Jesus Interrupts a Funeral

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No matter how well you prepare, there’s always something unexpected that happens in a service that you just kind of have to figure out on the fly and roll with. that happened this morning just a minute ago. There’s a miscommunication about who was doing the children’s lesson.

The worst possible time is when it happens during a funeral. I think it was the first funeral I ever officiated was for my great uncle, my grandfather’s brother. And I always liked him, got along with him real well. And when he passed away, his only daughter came down from Chicago and asked if I would officiate the funeral. And I said, I would be glad to.

And so we had the service at the funeral home and they brought in somebody from the funeral home to play the piano, but they forgot to get anybody to lead music. And so they asked me, would I lead singing a few hymns at the beginning of the service? And I said, yeah, that’d be no problem.

So we’re out at the beginning of the funeral. Keep in mind, I’m pretty sure this was the first funeral I’d ever done. At the very beginning, we’re singing Amazing Grace. And you would think, what could be easier?

We all know that one. It’s not a hard song. We’re singing Amazing Grace, and the piano player is playing about half the speed that I’m trying to lead it.

I mean, there’s funeral slow, and then there’s beyond funeral slow. So she’s playing at half speed, so I start trying to slow us down to match her tempo, and then she slows down even more. So I try to slow us down even more.

You already see this as a train wreck. I try to slow us down even more to match her, and she suddenly wakes up and goes back to the original tempo, and I’m 20, 21 years old. I don’t know what to do.

And in all fairness, maybe I was wrong. I think she was probably old enough to have heard John Newton play the song live, and so she probably knew better than I did how it was supposed to be played. But we ended up doing four verses of Amazing Grace, two different speeds.

She finished about three weeks before we did. And it was, oh, it was painful. And I thought that’s as bad as it gets.

That is not as bad as it gets. Funerals can be ruined in other ways. I’ve officiated funerals where, as I’m trying to get the family where they’re supposed to be, we’re also dealing with somebody has tried to crash the funeral, and now we’re dealing with the police department out in the parking lot.

Or somebody gets so overwhelmed, so dramatic over the loss, they’re like throwing themselves on the casket, screaming, take me with you. You never know what is going to happen. And I didn’t even think about this.

Lee, you’ve probably seen worse stories than this. I should have interviewed Lee for this introduction. He’s probably seen even crazier things.

But it’s amazing, you know, you go through the work of planning this service, and then it can be interrupted and ruined just like that. This morning, we’re going to look at an instance where Jesus interrupted a funeral. He didn’t ruin it. Well, I guess if you were there and you were determined, we’re going to have a funeral no matter what, he kind of ruined it.

But Jesus, but I think probably they were glad that the funeral got interrupted. We’re going to look at probably the best instance in all of history of a funeral service getting interrupted as we continue our study through the book of Luke. We’re in Luke chapter 7 and we’re going to start this morning at verse 11 and read through verse 17.

So if you’ll turn there with me and once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible or if you can’t find Luke chapter 7, it’ll be on the screen for you so you can follow along as we read. But starting in verse 11, it says soon afterwards, he went into a city called Nain. I looked it up.

You can pronounce that just about every conceivable way. I think probably the correct way is Nain, but I don’t know. I’ve heard other people say Nain.

He went to a city called Nain, and his disciples were going along with him, accompanied by a large crowd. Now, as he approached the gate of the city, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a sizable crowd from the city was with her.

When the Lord saw her, he felt compassion for her and said to her, do not weep. And he came up and touched the coffin and the bearers came to a halt. And he said, young man, I say to you, arise.

The dead man sat up and began to speak. And Jesus gave him back to his mother. Fear gripped them all and they began glorifying God saying, a great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.

And this report concerning him went out all over Judea and in the surrounding district. You may be seated. So while I was looking up, trying to figure out the proper pronunciation of this town, Nain or Nain or however you want to pronounce it, as I was looking up the proper pronunciation and some background on the town, I discovered that there are still ruins of it there today.

It’s a tiny little place today. It was a tiny little place in Jesus’s day. They’re sort of the fringes of Galilee in the northern part of Israel on the edge of the mountains.

