of town. You can imagine these two crowds coming together. What happens when two crowds meet each other? It's chaos. It's confusing. And you could see one crowd, the Jesus crowd, begin to kind of pull back out of the way, make room for the other crowd to go through. So let me just ask, can you see the scene at this point? Can you see what's going on? Who else though is in the scene? Well, there's the woman.

Now let's think about this woman and who you might cast in the role to play this woman. But in order to really get into her character, let me ask you this question. How many dead people are there in this passage? Now, of course, the obvious answer on first reading is there's one dead person, the adult son who's died. But if you read carefully, that's not the right answer. This is not her first time doing a funeral. We read that she's a widow, which means that she's buried her husband. So is the right answer two? No. Let me push that a little further because we read that this adult son is her only son. In the first century, this is like losing everything for a woman who can't own property, who has no means of supporting herself. This is like losing all your Medicare, all your Social Security, all your income, and even all of welfare, all at the same time. She's going to be poor beyond poor after this. She's going to be a beggar. She may be homeless. She may not survive. This funeral is not just a sad day because her son has died. It's a devastating day. She's lost everything.

You might say that there are actually three dead people. The son, the already buried husband, and now this woman. She's lost everything. She is devastated. Who would you pick to play her? It wouldn't be somebody who's regal, who plays like queens. We're not thinking Judi Dench, we're not thinking a comedian. This is not Ellen DeGeneres. I think somebody who can do grief really well. Think of Whoopi Goldberg or Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple. Somebody who can do grief really well.

Compassion in Jesus

And then there's Jesus. Listen to the words in verse 13:

And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. — Luke 7:13

Compassion is the big word of this passage. Jesus had compassion on her. I want to think about this word compassion a lot because it's remarkable. The original word here has to do with coming up from the bowels of a person. It's a really deep feeling, but this word doesn't exist before the New Testament. It doesn't exist in ancient Greek. It doesn't exist in the Greek that was used for business at the time. It's not a word that appears anywhere in the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. This word didn't exist until the gospels, and the gospel writers coined this new word to describe Jesus. They had to sort of make up a word to describe what they saw in Jesus.

Over and over, this word appears throughout the gospels. We read Jesus had compassion on them. We read things like this:

He had compassion on the crowds for they were like sheep without a shepherd. — Matthew 9:36

So he goes on to teach them. He had compassion on two blind men, and he healed them. He had compassion when he saw the crowds, and he fed 5,000 of them. He had compassion on Mary and Martha at the death of Lazarus. He had compassion on the crowd, and again, fed 4,000. This word is used over and over again, but it's a brand new word. Because you can see the gospel writers having to grapple with what they see in Jesus. There's something so deep in him that's coming out toward people. Over and over this word, they had to make up a word to describe Jesus.

And I want you to look at Jesus with me at the three movements of compassion. Three movements of compassion. Seeing, feeling with, and acting.

Jesus sees her. As this procession approaches, as one crowd approaches the other crowd, Jesus sees the woman. He sees her. He saw the professional mourners. He saw the basket, but he's seeing her. Not because she's a person who's paid to do this. He can tell this is a person who's deeply grieving. And his heart went out to her. He had compassion on her. And he doesn't have compassion because he's like, "Oh, this young life that was taken too early."

It's not compassion for the boy, it's compassion for the mother. He sees her. He feels with her. Literally, our word for compassion is two parts: "com," a prefix meaning "with," and "passion" means feeling—feeling with. Jesus looked and he understood what she was feeling.

Now we read in other places in the gospels where we know Jesus understood more of the situation. He was given insights from God the Father into a person—like the Samaritan woman. Jesus says to her, "I know you've had five husbands, and the man you're with now is not your husband." And Jesus has some kind of knowledge here that this is her only child. She's lost her only child. She's destined for a life of poverty. He feels with her, and then he acts.

The compassion of Jesus moves into action. It says he came forward and he touched the bier and the bearers stood still, and he stopped them and said to her, looks at her and says:

Do not weep.

And then he turns with all kinds of authority and says to the dead body:

Get up, young man, I say to you, arise.

The Compassion Shortage

Now, I want to make a big deal out of the compassion of Jesus because right now, I think compassion—the demand for compassion is at an all-time high, and yet the supply of compassion is at an all-time low. We are really in a compassion shortage right now. Just check your social media for this. You'll find lots of emotion on social media: outrage, anger, comparison, frustration, shouting. But compassion—seeing another person, feeling with another person, acting in kindness toward another person who doesn't deserve it or who's in need—those are in short supply.

