The compassion of Christ at the gate of Nain
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
May the blessing of the Father who calls us, and His Only Begotten Son who saves us, and the Holy Spirit who sanctifies and transforms us be with us all, that we may hear His word and bear fruit—thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. Amen.
Introduction
“When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her.”
Luke 7:13
My dear beloved,
Imagine a mother walking toward the cemetery. She is surrounded by people, but she feels terribly alone. She has already buried her husband. Now she is following the body of her only son. The people around her can walk beside her. They can cry with her. They can carry the coffin. But nobody can give her back what she has lost.
This is the scene Saint Luke brings us to today. A funeral is coming out of the city of Nain. Another procession is coming toward the city: Jesus, His disciples, and a large crowd. One procession carries a dead young man. The other walks with the Lord of Life. And at the gate of the city, they meet.
The most beautiful thing is this: the widow has not asked Jesus for anything. Luke records no prayer from her lips, no confession of faith, no request for a miracle. She may not even know that He is approaching. But before she speaks, Christ sees her. Before she knows what He will do, His heart is moved with compassion.
Some of us arrive at church with burdens that are not visible. We smile, greet one another, and take our places. Yet inside there may be grief, family pain, fear about a child, sickness, disappointment, or a prayer that seems unanswered. This Gospel is not asking us to pretend those things do not hurt. It is inviting us to meet the Christ who sees them.
1. Jesus Sees the Tears We Cannot Explain
Listen carefully to the order of the Gospel. Saint Luke tells us that the young man was the only son of his mother, and that she was a widow. That one sentence tells us almost everything about her sorrow. She had already known loss. Now the person whose presence may have filled her home with companionship and hope was being carried away.
And Luke says that when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her. He sees the mother before He addresses the dead son. He is not merely interested in displaying a miracle. He sees a person. He sees a broken heart.
Then He says, “Do not weep.” If those words came from an ordinary bystander, they might sound like the empty words we sometimes offer when we do not know how to comfort someone. But Jesus is not telling her to deny her pain. He is about to confront its cause. The same Savior who speaks here will later weep at the tomb of Lazarus. Divine compassion does not shame human tears.
My beloved, perhaps you have prayed for years about something that still hurts. You may be tempted to think, If God loved me, surely this would have changed already. Today, do not measure His nearness only by how quickly circumstances change. Look first at His face in the Gospel. He sees. He cares. He draws near.
2. Jesus Stops What Nobody Else Could Stop
Now we come to the moment that gives this sermon its title: Jesus interrupts a funeral. He walks toward the procession and touches the open coffin. Those carrying it stand still. Then He speaks directly to the young man: “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And the one who was dead sits up and begins to speak.
Think of that moment. The funeral had a destination. Everyone knew where they were going. Every step seemed to confirm that nothing could be changed. But when the funeral meets Jesus, the procession stops. Death has met someone it cannot command.
Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in his Commentary on Luke, Homily 36, asks why Jesus touched the bier when His word alone was sufficient. Cyril explains that the holy flesh of Christ is life-giving because it is truly the flesh of the divine Word. What a profound mystery: God did not save us from far away. The Son of God took our humanity, entered our mortality, and made His own flesh the instrument of life.
But we must also be careful about what this miracle promises. If you have stood beside the coffin of someone you loved, this Gospel does not mean that you failed to pray enough because your funeral did not stop. It does not mean that Christ loved the widow of Nain more than He loves you. In this sign, Jesus reveals who He is and points us toward a greater victory, His own Cross and Resurrection. The young man of Nain was restored to earthly life; Christ rose into a life over which death has no dominion.
The Lord did not come simply to postpone every death. He came to destroy death’s final claim upon us. That is why Christians can mourn honestly and yet mourn with hope. The grave is real. Separation hurts. But the grave is not our final home, because Christ Himself has entered it and risen victorious.
3. Jesus Gives Back Life, and Teaches Us to Live It
Saint Luke gives us one more tender detail. After the young man sat up and spoke, Jesus presented him to his mother. This miracle is not only about a body restored to life. It is about a mother and son restored to one another. Christ’s power is personal. His love reaches into a home, into a relationship, into the particular sorrow of this woman.
