Jesus Razes Cain

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Luke 7.11-17

Jeffrey Kripal teaches at Rice University in Texas. A Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, Kripal specializes in what he calls the “superhumanities.” That is to say, Kripal researches the undercurrent of the fantastic throughout the history of the humanistic disciplines. In other words, he gives credence to claims of the miraculous and he works to provide an intellectual framework to make them intelligible. He advocates restoring the anomalous and inexplicable to the heart of academic inquiry.

In his most recent book The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, and New Realities, Kripal begins with a life and death miracle story about one of his students.

He writes:

“James grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family in West Texas. He was pulled from “Satan public school system” so that he could be indoctrinated into absolute truths like creationism. He also experienced excruciating guilt around his emerging sexuality. By the time he was a teenager, James was severely conflicted and emotionally tortured.

He had, in fact, become suicidal.

One night, his parents were out. James decided that he would use the opportunity to kill himself—blow his head off with his dad’s pistol in the gun safe, which was left unlocked that night. That would end it all.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, James found himself falling into a kind of mild trance while he drove around town and, in his own words, “Ouija drove” to the local Barnes & Noble, a business and a building that he had never entered before, since he was not allowed to visit such a “worldly” place. Still, that is where he drove, or his car drove, or something drove. James got out of the car and walked into the bookstore, still very much in an altered state. His body zigzagged through the book stacks, with real direction and real force, as if it somehow knew where it was going. He certainly didn’t.

James, in fact, felt disconnected from himself, “dissociated” most would probably say today, as if that that somehow explains anything at all. Suddenly, he just stopped. He found himself at a section inexplicably marked “Philosophy.” He had no idea what the word meant. Then it happened. As though an unseen hand had reached out and touched it, a book slid from the tight space between two books. It then hung suspended in the air, as if it was being held. Then it fell from in front the shelf, dropped so as to land at his feet.

It was as if the thing jumped right then, for him no less.

When the book hit the floor, James suddenly came back to himself. He reached down and picked it up. The book had a strange title: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. James decided to buy the book that seemed to have sought him out and take it home, perhaps even read a little of it before he ended his miserable life.

So he bought it and drove home, now in a “normal” state (if you can call the intention to kill yourself normal). James sat at home, with the book on one thigh and his dad’s Colt pistol on the other. He read. The book turned out to be “the antidote to a lifetime of poison I hadn’t known I was drinking,” as James put it to me much later. He walked outside into a rainstorm. “I stared up at the stars between the clouds and laughed. A divine laughter, an ecstatic laughter while the rain poured down. It was the greatest moment I had ever experienced. When my sides ached and the rain abated, I walked back inside, dried off and I read the rest of the book.”

But first he put his father’s gun away.

Jesus touched not a funeral bier but a philosophy book.

In doing so, Jesus kept him from death and raised him into a new life.

Earlier this week, I read the story of James in Jeffrey Kripal’s book and I did not feel like laughing in the rain until my sides ached. I did not even want to rejoice for James. Instead— reflexively, resentfully— my heart thought of Jackson Casey, the twelve year old confirmand who hung himself in his bedroom closet fourteen years ago this past April. No invisible hand kept Jackson from taking his life. Jackson is one of more than a dozen children whom I have buried. Because his Grandpa is a four star, we laid Jackson to rest next to his grandmother at Arlington National Cemetery.

No miracle intruded unbidden into the long, slow procession of mourners.

For every James there is a Jackson.

In the Gospel of John, after Jesus encounters in Samaria the woman at the well, he returns to Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Booths. As he enters the city by way of the Sheep Gate, Jesus approaches a pool of water called Bethsaida. Rumor or tradition or faith held that whenever the water of the pool stirred it would heal whoever was in the water of whatever ailment afflicted them. Thus the massive pool of Bethsaida became a magnet for the desperate and a dumping ground for those who no longer wanted to care for them. As John reports, around five roofed pools “lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed.”

Multitude: plethos.

The other time John uses that word is at the Feeding of the Five Thousand. People who cannot see. People cannot move. People who can barely walk. Plethos— that’s a lot of desperate, despairing people who would have had difficulty finding their way into the healing water at just the moment the water began to stir. Frankly, that’s a lot of people who would not have had control over their bowels, a lot of people who would had to rely on others to feed them and clean them.

Perhaps it is easier to smell the scene than it is to visualize it.

