Where Is Jesus' Compassion Today? Trinity 16 Sermon

Christ for Us

Trinity 16 sermon on Luke 7:11-17 preached in 2024 by Rev. James Preus. Christforus.org.

Gospel: Luke 7:11-17

11 Soon afterward [Jesus] went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 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. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” 15 And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited his people!” 17 And this report about him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.

Trinity 16

Luke 7:11-17

Pastor James Preus

Trinity Lutheran Church

September 15, 2024

Laugh to scorn the gloomy grave

And at death no longer tremble;

He, the Lord, who came to save

Will at last His own assemble.

They will go their Lord to meet,

Treading death beneath their feet. (LSB 741:7, Otto von Schwerin, Jesus Christ, My Sure Defense)

The woman was a widow. That’s sad. But most married women are widowed eventually. She’s following the coffin of her only son. Now, that’s heartbreaking. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. Now, after this woman’s husband has died, death has taken away her only son. She’s alone and will likely need to depend on the charity of others to survive. Our Lord Jesus sees her and he has compassion on her. Yet, what Jesus does with this compassion is what is truly remarkable. He says to the mother of the dead man, “Do not weep,” which certainly would be a pho pas at any other funeral. Surely, at her son’s funeral, a woman is permitted to cry! But Jesus backs up his bold words by touching the coffin and saying to the dead man, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” And the young man rises from the dead, starts talking, and Jesus returns the man alive and well to his mother.

What wonderful compassion our Lord Jesus has! Would that He would show such compassion today! Do we not have parents in our midst who have held the lifeless body of their child? Who would give all they have to see their child start moving again, open his eyes, and talk? Who would be forever thankful to Jesus if He would give their dead child back to them alive and well! Yes, we have such parents today, such pitiable mothers and fathers, even widows and widowers, who are in need of this comfort. Why doesn’t Jesus raise their dead? Or, could He at least keep them from dying! Where is Jesus’ compassion today?

Scripture only records Jesus raising three people from the dead: Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter in Capernaum, Lazarus of Bethany, and this young man from Nain. Certainly, there were others He raised, along with His disciples (Matthew 10:8). Yet, it is also certain that there were many more Jesus did not raise. Yet, this does not prove a lack of compassion on our Lord’s part, nor a lack of power over death. Rather, to understand this, we must learn that there are three types of death: 1) physical death, from which Jesus raised the young man from Nain; 2) eternal death, which is suffered by all in hell; and 3) spiritual death, into which all are conceived and born, which means they are dead to sin and incapable of choosing or pleasing God. When you recognize all three of these types of death, you realize that the raising of the young man in Nain was the least remarkable and least compassionate resurrection, which Jesus demonstrates in this Gospel lesson. The young man would later die again. Yet, there are worse deaths than physical death, from which Jesus seeks to save us.

The cause of death, whether it is physical, spiritual, or eternal, is all the same: sin. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). God told Adam that on the day he disobeyed Him and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would surely die (Gen. 2:17). Yet, Adam and Eve did not physically die on the day they ate of the forbidden fruit. However, their physical deaths began. They spiritually died. And had God not converted them through the promise of Christ, they would have died eternally as well in hell. The cause of our spiritual death is sin. We are conceived and born in sin (Psalm 51:5). St. Paul writes to the Ephesians in chapter 2, “you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked…and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” And to the Romans, he wrote, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12) We die because of sin. If you want to get rid of death, you need to get rid of sin.

And this is where Jesus shows His greatest compassion. We think Jesus was displaying His “human side” when He felt compassion on the mother. But this was not Jesus showing His human nature, but His divine nature. It is God’s nature to show compassion. That we feel compassion reflects our Creator. God showed His greatest compassion when He sent His Son to take all our sin upon Himself, and suffer and die in our place because of it. This is what God declared through the prophet Isaiah, “He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and by His stripes, we were healed. All we, like sheep, have gone astray, we have turned, every one, to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6) Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesied of his son, declaring that he would “give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the compassionate mercy of our God.” (Luke 1:77-78) God’s compassion is shown in how He takes away our sins.

And so, when Jesus raised that young man from the dead, He foreshadowed His own resurrection from the dead, when He would forever nail our sins to His cross, sins, which lock us in darkness and in the shadow of death. At Nain, Jesus raised one man from physical death. Yet, with this resurrection, He foreshadowed how He would win salvation from eternal death for all.

