If someone were to ask you who Jesus was, what would you say? Would you talk about Him as the Son of God? Would you mention that He was God incarnate? Would you unpack that He came to die on a cross for our sins? That He was a gifted Teacher? I want to walk through the next few weeks exploring the idea that Jesus is our best friend and the ways we can experience Him as such. Today, I want to focus on the compassion of Jesus.
Luke 7:11-17 11 Soon afterward, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. 12 As he approached the town gate, a dead person was being carried out—the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the town was with her. 13 When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, “Don’t cry.” 14 Then he went up and touched the bier they were carrying him on, and the bearers stood still. He said, “Young man, I say to you, get up!” 15 The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.16 They were all filled with awe and praised God. “A great prophet has appeared among us,” they said. “God has come to help his people.” 17 This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country.
This woman was dealing with double grief. Her husband had passed on. Perhaps it had been a recent passing. The text doesn’t say how long it had been since her husband had passed, but now her son, someone Jesus called “young” passed on as well. When people experience the loss of a child it really violates our sense of fairness, doesn’t it? That’s not the way things are supposed to happen, right? Dealing with the death of a child can be something difficult to recover from. Processing multiple deaths at one time or in a short amount of time can be crushing.
And in that culture, when women relied heavily on a husband or a son to help provide and care for them, she was likely also grieving a sense of loss over her future, at least the future she had pictured. When her husband passed, though difficult, she still had her son to lean on and do life with. There would have been a daughter-in-law at some point. There would have been grandchildren to fill her life with joy. Her son’s presence, his family’s presence would have offered her a sense of security. She wouldn’t be alone. There would be support for her in her senior years. Now, when she looked forward, she felt she had nothing to look forward to. Her son was gone. She was truly alone.
And that’s when she met Jesus. She met Him when she was broken and alone. She met Jesus in the throes of her grief. She met Him when she had more questions than answers. She met Him probably at the lowest moment of her life to date. Can anyone else relate? And when she met Jesus, she met the greatest compassion and love she would ever encounter.
And verse 13 says, “The Lord saw her.” Those are four game-changing words right there! What a time to meet someone for the first time, when you are down and out, when you are hurting and alone…She wasn’t one of those people who met Jesus on her terms. She didn’t encounter Him because she had heard about this special Rabbi. She hadn’t been curious about Him and sought a way to find out where He was preaching next so she could see what all of the excitement was about. She wasn’t even looking for Jesus when she encountered Him. I don’t know if she even saw Him, but guess what? HE SAW HER! Aren’t you thankful that even in moments when we aren’t looking for Jesus, when we may not see Him because of the pain we are bearing that He still sees us? Maybe some of you met the Lord that way. Maybe some of you met Him when you weren’t even looking for Him. He just came and found you when you needed Him most.
Listen, when someone sees you at your lowest moment, when they see you in despair and are still drawn to engage you, to comfort you, you have received someone special into your life. Jesus is a friend to the brokenhearted because He is moved with compassion when we are in pain. Proverbs 18:24 calls him the “Friend who sticks closer than a brother.”
His heart went out to the grieving woman. He identified with her suffering. He felt her pain. At first read, His words, “Don’t cry,” may sound insensitive, like He was minimizing what she was going through or that He wanted her just to “get over” her grief, but that wasn’t the case. He told her not to cry because He knew what He was going to do. He was preparing her for the miracle He would perform. He was signaling that something was about to change. Her grief would end, so her tears could also end.
Jesus is called the Man of Sorrows and One who is acquainted with grief. (Isaiah 53:5) He knows what that heaviness, that emptiness, that ache feels like. Oh, there’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus. He knows all about our struggles. In fact, there is Scriptural evidence that Jesus comes even closer to those who are brokenhearted, to those who are crushed in their spirits. (Psalm 34:18)
In verse 14 we read that Jesus went up and touched the coffin. It was more of like a stretcher on a cart, and the people who were moving the boy’s body along stopped. Let me help you remember that the Jewish people considered a person unclean if they touched a dead body, but here we see what was and is important to Jesus. It isn’t the ceremonial law, but it is the pain of the person who is brokenhearted, and so Jesus reached out. And Jesus said to the boy, “Young man, get up.” The boy sat up and started talking. And then, this stunning phrase appears: “Jesus gave him back to his mother.”
A relationship was restored. Joy was restored. A future was restored. For me, it was a picture of the kind of reunion that awaits us in Heaven. Tears of sadness were replaced with tears of joy. Now obviously, the boy would pass from this life to the next at some point, but for the moment, this brokenhearted woman got to encounter the compassion of Jesus. Perhaps that was more important than getting her son back because the next time she dealt with a broken heart she would remember the One who entered into her suffering and changed her story. Because of the compassion of Jesus, our joy can be restored. We can have a hope and a future, even in this life.
