2nd Sunday after Pentecost - Year C (Luke 7: 11-17)

In the Gospel of Luke, women and the poor play a prominent role. In this particular passage, it is interesting to note that Jesus raises the man from the dead because of his compassion, not for the man himself, but for the man’s mother. A woman without a man (father, husband, son) was in that culture a nobody, a non-person. By restoring the woman’s son to her, he rescued her from poverty and oblivion. Here lies what is, for me, the bigger issue. Jesus solves the immediate problem but does not seem to do anything about the larger social structures that created the problem to begin with.


It seems to me that one could argue that the Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise at the beginning of Luke, should be the filter through which the entire Gospel is read. Through this filter, one sees the signs and wonders of Jesus less as isolated acts and more as signs of a future that is already breaking in on the world. The “lifting up of the lowly” and the “bringing down of the powerful” is a radical overthrow of the societal norms that left women like the widow in this story, without a voice and, frequently, destitute. The incarnation was the beginning of a new world order and the ministry of Jesus gave substance to the promise. God has indeed looked favorably on us, but the work of justice, the expansion of God’s reign on earth, is far from complete. To the extent possible, and always under the power of grace, Christians have a responsibility to cooperate in the continued building of this new world “according to the promise made to our ancestors, to Abraham, Sarah, and their descendants forever.”