Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost. The Gospel of the Lord the Resurrection

Many people were called the saviors of mankind, but when and which of them came up with the idea of saving people from death?

There were many winners in history, but which of them defeated death?

There were many kings on earth who called millions of people their subjects, but which of them and when included the dead as well as the living among their subjects?

No one - except the One and incomparable our Lord Jesus Christ. He is not just a new Man, He is a new world, He is the Creator of a new world. He ploughed the field of the living and the field of the dead alike, and sowed a new seed of life. The dead were like the living to Him, the living like the dead. Death was not the boundary of His Kingdom. He trampled on this border and extended His kingdom back to Adam and Eve and onward to the last man born on earth. He looked at both human life and death differently than any mortal man had ever seen. He looked and saw that life does not end with the death of the body, but that real death kills some people even before their bodily death. He saw many living in tombs and many dead in living bodies. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul, - He said to His apostles (Matt. 10:28) This means that with the death of the body does not come the death of the soul; the latter can occur from and because of mortal sins, before or after, regardless of the occurrence of bodily death.

With His spiritual gaze, our Lord Jesus Christ tore through time like the lightning of a cloud, and before Him appeared the living souls of both those who died long ago and those who had not yet been born. The prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision a field full of dead bones, and it was impossible to know, until God revealed it to him, whether these bones would live. Son of man! Will these bones live? - the Lord asked him. I said, Lord God! Thou knowest this (Ezekiel 37:3). Christ did not look at dead bones, but at living souls who dwelt and will dwell in these bones. The human body and human bones are only the clothing and instruments of the soul. These garments wear out and disintegrate, like a worn-out garment. But God will renew it and put it back on the souls of those who have fallen asleep.

Christ came to dispel the ancient fear of people, but also to bring a new fear to those who sin. The old fear of men is the fear of bodily death; the new fear must be the fear of spiritual death; and this fear Christ renewed and strengthened. Full of fear of bodily death, people call on the whole world for help; they strengthen their positions in this world, spread in this world; they rob this world in order to ensure the longest possible existence of their body, as long as possible and as little as painful. Insane! - God will say to a materially rich, but spiritually poor person, - this night your soul will be taken from you; Who will get what you have prepared? (Luke 12:20) Thus, the Lord calls the one who fears for his body, but does not fear for his soul, a fool. And again the Lord said: "A man's life does not depend on the abundance of his possessions" (Luke 12:15). What does it depend on? From God, Who by His word quickens the soul, and by the soul the body. By His word, our Lord Jesus Christ resurrected and resurrects sinful souls, souls that died before the body. And one more thing. He promised to resurrect the dead bodies of dead people. By the forgiveness of sins, by His life-giving teaching, and by His Most Pure Body and Blood, He resurrected and resurrects dead souls. And that at the end of time dead bodies will also be resurrected, He confirmed both by His words and by the deed of the resurrection of some dead people during His sojourn on earth, and by His own resurrection. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The time is coming, and it is now, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and when they have heard, they shall live" (John 5:25). Many inveterate sinners and sinners heard the voice of the Son of God and came to life in their souls. But many of the bodily dead also heard the voice of the Son of God and rose again to life. One of such cases is described in today's Gospel reading.

In the time of it, Jesus went to a city called Nain; and many of his disciples and a multitude of the people went with him. This was soon after the miraculous healing of the servant of the Roman centurion in Capernaum. Hastening to do as much good as possible and thereby show a wondrous example to all His faithful, the Lord set out from Capernaum past Mount Tabor. Here, beyond this mountain and on the slope of Hermon, even today is the village of Nain, which was once a walled city. The Lord was accompanied by a huge crowd of disciples and people. All of them had seen the many miracles of Christ in Capernaum, but all were full of desire to see and hear more. For nothing like the miracles of Christ had ever been seen or heard in Israel until then, and His words were like rivers of honey and milk.