Although Jesus won eternal life for all, not all receive it, because it can only be received through faith. Unless one is risen from spiritual death, which prevents a person from believing in Jesus and being saved, then he goes from physical death into eternal death in hell. So, we learn that not only is eternal death more severe than physical death, but spiritual death is much worse than physical death. For the Christian who suffers from physical death is immediately granted eternal life in Christ and will soon enjoy the resurrection of the body. But the spiritually dead can only expect eternal death and punishment.

And so, we see that Jesus performed an even more compassionate and praiseworthy miracle at that funeral in Nain than He did by raising the man from physical death. What was the response of the people? They praised God and declared that a great prophet had risen among them and that God had visited His people. These are not simply generic praises of God. They are filled with faith and hope in God’s promises.

In Deuteronomy 18, the Lord spoke to Moses, ‘I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I commanded Him.” This was a Messianic Prophecy, meaning, it prophesied of the coming Messiah/Christ. When the crowd declared that God raised up a great prophet from among them, they were confessing that God had fulfilled His promise to Moses and that Jesus was the Christ. Again, the crowd said that God had visited His people. How has God visited His people? Christ Jesus is God! God said through the prophets that He would visit His people when they were in captivity in Babylon, to bring them back to their land (Jeremiah 29:10). Now God visits His people in a greater way. Again, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, prophesied of this when he said, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because He has visited and redeemed His people, and raised up a horn of salvation for us, in the house of David His servant.” (Luke 1:68-69) This horn of salvation through whom God would visit and redeem His people is Jesus Christ, the Son of David. So, by raising this young man from physical death, Christ brought about that many would be raised from spiritual death by being brought to faith in Christ, and therefore, would be rescued from eternal death in hell.

Only Jesus can raise the dead, because only Jesus can take our sins away. When Jesus raised that young man from Nain from physical death, He demonstrated His power to raise Himself from the dead after taking all our sins away on the cross. And when Jesus converted the crowd to believe that He was their Messiah, He rescued them from eternal death by granting them faith in the only One who can take away their sins.

We cannot bring our loved ones who have physically died to Jesus today for Him to raise them up. Yet, that does not mean that our Lord does not have compassion on us today. Jesus has compassion on us now in the midst of the shadow of death. He can comfort us in a way that no one else can, as St. Paul writes to the Thessalonians, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring to Him those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Thess. 4:13-14) Christ gives us comfort in death, because He has defeated death by taking away all our sins.

I love Jesus and I have devoted my life to telling people about Jesus, because only Jesus can comfort me when I am oppressed by things beyond my control. Only Jesus can comfort me when I lament my sins, which I cannot undo, because He alone died to take them away. Only Jesus can comfort me in the face of death, because only Christ undoes death. I love Jesus, because He is not only my Savior, but my children’s Savior. He comforts me not only as I face my own death, but as I face the death of my wife and children, regardless whether that precedes my own. Because Christ Jesus is their Savior too, as St. Peter declared in His first Pentecost sermon, “The promise is for you and for your children.”

We cannot bring our physically dead to Jesus for Him to raise them to life for a few more decades. But we can bring our children to Jesus, for them to be raised from spiritual death and to be sustained in spiritual life, so that physical death will lose its sting and eternal death will be completely undone. Christ Jesus shows His compassion today in raising us from spiritual death, so that we may enjoy eternal life without fear of physical death or any of the sorrow associated with it. Jesus shows us this compassion in Baptism, where we are buried with Christ and united to Him in His resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). Jesus shows this compassion through the preaching of the Gospel, where we hear the good news that Christ has taken away all our sins, which is the sting of death. Through the preaching of the forgiveness of sins, we are strengthened in spiritual life, so that eternal death cannot harm us. Christ comforts us today by robbing physical death of its power to gloat over us. Rather, Christ gives us the right to mock death and call it just a little nap, because Christ will raise those who belong to Him from physical death, as a mother wakes her little child up from a nap. And they will enjoy eternal life with Him.

Then take comfort and rejoice,

For His members Christ will cherish.

Fear not, they will hear His voice;

Dying, they will never perish;

For the very grave is stirred

When the trumpet’s blast is heard. (LSB 741:6, Otto von Schwerin, Jesus Christ, My Sure Defense)

Amen.