Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“When the Lord saw her, he was moved with compassion … and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’” Lk. 7:13
This moving gospel narrative is beautifully representative of Luke’s tender approach in describing the heart and soul of Jesus.
The woman in this story had lost everything – first her husband and now her son. She is not only alone, but also now bereft of any financial or emotional support. She has been relegated to the status of the outcast – the people the world forgets; the people who now dwell among the invisible; the people who no longer count.
Tears streaming down her face speak the language of all the discarded and rejected throughout human history.
Jesus saw her, immediately recognizing the pain, the fear, the grief.
And more than merely noticing her, Jesus acts – and does so in a way never imagined: he raises her son from the dead! And then he goes even further in showing the depth of his compassion: Jesus “gave him to his mother,” as Luke puts it so endearingly.
The message Jesus sends to each of us hearing this stunning story is two-fold.
First, it speaks powerfully of the God that Jesus keeps describing in every way imaginable: a God who is Compassion, who is Mercy, who is Love in its most abundant form.
Specifically, notice in the story that Jesus never asks the woman about how faithfully she has fulfilled all the commandments. Jesus never asks her how impeccably she has obeyed all the rules and all the traditions and all the laws.
Jesus never asks her anything.
He sees her tears. And the tears tell him all he needs to know.
They tell him about the depth of her sorrow. They tell him about the brokenness of her heart. They tell him about her fears and her anguish and her bottomless sense of loss.
Jesus cannot remain unmoved.
And neither should we.
Which brings us to the second message Jesus sends each of us hearing this story:
We must engage ourselves in continuing that same display of mercy. We must allow our hearts and our souls to respond with the same depth of tenderness to the tears being shed around us.
People are crying. People are weeping. People are shedding buckets of tears everywhere we look.
What does Jesus ask of us?
This: “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke, 6:6).
In other words, Jesus asks us to not just notice the tears all around us; to not just recognize the weeping of those undergoing private tragedies or natural disasters; to not just be aware of the silent ache of those stricken by the curse of addiction or destitution, or the invisible isolation of those who are aging and alone, or those struggling with mental illness or job loss or extreme poverty.
It is not enough for us to cry out “Lord, Lord” in prayer – as important as prayer is. We need to take the next step toward immersing ourselves fully into the world of mercy and compassion:
We need to act. We need to do.
Just as Jesus did in today’s gospel.
While we may not be able to literally raise people from the dead, we can help resurrect hope in their hearts. We can revive a sense of purpose. We can re-energize, re-ignite, re-inspire. We can raise them from the death of isolation and hopelessness.
We can do all of this by mirroring the example of Jesus, especially the example of his sacred heart:
Follow the tears. Keep our eyes open to the signs of misery. Sharpen our inner sense of compassion so that we can more easily spot those who have been left behind and are most vulnerable to becoming immersed in despair.
When we do this, we will be living out the belief that God is leading us onward, even sometimes in the midst of terrible suffering, to an experience beyond description.
We don’t know the exact details of what awaits us, but what we do know is, to borrow the haunting words of the great mystic Julian of Norwich: “all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”
Knowing this is why Jesus could so tenderly and so surely say to the woman immersed in grief and awash in tears: “Do not weep.”
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
11809194.1
6/2/16
