Christ’s Compassion and the Restoration of Man to Life
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In the miracles of Christ, God’s rich and wondrous relationship to our earth and to us, human beings, is revealed. On the one hand, His compassion is not merely an ability to love and feel pity as if from the outside, but to suffer together with us—to experience more deeply than we ourselves can (for He is unfathomably deep) the suffering, grief, and sometimes the terror of our earthly existence.
In today’s Gospel narrative, we hear that Christ felt deep pity for this mother, a widow who had lost her only son. He felt pity and pain because it was not for this that He created the world, not for this that man was born, nor for this that his mother brought him into the world—to die prematurely. And in this pity of Christ, in this compassion, in His capacity to suffer with us through our suffering, one aspect of God’s disposition toward us and the world is revealed.
Yet on the other hand, do not all these miracles, all this care and concern for the world, demonstrate that the earth is just as precious to God as heaven is? We so often think of God as detached from the earth, as a God of the heavens alone. But this is not true: the earth is infinitely precious to Him. One of the Fathers of the Church observed that the name “Father” speaks of God more meaningfully and truthfully than the word “God,” because the word “God” points to distinction, to distance, to the fact that we and He are separated by nature and by holiness; whereas the word “Father” points to closeness and kinship.
And so, in Christ and through Christ, God is revealed to us as Father. Nothing earthly is indifferent or foreign to Him. He created both heaven and earth alike; He lives both the earthly and the heavenly life. First through His creative love and guidance, and ultimately through the Very Incarnation of the Word of God, heaven and earth were united. God and creation became kin to one another; we became God’s own, and He became ours. In His humanity, Christ is our kinsman, He is our Brother, and God’s attitude toward the earth must become our attitude as well: with a vigilant, seeing love we must look attentively into the destiny of the earth. The works of God upon earth far transcend all that we can accomplish or hope to perform, and yet, in us and through us, He performs works that are truly Divine.
In today’s account, we hear how the Savior raised up, restored to earthly life, and reintegrated into earthly tragedy and joy a man who had passed through it and was now at rest from it. Christ restored man to life—a temporal, turbulent, complex life—so that he might be fruitful within it: not merely vegetating, but living and acting creatively. We, too, are granted the power—if only we desire it with a sincere heart, if only we apply a creative and sometimes cruciform effort—to restore to life those who have died to this life: people who have lost hope and continue to exist but no longer truly live; people who have lost faith in God, faith in others, and faith in themselves, and who dwell in darkness and despair. We are given the grace to bring back to life those who have lost it, for whom nothing remains but a dead, gray, dim existence. In doing so, we labor together with God: and to restore a person’s faith in oneself, faith in humanity, faith in God, and faith in life is just as vital as returning him to physical life, even as Christ performed this miracle.
Amen.
LEAVE A REPLY