Jesus looked. Jesus felt with. He had compassion. And Jesus acted.

Aggressive Compassion

We're going to look at this over and over again over the next three months—the way Jesus moves out. His is an aggressive compassion. An aggressive compassion. Did you notice Jesus in this? There's no hesitation. There's no, "I don't know if I should really interrupt. This is a funeral. I'm really sorry." None of that. He boldly goes forward, stops everything. His is an aggressive compassion.

You know, when I was a freshman in college, both my wife Susan and I were part of a Bible study done by the campus worker for InterVarsity on our campus, a man named Roger Edwards. And Roger was just taken with the person of Jesus. This was an inductive Bible study going through all these passages in the gospels, looking at the life of Jesus and the way Jesus moves out in aggressive compassion toward people. And it was absolutely life-changing for me, and it was an inspiration for this series.

You know, Roger was also a history buff. His favorite analogy for Jesus was taken from the travel journals of Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark's journals are filled with encounters with grizzly bears. Lewis wrote of grizzlies: "A most tremendous looking animal and extremely hard to kill." That was from May '05. Clark described the grizzly as "very large and a terrible looking animal." Lots of spelling mistakes. But they described the raw ferocity of a charging grizzly—a grizzly that could be coming at their party as they were traveling, charging straight on. It would take over 10 shots to the heart to bring down a grizzly bear.

Several tribes of Native Americans had warned Lewis and Clark about grizzly bears. The tribes told them, "We will only attack a grizzly bear if there are six to ten people in the party, and even then, we're very likely to lose someone."

Roger's point is that Jesus in the gospels had this raw ferocity about him—like a charging grizzly. He went after people with aggressive compassion over and over. This is the Jesus of the gospels, much more like what Lewis and Clark described than those pictures we have of gentle Jesus, meek and mild from many of our children's books about Jesus—you know, Jesus who looks like he's asleep with his eyes open.

His is an aggressive compassion. This kind of love. He goes after sinners. He goes after sufferers with this authority, seeing and feeling with and acting toward them. And there seems to be only one way in the gospels to bring down the ferocious Jesus, and that's through a cross—which itself is an expression of his love, and which took a large group of people to bring about.

Jesus' Compassion for You

See, that compassion doesn't get used up in the gospel narratives. The Bible tells us that Jesus is the same yesterday and the same today—he's been the same forever. Jesus is that compassionate toward you and toward me. I mean, this is really hard for us to see, but even today, Jesus continues to look and to feel with and to act toward people with this kind of compassion. And I know it's hard to see.

I mean, we read these gospel accounts, like, "If only I was there, I would have been able to see it." And now we have to look more with eyes of faith than what they did by sight. But I just want to ask you some questions. Do you see Jesus seeing you? Do you see that? I mean, he does. He sees you. He sees the burdens that you carry, the fight that you are in every day, the temptations and the struggles.

I think it's remarkable to look at this passage because you see Jesus seeing her. There's a crowd of 400 to 500 people that he's coming up to. When I see a crowd of 400 to 500, even when I preach to crowds that are smaller than that, to be really honest, I don't see anybody. I sort of see a crowd. And Jesus, yet he zeros in on this crowd on her. What must it have been like to have been seen by Jesus in that way? That's how he is toward you.

Jesus feels with. He feels what you feel. We know from the scriptures that Jesus is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He feels all the feels of life. There's nothing that you could tell Jesus that would surprise him or cause him to raise his eyebrows and back away. In fact, we read Psalm 139. He knows you so thoroughly, so completely, and your hurts are his. His eyes are filled with tears.

He knows you so thoroughly, so completely — Psalm 139

And then Jesus acts. Jesus is always the one who initiates with sinners. Many of you have stories where your life was headed a completely different direction, and Jesus sort of ambushed you. We know Jesus is the one who comes knocking at the door of our hearts. He's the one who moves toward us before we would ever want to move toward him.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly — Romans 5:8

Jesus in his compassion, he keeps acting in your life. You may not always see it. You may not always be able to identify it. But his love is an aggressive love. It's a compassionate love.