This brings to mind something our beloved Fr. Bishoy Kamel taught in his book How to Live the Resurrection, كيف نعيش في القيامة, published in English as Resurrection and Me. He reminds us that the resurrection is not only an event we await at the end of time. By the grace of the risen Christ, we begin to live a new life now. He points to Saint Peter: the disciple who once denied the Lord in fear later stood with courage and witnessed to Him. The risen Christ did not merely give Peter a new task; He renewed the man himself.
What about us? We may be breathing, working, and attending church, yet something inside has become cold. Perhaps prayer has become mechanical. Perhaps we have stopped believing that we can repent. Perhaps resentment has settled in our heart and we call it normal. Christ does not come to humiliate us for our weakness. He comes to call us out of it, to renew us in repentance, in confession, in forgiveness, and in communion with Him.
And yesterday, October thirty-first, we commemorated twenty years since the departure of our beloved mother Tamav Irene, abbess of the Convent of Saint Philopater Mercurius, Abu Seifein. Many of our families remember her love and prayers. But there are two details from her life that speak especially to today’s Gospel.
When the young Fawzia became the nun Irene in 1954, she lay beneath the funeral pall during her monastic consecration. According to her life story, she prayed that she might die to the vanities of the world and belong wholly to Christ. Imagine it: a funeral image, not marking the end of a Christian life, but the beginning of a life offered in love. It points us back to what all of us received in Holy Baptism: to be buried with Christ and to rise with Him into newness of life.
And then consider her later years. For roughly twenty-five years, Tamav Irene endured grave illnesses, including cancer. She received medical treatment. Her body knew pain and weakness. Yet the testimony of her spiritual daughters remembers her prayer, patient love, and thanksgiving amid suffering. In the convent’s account, she understood suffering borne in Christ as a kind of martyrdom without blood.
The same Jesus who raised the widow’s son did not remove every illness from Tamav Irene. She departed to the Lord on October thirty-first, two thousand and six. Did that mean Christ had abandoned her? No. The life of His Resurrection had already borne fruit in her through love, prayer, perseverance, and self-offering. Her witness does not tell us that suffering is easy, or that we should refuse treatment. It tells us that suffering need not separate us from the love of Christ.
And so these two witnesses, Fr. Bishoy Kamel and Tamav Irene, help us hear the Gospel correctly. The miracle at Nain reveals the Lord’s authority over bodily death. The life of repentance reveals the same Lord renewing our hearts today. And the hope of the final resurrection tells us that even when an earthly funeral is not interrupted, death will not have the last word.
Conclusion
My beloved, two processions met at the gate of Nain. One moved toward the grave. The other moved with Jesus. The widow did not know that the Lord of Life was walking toward her, but He saw her before she called to Him.
Today we may have tears that remain. We may be carrying burdens that no one beside us understands. But the Christ of Nain is not a figure who belongs only to the past. He is the crucified and risen Lord, living and present in His Church. He is the One who meets us in His Word, receives us in repentance, and nourishes us with His life-giving Body and precious Blood.
As we approach the Holy Mysteries, let us bring Him our grief without disguising it, and our spiritual weakness without despair. Let us ask Him to make alive what has grown cold in us, to make us compassionate toward those who suffer, and to keep our hearts fixed on the day when He will raise the dead and wipe away every tear.
The funeral was moving toward the grave, but Jesus interrupted it. And because Christ is risen, He will interrupt every funeral on the last day, and our tears will never have the final word.
O Lord Jesus Christ, You who saw the widow of Nain before she called to You, see us today. Receive our grief without disguise and our weakness without despair. Make alive what has grown cold in us, make us compassionate toward those who suffer, and keep our hearts fixed on the day when You will raise the dead and wipe away every tear. Amen.
May the Lord bless us and transform us — that our homes may stand on the Rock, our hands may serve in the harvest, and our hearts may long for Heaven. Through the intercession of our Lady, the Theotokos Saint Mary, and the prayers of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew. Glory be to God forever. Amen.
Prepared and presented by Hegumen Fr. Andrew Awad, D.Min.