When He approached the city gates, they were carrying out the dead, the only son of the mother, and she was a widow; and many people went with her from the city. As soon as the Lord and His companions reached the city gates, the people accompanying the dead came out of the city to meet them. And so the Lord and the slave, the Giver of Life and death met. The deceased was young, as indicated by the word of the young man with whom Christ addressed him, as well as by the fact that the Savior gave him to his mother after the resurrection. Obviously, the mother of the deceased was from a rather rich and noble house, as evidenced by the number of participants in the funeral procession: and many people went with her from the city.

Seeing her, the Lord had compassion on her and said to her, "Weep not." It was for the mother's sake that such a large crowd of attendants had gathered, firstly, because she was of a noble house, and secondly, because of the heavy blow inflicted on her by the loss of her only son. Surely all present must have felt great pity for her, which was intensified by her desperate sobs and lamentations. For, although we all expect sympathy for our sorrow, when death takes away from us the most precious thing, yet all human sympathy can hardly lessen our grief and suffering. When powerlessness consoles powerlessness, this joy is weak. There is one secret feeling that engulfs everyone around the dead body, a feeling that is rarely admitted: the human shame of death. People are not only afraid of death, they are also ashamed of it. This shame proves even more convincingly than fear that death is a consequence of human sin. Just as a sick person is ashamed to show his secret wound to the doctor, so all conscientious people are ashamed to show their mortality. The shame of death proves our immortal origin and our destiny for immortality. And animals hide when they die; As if they, too, feel ashamed of their mortality. And what a shame this is for highly enlightened spiritual people! How will all our shouting and noise, all the vanity, all the honor and glory help in the hour when we feel that the meager vessel in which our life dwelt is being broken? We are ashamed both for the fragility of this vessel and for the insane vanity with which we have filled this vessel throughout our life. Why conceal it: we are ashamed of the stench with which we have filled the vessel of our body, and which after our death will flow not only to earth, but also to heaven? For our spiritual content gives either fragrance or stench to both the soul and the human body, according to the one who filled his spirit with something during earthly life - the fragrance of heaven or the stench of sin.

Our Lord Jesus Christ took pity on the despairing people. He often felt pity for human weakness. Seeing the crowds of people, He had compassion on them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep without a shepherd (Matt. 9:36). When the sheep see the shepherd, they are neither exhausted nor scattered. If all people were constantly having the Living God before their eyes, they would not be exhausted or scattered. But some see God, others seek Him in order to see Him, others do not see Him at all, and still others mock those who see Him and who seek Him. That is why people are exhausted, and that is why they are scattered, that is, everyone becomes his own pastor and everyone goes his own way. If people had even half the fear of the omnipresence of God as they experience at the thought of death, they would not be afraid of death; Oh, and what's more, the world wouldn't even know about death! - In this case, the Lord took special pity on the poor mother and said to her: do not weep. He looked into her soul and read everything that was there. Her husband died, and she felt lonely; Now her only son had died, and she felt completely alone. And where is the Living God? Can anyone be alone in the presence of God? And can there be a friend closer to a true man than God? Is God not closer to us than father and mother, than brothers and sisters, than sons and daughters? He gives us relatives, and He takes them away, but He does not depart from us, nor does His eye grow old over us, nor does His love for us change. All the blows of death are calculated so that we cling as closely as possible to our God, the Living God.

Do not cry, - the Lord comforts the grieving mother. This is said by the One Who does not think, as many of us do, that the soul of a dead youth descended into the grave before the body, He Who knows where the soul of the dead is; rather, He Who holds this soul in His power. And we comfort those who mourn with the same words: "Do not weep!" - although our heart is filled with weeping. But we feel powerless to offer the mourners anything other than these words and our pity. So much has the power of death surpassed our strength that we swarm in its shadow like insects; And when we bury the dead in the ground, we always feel that we are burying a part of ourselves in the grave darkness of death. The Lord says to a woman: do not weep – not to show that one should not weep at all over the dead. Behold, and He wept over the dead Lazarus (John 11:35); and he wept beforehand over many who were to suffer later at the fall of Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), and, finally, he praised those who mourned, calling them blessed, for they would be comforted (Matthew 5:4)! Nothing humbles and purifies a person as much as weeping. In the Orthodox method of salvation, crying is considered one of the main means of cleansing the soul, heart and mind. We must weep not only for the dead, but also for the living, and first of all for ourselves, as the Lord advised the women of Jerusalem: "Weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children" (Luke 23:28). But there is a difference between crying and crying. The Apostle Paul exhorts the Thessalonians not to grieve like others who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:13), that is, like pagans or atheists, for they grieve for the dead as if they were completely lost. Christians, on the other hand, should grieve for the deceased not as lost, but as for a sinner, which is why their sorrow should always be combined with prayer to God, may God forgive the sins of the deceased and may He lead him by His mercy into the Kingdom of Heaven. Because of their sins, Christians should grieve and weep over themselves, and the more, the better; not, however, as having no faith and hope, but, on the contrary, precisely because they have faith in the Living God and hope in God's mercy and eternal life.