And there was one way in and one way out of this town. It was perched on the edge of a hillside. And so you’d have to go down this one winding road through the mountains to get there.

If you’ve ever watched any of those documentaries where people drive buses down the side of mountain cliffs and the road is about two feet wide, that’s kind of what I picture. Maybe not that dramatic, but they were, what you see in this story is this crowd coming out down this mountain road to go and bury this dead man outside the city, and another crowd coming to meet them, coming with Jesus from Capernaum, where they’ve kind of come head to head on this mountain road, and there’s no way for, not necessarily any way for them to avoid each other. And so they happened to meet each other.

One other thing I want to point out is that the translation I read uses the word coffin. That’s not a great word for what they had, but that’s because we don’t really have a great word in English for what they had. The word there in Greek is soros, and the closest translation I could come up with would be like a stretcher, but a stretcher specifically for a dead person.

I know in older English they use the word beer, B-I-E-R, but if I said they brought him out on a beer, half of us may not know what that meant. But they would carry him down on this basically platform. And the reason why that’s important is because when Jesus goes through the miracle of healing this man, of raising him from the dead, he’s not locked inside a coffin.

He sits right up. Everybody around could see this dead body wrapped up on top of this stretcher-like device. and then when Jesus speaks to him, he sits up right there in full view of everybody.

So that’s important for us to note that we’re not talking about a coffin in the way that we would understand it. But as we start into this story, we see immediately, as we’ve seen all throughout the book of Luke, that Jesus specializes in doing the unexpected. He specializes in doing things that we don’t expect.

And just when we think we’ve got him figured out and we know what he can and can’t do, which there’s nothing in his nature that he can’t do. I mean, he can’t sin, he can’t lie because it’s not in his nature, but there’s nothing in his nature that he can’t do. But once we think we’ve got him figured out what he’s going to do, what he would do in a particular situation, he surprises.

He frequently surprises. I think that’s part of the reason why he did not seem to heal in the same way over and over. Sometimes he’d touch them, sometimes he’d speak to them from a distance, sometimes he’d spit in the dirt and put it on them.

Different methods every time. So that we were always a little bit on our toes and not expecting that it was going to be this method and we’re putting our faith in this method, but it’s always what is Jesus going to do. But he does some things here that are unexpected to them.

Like I said, this large crowd has begun to follow Jesus wherever he goes as they’re coming from Capernaum up this kind of isolated mountain path up toward this town that nobody really goes to. They were following Jesus. And some of this crowd was there because they wanted to learn.

They wanted to hear his teachings. They were interested in what he taught and maybe growing closer to God through that. Some people were just there because of the show.

They were there because he would do unexpected things, and they wanted to see what he was going to do next. And sometimes he fed them. That’s a great way to draw a crowd.

Some of them just wanted to see what he was going to do. And the people of this small town would not have expected him to bring his crowd there. You know, it’s like if we said that there was some major celebrity that was going to visit some little town near here.

Cookie Town. How many of you have ever been to Cookie Town? Okay.

Not even everybody in this room has been to Cookie Town, but quite a few of you. How many people you think live in Cookie Town about now? And I picked that name because it was the first one that came to mind.

It’s just a fun name to say. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it’s out south of here, off to the side of I-44. Not many people live there.

You think the people of that town would be shocked if we said the president is coming and bringing his entire entourage and having a major event in Cookietown, Oklahoma? You think they’d be shocked? Or if we said Taylor Swift is going to be in concert in Cookietown, Oklahoma, I’m assuming they don’t have a venue for either of those events.

We would be shocked. And so here is this rabbi that everybody in Galilee has heard about, his teachings and his miracles, and he’s drawn a massive crowd. And now he’s coming up the road to Nain.

That would have been unexpected to those people. Nobody expected to encounter Jesus. And the crowd from Nain was heading out to bury this dead young man.

They would have prepared the body quickly. When somebody died, they would wrap them up. They would prepare them quickly.

And then they would usually bury them by the end of that day. So they’re taking him out to the burial ground outside the city, carrying him on this stretcher-type device. And they certainly didn’t expect anyone to interfere with their plans.

