June 10, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
I Kings 17: 17-24 & Luke 7: 11-17
Lazarus. The name is synonymous with the reanimation of dead tissue – to put it bluntly. The “raising of Lazarus” episode immediately precedes Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem as John told the story in chapter 11 of the gospel named for him. New Testament scholar Paula Fredriksen of Boston University thinks the Lazarus event is what excited the Roman authorities to pursue and execute Jesus. Even the rumor of such an event would – and probably did – confer on Jesus the kind of authority any set of principalities and powers would fear.

But long before Lazarus – both in the supposed chronology of Jesus’ public career and in the appearance of the several gospels – Luke told the story of Jesus raising the only son of the widow of Nain from his deathbed. And even long before that in the saga of early Israel (see the I Kings passage) a writer told the tale of a prophet named Elijah giving life to the dead son of yet another widow.

Here, then, is a thread that runs from very early in the stream of Jewish-Christian literary history to very late. I think you can say it is about death, its pitiable survivors and people possessed of power and courage unafraid to use both in giving redress to the powerless.

Death is a frequent theme in any literature worth reading. That is because death is at the root of every human fear. It is also because death is difficult to face and accept, so we make up stories and poems about it. Often enough such stories and poems speak of death being overruled. Outside of the frequent Reader’s Digest stories of people insisting that they died, saw the other side and came back, only the irrational and delusional believe such things.

And yet we have in our treasured literature the three stories above referenced – all well known and obviously of considerable significance to believers. Why? In all three cases, the catalytic actors in the dramas are persons of presumed authority: Elijah, the prototype of the prophet, and Jesus, one of Elijah’s successors in the panoply of biblical heroes. The name “Jesus” and the noun “prophet” are more than once used together in the gospels.

As such, both Elijah and Jesus end up having to do with widows. If there is any sort and condition of humanity more powerless in the world of biblical antiquity than widowhood, I do not know what it is. Where rights were concerned, widows had slim to none. They could not ordinarily be beneficiaries of their husbands’ estates, if even they had them. Widows as widows were basically out of luck. Widows who had sons had hope that they might keep them from destitution. When a widow’s son died, she was twice death’s victim.

So into the lives of the widows we meet in today’s readings came persons of power. What kind of power? The power a prophet has by virtue of the name. A prophet in the biblical understanding of things was a person with knowledge, courage and power. He or she had the power because he or she had the knowledge and the courage. A prophet was perceived as having the power to name a thing for what it was, to call a digging implement a shovel, the power to know when a lie was a lie and to speak that truth to the lying power.

Sometimes poverty is a kind of death. It is surely a death of freedom. And the absence or denial of freedom reeks of death in that it cannot support life. So both Elijah and Jesus are depicted as restoring two widows’ only hopes for freedom and life: sons that could support them in their old age.

Today in this first decade of the 21st Century, supposedly free and enlightened societies, at least in theory, have ways to save widows and other economically vulnerable persons from the death that poverty brings. Such ways must needs involve – dare I say this five-letter word: TAXES – a distribution of national wealth in an equitable manner that ends up leaving the rich not too rich and the poor not too poor, that raises up the valleys and lowers the mountains, that puts down, if necessary, the mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and meek.

The Wall Street Journal may not like to hear it, but this is the law, the prophets and the gospel.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.