Among the multitude is a man who has been there as an invalid for thirty-eight years. He has been trying to get into the water for longer than Jesus has walked the earth.

Jesus sees him.

Jesus sees this man.

Jesus sees this man among the multitude.

“Do you want to be healed?” Jesus asks him.

The sick man does not answer in the affirmative so much as offer an explanation, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

Jesus responds with law that is gospel, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.”

And the man, miraculously, obeys.

But again, remember: the Pool at Bethsaida was littered with a loaves and fishes multitude. When the invalid picks up his mat and walks away, he has to step over scores of the still blind and the still lame and the still paralyzed— the still desperate and despairing.

Just as Jesus had to step over them in order to heal this one man.

The problem with miracles is not simply the fact they contradict a purely materialistic account of reality. The problem with miracles is not merely that it is a challenge to believe in Lazarus in a world shaped by Newton and Darwin. The problem with miracles— especially for believers— is that they grate against our sense of rightness.

Why him and not them?

Why them and not me?

Jesus has just come from Capernaum where a centurion wearing Caesar’s insignia on his chest begged Jesus to heal his dying child. Jesus and the disciples and the great crowd which follows him arrive at the little town of Nain just as a crowd of mourners are leaving the city to lay to rest a widow’s only son. He who is Resurrection and Life collides with the funeral procession. That Jesus reaches the gate just as they bear the boy’s dead body beyond the city suggests Jesus has walked from Capernaum all night.

The name of the town means “pleasantness.”

Where the Roman foot soldier had pleaded for Jesus to heal his child and Jesus in return praised the soldier’s faith, no one in Nain asks Jesus to act. The boy’s mother doesn’t even look up from her path of sorrows. As the church father Cyril of Alexandria comments, “She is stupefied with her misfortune.” Luke layers the loss suffered by the mother of the deceased; she is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.” No one asks Jesus to act, and Jesus makes no mention of anyone’s faith. He simply sees her, Luke reports, and is “moved with compassion.” Literally in the Greek (esplagchniste), God feels her grief like a gut punch. Jesus sees her and he does not pass by on the other side. Taking pity on her, Jesus utters a promise in the form of a command, “Do not weep.”

Before his word works what it says, Jesus approaches the boy’s corpse and touches the bier that bears his dead body. According to the Book of Numbers, death’s defilement was contagious— proximity to a corpse rendered a person ritually unclean for seven days. Not only does Jesus accept the same impurity the pallbearers have assumed, his indestructible life is even more infectious. The power of his divine humanity contaminates the boy’s body through the wooden bier.

With his hand touching him, the Word speaks.

Take note. The dead can yet hear their LORD address them. Death does not remove them from his reach. The dead are no more distant from Jesus than we are to each other. Time is a helix wrapped around Jesus like swaddling clothes. Hence, he issues another gospel command, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” And just as the man with the mat, the boy sat up and began to speak.

“Jesus gave him back to his mother,” Luke writes.

In twenty-five years of ministry, I have officiated hundreds of funerals— close to five hundred. So I know how every funeral reminds you of another funeral. Sometimes it is the singing of “How Great Thou Art.” Often it is the reading from the Gospel of John, “Let not your hearts be troubled…In my Father's house are many rooms.” For some, it is the sign of the cross over the casket and the last fistful of earth cast onto the pall of flowers.

Every death is a fresh reminder of a loss you suffered and still mourn.

I think of Jackson at every funeral I lead.

Luke does not mention it because we do not need Luke to say it. As they bore that boy’s body on the bier beyond town, everyone in Nain was thinking of a loved one in their life whom God did not give back.

In his philosophical work on supernatural events, Jeffrey Kripal argues that the anecdotal nature of miracle stories is not a sufficient reason to dismiss them.

He writes:

“To categorize certain testimonies as “anecdotal” is to argue that they have no broader context and are therefore pure anomalies that can be explained away as local constructions of a single human psyche and so should not concern us as either meaningful or real in the sense that other things are real…No broader context equals unreal. These anomalies are best left ignored, then, as meaningless blips, as statistical flukes, or as neurological hiccups.”

In other words, to the incredulous, the infrequency of the miraculous is a reason to doubt its veracity. For believers, however, the fact that miracles do not evidently happen for everyone is a reason to question God— question not his existence but his purpose. What does the LORD will when he heals one man out of a multitude of desperate people at a pool? What is Jesus up to among us when he pulls that book from the shelf for James? You think that widow was the only person on the prayer list in Pleasantness? What is God doing when— out of all the citizens of Nain— he acts in this woman’s life for her child?