They’re heading out. They’re going to put him in the tomb. They’re going to come back, have all their morning festivities.

And festivities is not the right word, but all their morning activities. And that was going to be the end of it. That’s what they expected the day to entail.

They didn’t expect Jesus to crash the funeral. They didn’t expect a teacher like Jesus to come and touch this stretcher that he was on. If you were touching a dead body or if you were touching something that the dead body laid on, you were considered ritually unclean. Now, in order to get the dead out of the city, somebody had to do that.

It wasn’t sinful to be ceremonially unclean, but it’s just not something you would expect a respected teacher, a respected rabbi, religious leader, somebody like that to come and say, I’m going to touch the thing that he’s being carried on there in verse 14. They just wouldn’t have wanted to be ritually unclean. But Jesus did all of these things that they didn’t expect.

Jesus did that all throughout his ministry, did things that people wouldn’t expect. Even today, Jesus does things that we don’t expect. Even as we have access to more of the story of Jesus than they did, because we see the end of his earthly ministry, we see how he worked through the early churches, we see the plans in Revelation for the future culmination of history.

We know more about Jesus than they did, but even today he still surprises us. And not because he does things that are out of character, but he just does things we don’t expect. Sometimes we don’t expect the changes that he makes in our hearts and in our lives.

We don’t expect that person to get saved and get radically transformed. We don’t expect always the things that Jesus does or can do. But this is what Jesus specializes in.

And now Luke here is recording a story that really happened of something that Jesus did, but the story also is there for the purpose of giving us a glimpse and giving Luke’s readers a glimpse of what Jesus was like. And there are a couple of characteristics of Jesus that are particularly emphasized in this story, his power and his compassion. And we see that his power and his compassion are unmatched if we look at verses 13 through 15.

Now by his actions here, Jesus demonstrated both that power and that compassion. And the strange thing about it is when you start to think about those two characteristics, they don’t always go hand in hand. There’s a lot of powerful people in the world who don’t have a whole lot of compassion.

I’m not saying there’s nobody, but it can be an unusual combination. And Jesus demonstrated them both, not just in this instance, but throughout his ministry, he demonstrated both of them, and he demonstrated them both in a perfect balance. He shows his compassion.

We don’t have to guess about what Jesus’s motives or thoughts were, what was going through Jesus’s mind as he came up on this funeral, because Luke tells us in verse 13, he says, when the Lord saw her, he felt compassion for her. She was heartbroken over her loss, and Jesus empathized with her. Jesus took pity on her.

And we look at that, we can kind of understand that, you know, she’s heartbroken, but we may not understand the depths of the worry and the anxiety and the fear and everything else that this woman would have been going through based on what the passage tells us. This was her only son. And in that day, it wasn’t uncommon to lose a child when they were small.

I’ve seen some translations or some tellings of this story say that, you know, this was a boy. Probably not. When Jesus in verse 14 talks to him, you see there where it says, young man, I say to you, arise.

When Jesus talks to him, he uses a Greek word there, neonicos, which indicates somebody that was between puberty and marrying age. This young man was probably somewhere between 13 and 18 years old. You say, well, that’s still just a kid.

In their culture, that was a young man who was building his life. He was strong. He was probably agile, had learned a trade.

This is who was going to take care of his mother because he was the only son, and she was a widow. He was her expected means of support. And with him dead, she had lost all the rights to her husband’s inheritance, if he’d left her anything.

All the rights to her husband’s property, all of that was going to go to some more distant male relative who may or may not take care of her. She had few legitimate options for earning money. If you’ve heard stories about Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, and how women aren’t allowed to work, how women aren’t allowed to go out and earn money.

It’s a very similar situation. And so she would depend on charity from extended relatives. Like I said, they may or may not help her.

I have seen so many situations on the back end of funerals where families get to fighting over some inheritance and money makes them do crazy things. So she may or may not have been able to count on her extended relatives. It was either that or the hope that the religious leaders took pity on her and showed charity.

But Jesus said those people were devouring widows’ houses. They weren’t necessarily people you could trust. So she was in a vulnerable position, and Jesus looked at her in her position, in her fear, in her anxiety, in addition to her grief, and he had compassion on her. And this compassion was not just a feeling.