The Birthmark of God's People

I think one of the things about being associated with him is that this is what his desire is for his people to look like: to be people of aggressive compassion, to see, to feel with, to act. I think about the different marks that we are familiar with. Maybe you have a birthmark that maybe only you and your mama know where it is, but a birthmark is something that identifies you. It's unique to you. Maybe it's a pigment on your skin that's a different color, or part of your hair is a different color. But it identifies you for who you are.

Or think about designers who have trademarks or logos. You may not even know the name of the company, but you recognize the logo. You recognize the trademark. It identifies that as belonging to that designer.

God has likewise established a mark, a birthmark, a trademark, a logo, by which he wants his children to be identified. Compassionate love is supposed to be the birthmark of the new birth. This is supposed to be what marks us as God's people.

By this will all people know that you're my disciples, the way that you love one another — John 13:35

Without that birthmark of compassionate love, people don't know who we really are. This is what we're supposed to look like. This is the trademark, the logo that's supposed to be read off the lives of Christians all the time. This kind of compassion.

Cornel West said it this way: "Despite the challenges presented by the widespread trivialization and dilution of the Christian gospel, I remain committed to its fundamental claim, that to follow Jesus is to love your way through the darkness of the world. In my view, to be a serious Christian is to live dangerously against the grain of the world. For too much of American Christianity, to follow Jesus is to seek comfort, devoid of courageous compassion and bold witness for the least of these."

Man, I love that phrase: courageous compassion. We could use some more of that up in here.

So here's the question: Are we becoming people of compassion? More and more, is this what flows out of my life and your life?

Today is a great day at CTK. We get to ordain and install some new deacons in our church, which is a huge gift. I hope that these are instigators of compassion in our church, but they are not subcontractors. We are not subcontracting out to them compassion. We're not saying, "Hey, go do it for us and let us know how it goes." We're saying, "No, help us grow in this area. Help lead us, push us."

Are you growing as a person who sees and who feels with and who acts? Let me ask these questions in order. Are you growing as a person who sees other people? Remember the story I told about Spurgeon and his fiancée, Susie Spurgeon?

Yet he's so focused on the ministry, on what he's supposed to be doing, that he missed the woman that he loved the most in the world. See, compassion starts with seeing. And I'll confess, this is hard for me. I'm guessing it's hard for you too. Because blindness, by definition, means you can't see what you can't see. But here's a good prayer for me, and I'll let you borrow it for you if you want to.

Lord, help me see. Help me begin here by seeing others.

Second, are you growing as a person who feels with other people? I want you to picture a three year old, little boy, little girl running to mom, wailing because they scraped their knee. The mom tells what has got to be one of the greatest lies that has been perpetuated probably since the beginning of humanity. She says, "Let me kiss it and make it better." I mean, many of you've heard that before? Let me kiss it and make it better. And the child crawls up in mama's lap, and she kisses it. And then the child looks up at her and notices mama is crying. "Mama, why are you crying?" And she says, "Because you're hurting."

Of course, it's not the kiss that makes it better. There's nothing magical about a kiss. It's the compassion. It's fifteen minutes spent in the lap of love. It's feeling with. Our world is crying all the time right now. And I think like this story, where we're like, how many deaths are there in the story? There's so many deaths. There's death all around us. And man, we are in a compassion scarcity. A high demand short supply. This is so much what we need today for the church to be those who feel with, who cry like the mother hurting for others. Can we become people who feel with? That's my question.

And are you growing as a person who acts? You know, compassion acts. It's bold. It's courageous. It disrupts a funeral. It does what's not appropriate. Gets involved. The late Colonel Sanders—yep, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel Sanders—he was on an airplane cross country, and there's an infant on that plane who's screaming, and the mother is trying to get the child to be quiet. The airline, the flight attendants are trying everything they can think of to try to calm the child, and Colonel Sanders finally asks if he can hold the baby. And they're exasperated at this point. They let Colonel Sanders hold the baby, and he actually rocks the baby to sleep. Later, another passenger said, "We all appreciate what you did for us." And Colonel Sanders replied, "I didn't do it for us. I did it for the baby."

See, that's compassion. Feeling with. Acting. What about you? Are you showing off the family birthmark?

Lord, give us an opportunity this week. Give us opportunity to live out the gospel, to remember what's true—how you see us, you feel with us, you act toward us. Father, we pray that that would be mirrored out of us into our world, or we know our world is dying for that. Lord, protect us from becoming cynical and jaded. Help us to love as you love. Help us to learn aggressive compassion. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.