A woman named Sharon worships remotely with the church. She lives in Colorado. I pray for son who is in recovery, and she often sends me notes after listening to the sermon. They have been a blessing to me.

This week she wrote:

“Dear Jason,

It was at First Watch— over bacon and eggs and lukewarm coffee. I was eating breakfast with my son, who has been sober for almost nine months. “Mom, I can’t imagine all the pain I’ve put you through. The rides to detox and rehab, the relapses within hours of being released. I’m sure I don’t know…Is there anything I need to do to make things right with you?”

His amends simultaneously caught me off guard and felt like a miraculous answer to thousands of prayers— petitions uttered in desperation, in doubt, and from a place of deep resentment that God intervened for others.

But not for me.

I thought that was the miracle, my son’s healing that I’ve prayed for in so many sleepless nights. It turns out it’s easy to miss the real miracle God is working.

“You know what my favorite part of making amends is?” my beautiful, brilliant lawyer boy asked.

I waited for his answer.

“It’s that last line in the Big Book about this whole process of setting things right.” His face filled with emotion, his voice got a little shaky, his lips quivered as he fought back tears, “We needn’t wallow in excessive remorse before those we have harmed, because we have already sought forgiveness from our Maker and it has been so generously given.”

Just like that, my son gospeled his prodigal mom.

And that is the miracle.

God’s slow medicine over the years of healing him was also about healing my weathered and worn heart that resented God blessing others while he did not hear and answer my prayers. I’ve gone to enough AA meetings myself to know that people stop drinking every day, and I held on to hope my son would eventually get sick and tired of being sick and tired. But the idea that my boy would know Jesus and be so overwhelmed by his love that he wanted to gospel me? I didn’t even think to pray for that.

And that’s the miracle.

During all those rides to rehab, in the middle of anguished cries for God to save my son, in the utter discouragement of addiction rearing its beastly head again and again, God has been dispensing his extended-release medicine to heal a wound I never even asked him to heal— that tender, long-infected place in the back of heart’s mind that whispers, “No blessing is coming for you.”

It’s easy to miss the miracles God is working. It’s right there at the end of the story— not the one Jesus does for the widow and her dead boy— that’s obvious— but the one Jesus works for all the others in Nain.

Remember, the Great Physician is never not healing. Jesus is always at work and there are no bystanders to his work only recipients. Just so, Jesus is at work in the lives of everyone in the multitude at the pool of Bethsaida. He is at work in every person in that funeral procession at Nain. He is at work in every single one of your lives too!

His touch alone can raise the dead!

Which is to say, Jesus is not God scaled down to a human consciousness. Jesus is God. Jesus is the Infinite Son embodied, which means that as Jesus of Nazareth collides into this funeral procession at Nain, he is simultaneously ruling heaven and earth. Jesus is not limited to one brain or one body; but rather, in that body lives the one who is all in all.

Therefore, Jesus is at work on behalf of this widow upon whom he has compassion. He is at work in an obvious way we cannot miss. But he is also work in another way for everyone processing behind the funeral bier.

Again this is critical:

It is absolutely not the case that God works sometimes but not other times.

Jesus is always working.

And the will behind his work is always for good in everyone’s life.

Jesus gives this mother her boy back. And the entire funeral procession in Nain rejoices. Not one of them respond to resurrection with resentment, “What about my child, Jesus!?” All of them— they all rejoice.

This is no idle detail.

This is the demolition of the sin upon which civilization is founded.

Go back to the garden.

Sin begins with Eve and Adam seizing after what did not belong to them. But sin quickly progresses to Cain who founds creation’s first city. What is Cain’s crime? Cain kills his brother because he resents the blessing his brother receives from the LORD.

Cain is not angry that the LORD did not bless him.

Cain resents that the LORD blesses his brothers.

Cain envies what God does for Abel and so kills him.

“Why didn’t God do that for me!?”

Those are the first words before the first murder.

According to the scriptures, at the center of sin is our inability to rejoice when God blesses someone else. According to the scriptures, the sin of Cain cries out from the dirt, the same dust whence we come. We have ailments other than the ones we put on prayer lists! The sin of Cain is an inextricable part of us. According to the scriptures, at the very heart of what is wrong with the world is that voice that whispers in our heart, “No blessing is coming for you.”