I think we’ve all felt compassion where we feel something for somebody in their plight. But this was compassion that says, I have to do something. This was a feeling with a willingness and a compulsion to act.

And so he offers her some genuine comfort here, not only in his words in verse 13 where he says, do not weep, but in what he goes and does next. He shows her compassion. And the way he shows her compassion is by using his power.

So Jesus walks up and he touches this stretcher. The way this sounds like, the way this sounds, it sounds like Jesus stepped in the way, physically stops the stretcher from going to the cemetery, saying, we’re not done here. He stopped the men who were carrying it.

This man was literally on his way to the cemetery until Jesus physically intervened and said, no, the story’s not over here. Jesus steps into the situation and takes control and stood in the way. He brings this funeral procession to a halt, and then he does something that in order to do, you’ve either got to be God or be crazy.

He speaks to this dead man and says, I’m telling you, rise up. Young man, I say to you, arise. The reason I say you’ve either got to be God or be crazy to do that is because you and I can’t do that.

If I could have willed people back from the dead, I would have done it. I think we’ve all lost people that if we could raise them back, I know we think they’re in heaven, and so they’d be mad at us if we brought them back. I I want you back.

You know, I would have done it. But that’s not something we have the power to do. And if we think we do, we’re crazy.

But he wasn’t crazy. He was God. He commanded the dead man to rise.

And to everybody’s astonishment, verse 15 tells us, he sat up. He sat up and began to speak. The Bible doesn’t tell us what he said.

I wish it did. I kind of picture it as he struggles to sit up because they would wrap a body in linen. He’s struggling to sit up and say, get the things off me, but he speaks.

And that was an audible and visible piece of evidence to everybody who was watching. This was not, oh, there was a story. He healed a guy.

I know a guy who knows a guy who said he saw Jesus raise somebody from the dead. This took place in full view of both of these crowds, that this man who was dead at Jesus’ command actually sits up and begins talking. This wasn’t something, this wasn’t some hoax that somebody else perpetrated.

The guy was dead. Jesus told him, stop being dead. And he demonstrably stopped being dead.

It was undeniable public proof of the miracle that Jesus had just performed. And then Jesus in verse 15 gave him back to his mother. Now, I think that may be where some people get the idea that he was a little boy.

Here you go, giving him back to his mother, but I think the act of telling him, stop being dead, and then here, let’s get you down off of this stretcher. Here you go, man. This young man that she was so heartbroken over, he gives her back her son.

No one in history could have done what Jesus did. No one in history had the power to do what Jesus did, and Jesus, with all of that power, with all the power at his disposal that created heaven and earth, he had enough compassion to care about that woman, that vulnerable widow woman from a town nobody had ever heard of. He cared about her and where she was and what she needed.

Jesus’ actions demonstrated his power and his compassion. They also demonstrate his authority. So when we get to verses 16 and 17, what Jesus did was shocking to these people.

It says in verse 16, fear gripped them all. And we read over statements like that in the Bible very quickly. If you’ve read the Bible for very long, you’re used to that.

The angel of the Lord shows up, do not be afraid. Jesus does something, everybody’s afraid. I think we miss the gravity of what actually happened here.

Think about yourself in that position, that you’re going to a funeral, and somebody shows up and tells the guest of honor at the funeral, stop being dead, and they sit up. Is that going to be, oh, it’s just another Tuesday? There’s probably going to be some panic that breaks out.

Not to make light of it, but I see this, I think of that old Ray Stevens song, sitting up with the dead. If you’ve seen that, everybody panics when they think the man has come back to life. That’s probably, you know, there’s probably some similarity there with the way people reacted because we don’t expect it.

We don’t expect the dead to sit up and start talking. And so not only are you thinking about what you’re just seeing and is this really happening and this is crazy, but you also start thinking about the power of this person who’s standing next to you who just made it happen. And I think that would be a little terrifying as well.

Who is this guy and how did he manage that. Everybody was afraid, but they realized in that fear that it meant God was working in their midst. It meant at the very least they recognized that God the Father had sent Jesus because in their fear, as that fear calmed down eventually, verse 16 says they began glorifying God. They’re not looking at this and saying, what kind of sorcery is this?

