How the casket opens
“ And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then He came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And He said, “young man, I say to you, arise.” Luke 7.13-14
The crowds pass at the gates of Nain, Jesus and His followers, a widow and the mother of a lost son, and her mourners. One carrying life. The other, death, on the bier. Luke records Jesus’ determination to not pass her by.
When Jesus, moved by the tears of a grieving mother, touches the casket, the procession stops. It stops perhaps because there is a man and a crowd in the way of their procession. Or because there is a terrible power at work in a funeral procession. Each person carrying the bier, and everyone walking with it, thinks about the day when they too will be carried. The dead are buried and sometimes the living are buried right along with the dead. Jesus touched the Bier. A record scratched and the procession shuffled to a stop. The crowd craned their necks to see.
We too live in a procession of the inevitable; the problems we face seem beyond our ability to guess at a solution. The next personal or cultural crisis, the next natural disaster or financial crunch. It’d be nice, we think on our own long stroll in our own processions, to the cemetery or just around the block, if someone could put a hand on the bier for us and stop this thing.
Jesus says, “young man, I say to you, arise,” and the words young man, I’m sure, tore at the mother’s heart. Young man, I say to you, arise. Emphasis on the “I” because of course it matters who is speaking when they’re telling you that the dead rise. Rise not just in anyone’s name but in His name if you’re going to rise at all. And just who is He, the one who stops a funeral and opens the casket from the inside? Who is He?
There are two answers we are given: first, he’s the God who says “do not weep” though for all the world nothing could keep us from weeping. And second, he’s the God who can do the one thing in all the world to stop our tears. Do not weep he says, and he touches the bier. He touches it despite the fact that it could render him ceremonially unclean, because the Torah was clear that you can’t touch a dead body, and you can’t even touch what touches a dead body. In their day, as in ours, if you can’t be good, at least be clean.
The moment before the young man is resurrected is an important one. It is the in-between. It’s a big fat promise. The word “arise” hangs in the heavy air around the casket. I once saw a casket topper (they called it that, not me) — a red children’s plastic play-phone, an old rotary model, with the receiver off the hook. Below, in script, the words, “Jesus Called.” Forgive me, Lord, mothers before and since have said it, we need more than a casket topper.
When a bomb went off in the basement of the sixteenth street baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, it killed four little girls reading their bibles and putting on robes for choir practice before a service where the sermon, “A love that forgives,” would be preached. When the blast went off it blew out all the stained glass in the church except for a panel displaying Jesus leading little children—an audacious panel of hope suspended in the air. I watched a painter once who worked with acrylics; he started with a hopeless blob of paint, blobbed there on the canvas. Something good was starting from something aimless.
Most days, if I have my bet, we walk out the doors of our homes not knowing whether the dead will rise or if the ends will meet. We hope. We know the resurrection of this young man is going to happen, but those listening to Jesus do not. God knows the broken places are where the light gets in, but we do not.
It is in that moment before the miracle that much of Christian theology is forged, for the saints in Luke 7 and for us. The early pregnancy after several miscarriages, the first interview after being let go, the first doctor’s visit after beating cancer. In those places we will learn that faith must have something to do with the waiting room, the boardroom, the bedroom, the cemetery, if it is going to be true. His Gospel must speak to us in the funeral procession if it is going to speak at all.
Ever since Jesus we have entered a world that whispers about the end of funerals. Until that day we will see all sorts of resurrections, dreams rising from death, and sometimes those resurrections won’t come. And those deaths we actually have to bury will threaten to bury us. That’s why we need to see Jesus with his very heart out to a grieving widow and mother. It tells us that if the maker of the universe has a heart that beats for us, if the most powerful is also the most compassionate, then nothing will stop him from making all things new in the last. In the meanwhile we will have to remind one another that, where Jesus walks, the casket opens from the inside every once in a while, and that, in just a while longer, all will open at once.