1. When have you had a sense of God’s healing and compassion seeming to be activated in your life, or in the world around you, in response to earnest prayers and pleading (as in the story of the centurion’s slave)?
And when have you had a sense of God’s healing and compassion at work, or being activated, quite apart from your prayers or pleading, as if God showed up on God’s own (as in the story of the widow of Nain)?
2. This story is a story, first of all, about terrible loss. A widow in Jesus’ day was particularly vulnerable, since her husband would have represented her sense of security and livelihood. In this case, we encounter a widow who has not only lost her husband, but her son, as well. Perhaps she had some hope of being cared for by her son, after her husband’s death, but now even that hope is taken away. And beyond the issue of personal security, there is the even more painful emotional devastation that comes from losing a child. Not only is this widow now dependent on the charity of others in order to live, she is also dealing with the most devastating emotional trauma a mother can experience.
Take a moment to ponder loss in your own life. What do you know about waiting for God’s compassion? What do you know about God tending to you in your grief?
Ponder, also, someone you know who is experiencing great loss. How might God want to use you to tend to this person in his or her grief?
3. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her.”
It seems from this story that Jesus is more concerned about the woman who is grieving than he is about the young man who has died.
How do you demonstrate your compassion for people who are bereaved?
A large crowd was with the grieving widow in this story. How does our society today tend to the elderly, the helpless, and the grieving?
4. “Jesus gave him to his mother.”
A recent news story has been circulating about a soldier in World War II who was killed in the Central Pacific. Before he was deployed, his sweetheart had given him a diary, and he wrote beautifully in this diary about his love for her. In this diary, he requested that, if anything should happen to him, the diary be returned to Laura Mae, the girl he loved. A sniper killed the 22-year-old, and the diary was lost.
Then, just this year (70 years later), Laura Mae, now 90 years old, was stunned to see this very diary open in a display case in the National World War II Museum, where she was able to read her beloved’s words of devotion to her. The whole experience was like a tearful reunion for her.
What is your experience of God “giving us to each other”?
Have you ever had a sense that God was giving someone to you, or giving someone back to you?
5. What do you know about God giving your own life back to you, after it seemed as if your life had slipped away from you?
Along those lines, read the following poem and see if it conjures anything in you:
“Love After Love,” by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
6. “Fear seized all of them.”
“…and they glorified God…”
Ponder the crowd’s reaction to Jesus’ miracle, to the sense they have of being in the presence of a great prophet or holy man of God. What do you know about having a sense of awe and wonder that borders on fear?
Some suggest that Christians today are so focused on God as one who gently comforts that we are less attuned to God as one whose power overwhelms.
Do you have a sense that we have perhaps overly domesticated Jesus or God, that we have become overly familiar or comfortable with God as a manageable entity or force?
In this passage, we see Jesus as one who is both tenderly compassionate and all-powerful. Jesus incites both fear and praise among the people in the crowd. Does this depiction open you to new ways of perceiving God among us?
7. How would you describe your sense of hope or expectation about God working miraculously in your life?
When the crowd experiences this miracle, they “glorified God,” and “word about him spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.”
How do you respond to the miraculous in your life?