———————

In his book The Superhumanities, Jeffrey Kripal skewers the evasiveness of scholars when the subject of miracles arises.

He gripes:

“I cannot tell you how many times I have heard an otherwise admired colleague say something like, “Well, it does not really matter if St. Teresa of Avila floated off the floor as her sisters piled on top of her to avoid a social embarrassment. What matters is how the popular belief in such presumed levitations was disciplined, controlled, and maintained by the church and later constructed as sanctity…Really? I want to pull my hair out in such moments…A raptured Spanish nun cannot keep herself on the floor in front of some visiting noblemen, and these miraculous physical events do not matter to you? Uh, excuse me, if these things actually happened (and our historical records suggest strongly that they did), such anomalous events change pretty much everything we thought we know about human consciousness and its relationship to physics, gravity, and material reality. Any one of these events would fundamentally change our entire order of knowledge.

AND YOU DON’T CARE!?

Don’t you find that disinterest just a little bit perverse? I do. You are piling on St. Teresa with the nuns, holding her down to avoid a social scandal. Shame on you. Get off the levitating woman. Let her float. Let her fly. Let the real be what it sometimes is— rapturous.”

Not sometimes.

The real is always rapturous.

Because Jesus is never not up to something in our lives.

God is the God of the impossible. Miracles happen. Absolutely, this should reorient your entire perception of the universe. Yes, this should infinitely expand the horizon of your hope. Of course, this should give you permission to pray with a boldness bordering on the ludicrous. But even more important than believing that God works miracles is knowing why he works miracles and how he works them.

It is not the case that God works sometimes but not other times.

God is always at work.

As Thomas Aquinas says, God is pure act. God is always being fully God all the time. It is not the case that God has the potential to be good and at times activates it for us. God is always being God and God is always being good to everyone everywhere.

No exceptions.

Not even for you.

At Nain, Jesus gives the widow her boy back, yes.

But he also creates an occasion for all the others to rejoice over her blessing.

Therefore—

When we see the work of Jesus in the world, when we hear of Jesus bestowing a blessing upon another, when we see Jesus work a miracle for someone else, that is God razing the sin of Cain in you.

When Jesus answers the prayer of someone in your life, that is Jesus simultaneously healing you of the instinct of Cain.

When you witness Jesus work a miracle for a brother or a sister even while you still await your own, that is Jesus at work on you too, silencing Cain’s voice inside of you— the one that whispers resentfully, “Why aren’t you doing this for me?”

There are no unanswered prayers.

There are no blessings withheld.

There are no miracles refused.

There is only the razing of Cain.

Don’t you see?

If God simply granted a miracle every time we prayed for one, then God would be no different than a genie in a bottle and WE WOULD REMAIN NO DIFFERENT THAN CAIN, envious of what we think we are owed.

Jesus rescued a teenager named James in a West Texas Barnes and Noble; so that, in no small part, despite my still acute grief over Jackson Casey, I would have the opportunity to respond, “Thanks be to God!”

Jesus rescued Sharon’s son from addiction; not just for his sake, not just for her sake but for your sake too— to give you the occasion to rejoice over another’s miracle.

And thereby undo the Cain in you.

Jesus resurrects the widow’s son; so that, everyone behind the bier can swallow their own still sore grief and celebrate a sister’s blessing. Jesus is not just reversing the curse of Adam’s sin, he is healing the sin of Adam’s son.

By raising the widow’s child, he’s razing the Cain in everyone at Nain.

They all rejoiced, Luke writes.

Again, it is no idle detail.

Salvation is the opposite of schadenfreude!

When the Father lightens a loved one’s load, when Jesus answers your neighbor’s midnight prayers, when you’re still waiting on the Holy Spirit to deliver for you but he shows up in a mighty way with blessing for another and you clap your hands and stomp your feet and cry out, “Amen! Look what the Lord has done!” that is a miracle.

Rejoicing over another’s blessing.

Joy in a miracle not your own.

Responding to the LORD’s work in the lives around you with words like “Amen!” and “Thanks be to God!” and “I’m so happy for you!”

That is what salvation sounds like.

So come to the table.

But before you taste and see for yourself that the LORD is good, listen. Hear him promise “This is my body given for you” to the brother or sister in front of you. Hear him make that miracle for someone other than you and say, “Amen!”

That’s what your salvation sounds like.

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