These are not the people later on who accuse him of doing things by the power of Satan. These people realize that God is at work. they began glorifying God, and they said a great prophet has arisen among us.

And for us, we might read that and think, well, that’s a stretch. How did they get to profit? Elijah had done something almost line for line like this in raising a widow’s son back in 1 Kings 17.

It’s a clear parallel of that story, and I think that’s the reason why Luke saw fit to write it down. I think that’s why the Holy Spirit inspired Luke to write it down, because he’s drawing a parallel here between the power of Jesus and the power of Elijah. So we understand that Jesus Christ was sent by God, just like Elijah was sent by God.

And verse 16 says, God has visited his people. And we could read that a couple of ways. We could see that as a recognition from them that he’s not just sent by God, he is God.

We could see this as a recognition by them that God was visiting his people by sending a prophet. whichever of those they meant, it’s still clear they’re acknowledging that there’s something about Jesus that what he just did shows that he was sent by God. He’s not here speaking on his own authority.

He’s not a crazy person walking around claiming to do miracles. This person really was sent by God, and they were convinced of that, that this man has authority that comes from God. Now, we might look at it and say, well, why did they just think he was a prophet?

Again, we see more of the story than they do. I think it’s admirable that unlike the Pharisees, they would see a miracle like this and say, he’s a prophet of God, instead of just saying, oh, he’s, that can’t be true. But as far as them stopping at just, he’s a prophet, they didn’t yet see the rest of the story.

There’s a similar miracle at the end of the book of Luke that clarifies exactly who Jesus is. He’s not just sent by God, but he is God. Because while some of the other prophets of God were able to raise people from the dead, only Jesus predicted and accomplished his own resurrection.

But wherever we see that miracle take place of raising somebody from the dead, it shows that God’s authority is in that person who spoke. For us, we just get to see more of it than they did because we get to look back at it. As we close this morning, I want to leave you with one additional point as we go back to verse 13.

And in his compassion, Jesus looks at this woman and says, do not weep. And the reason he could tell her not to weep is because of what he was about to do. Jesus’ presence was the only hope this woman had.

Jesus’ presence gives us hope today because he’s demonstrated that he has power over life and death. He has authority over everything that plagues us and ails us. It doesn’t mean that everything’s going to work out exactly the way we want it to, but he has authority, he has power, he has compassion, and we can trust him, and his presence in our lives gives us hope.

We’ve all been in circumstances like that woman. Maybe not as dire, but we’ve all been in circumstances like that woman. I was thinking about it yesterday.

My grandfather has been close with all of my grandparents. One of them is still living. Been close with all of them, but one of them in particular I was close with.

My grandfather’s been gone nine and a half years, and every day I think of that man. Every day I still want to pick up the phone and call him. And sometimes I start to without realizing, wait, and there’s a void and there’s a sadness.

I have three children who are waiting for me in heaven. And that brings tremendous sadness and tremendous pain to think about. To think about what happened and what could have been.

We’ve all been in those circumstances. They’re not all exactly alike, but we’ve all been in those circumstances of loss and pain and hopelessness. But just like this woman, the presence of Jesus gives us hope.

Only Jesus can look at us and tell us, do not weep, and give us a reason not to weep. Because we know there’s a day coming when he will wipe away every tear from our eyes. And there’ll be no more sorrow, no more pain, no more crying.

The former things have all passed away. This woman got a taste of that in this life. But today, because Jesus is here, we have hope.

And if you’ve never experienced that hope, it begins with knowing that you’ll be with him for eternity. That begins with acknowledging that you’ve sinned against God as we all have. That sin separates us from God.

But Jesus Christ paid for our sin in full so that we could be forgiven and rose again to prove it. And all that’s necessary for you and me to do in order to have that hope, that eternal life, that knowledge that we’ll be reunited one day with our loved ones, that assurance that we will stand in the presence of the God who made us and loved us in a right relationship with him. The only thing that’s necessary for us to do is to believe that Jesus died to pay for our sins in full and ask him for that forgiveness and we’ll have it.