tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7553896531179747942.post-9970101190270564992007-05-02T11:04:00.001-07:002007-05-07T15:29:46.045-07:00The Gospel according to Luke<br />Chapter 7: 11-17<br /><br /><em>Theme: There are times in our lives when we feel dead, when our Lord bids us to come alive again and gives us the grace to do so.</em><br /><span id="fullpost"><br />As we encounter Jesus and his work in the Gospel story, we are constantly faced with two things. The first is the Jesus saw his vocation very largely in terms of healing. He spent a great deal of time healing people of every description and of every kind of disease.<br /><br />We always want to know how Jesus did these things. There is no harm in the question as long as we realize that it will never be fully answered. In Jesus of Nazareth we encounter a person who possessed an extraordinary gift of healing. What is important to realize is that our Lord has shared, and shares, this gift with many men and women in every age. Such people, far from being mysterious or exotic, have often been quite ordinary. What they have in common is a complete absence of any illusion that they themselves are the source of healing. They know themselves to be mere channels of their healing Lord.<br /><br />With our Lord I think we must go further. Luke writes "The dead man sat up". There are occasions in the Gospel, such as this one, that are told with the immediacy and the simplicty of absolute factual truth. How are we to respond? I think we can say one of two things, each of which gives glory to our Lord. We can conclude that the young man was indeed dead and that there stood beside his bier the one actual conquerer of death who has ever walked this earth. On the other hand we could believe that among Jesus' healing powers was the capacity to tell death from coma. William Temple, one of the great and devout Christian minds of the last century, remarked of another such incident, the healing of Jairus' daughter, that he could never understand how people presume that incident to be a raising of the dead when Jesus categorically said that the child was not dead but asleep.<br /><br />There is a further way in which a passage like this can speak to our lives. What does it mean for our lives when Luke says that the young man was "carried out of the city dead". What would it mean if we spoke of ourselves as being "carried out of the city dead"? Could it mean those many occasions when we head home in the evening, parts of us in a sense dead, perhaps numbed by a hurt done to us, a cutting remark, a threat made, a mistake we could not avoid, a harsh confrontation, hours of tension. Sometimes we can use the privacy of the journey home, or the affection of those who welcome us home, to allow Jesus to touch us by his loving compassion. We can experience him calling us to come alive again.<br /><br />This is the Good News for this week.<br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"><script expr:src='"http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/OneMansJournal?i=" + data:post.url' type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script></div>Herb O'Driscollhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15131608054218451967noreply@blogger.com