But if weeping is so useful, in the Christian sense, why then does the Lord say to the mother of the deceased youth: do not cry? Here again a completely different case. This woman wept as if she had no hope; And, besides, she wept not for the sins of her son, nor for her own sins, but for the bodily loss of her child, wept for his imaginary destruction and for parting with him forever. Meanwhile, the Son of God, the Lord of the living and the dead, was present. In His presence there was no need to weep, just as in His presence there was no need to fast. When the Pharisees blamed the Lord for not fasting as John's disciples did, the Lord answered: "Can you make the sons of the bridal chamber fast when the bridegroom is with them" (Luke 5:33-34)? In the same way, should anyone weep in the presence of the Giver of Life, in Whose kingdom there are no dead, but all are alive? But the contrite widow knows neither Christ nor the power of God. She grieves for her only son without any hope, as did all the rest of the Jews and Greeks at that time, who either had no faith in the resurrection of the dead, or had lost it. The merciful Lord took pity on her insane anguish from ignorance and said to her: "Do not weep." He does not say this to her in the sense in which many say today not to cry for those who mourn for their departed, that is, in the sense: "Do not cry, you will not bring him back with tears! So it is destined! Such is the disappointing consolation which we give to others, but which does not console us when we hear it from others. This is not what Christ means when He says to a woman: do not weep. He means, "Weep not, for I am here! But I am the shepherd of all sheep, and not one sheep can hide from Me, lest I know where they are. Your son did not die as you think, but only his soul was separated from his body. I have power over his soul and body alike. And because of your sorrow from ignorance and unbelief, as well as because of the ignorance and unbelief of all those around you, I will reunite the soul of the young man with his body and restore him to life again, not so much for his own sake as for the sake of you and this people. That all may believe that the Living God watches over men, and that I am He who was to come as the Messiah and Saviour of the world." This is the meaning that Christ puts into His words when He says to His mother: "Do not weep." And having spoken these words, He got down to business.

And approaching, he touched the bed; Those who carried it stopped, and He said, "Young man! I tell you, get up! Touching the dead or his belongings was considered desecration among the Jews and was forbidden. This prohibition was reasonable as long as God was honored in Israel and human life was valued above all else on earth. But when true worship of God, as well as respect for human life, decreased, then many commandments, including this one, turned into superstitions and crept into the first places, pushing aside the main commandments of God. This was the case, for example, with carnal circumcision and the keeping of the Sabbath. The spirit of these commandments was completely lost, and instead of the spirit there remained the deification of the form, or letter, of the commandments. Christ restored spirit and life to these commandments, but the hearts of the people's elders, the guardians of God's law, were so darkened and hardened that they wanted to kill Christ because He healed the sick on the Sabbath (John 5:16)! The Sabbath was more important to them than man and even more important than the Son of God Himself. But the Lord did not pay attention to the malice of the elders; He continued to emphasize at every opportunity that the life and salvation of the human soul are more important than the old mortified traditions and customs. He deliberately wanted to emphasize this in this case, contrary to the law, touching the bed on which the dead man was carried. But the miracle of the resurrection performed by the Lord on this occasion was so astounding that the powerless Jewish elders did not dare to open their mouths to pronounce their sentence.