“CHRIST THE PROPHET IS RISEN, AND VISITS”
Saint Luke 7: 11-17
16th Sunday After Trinity: 11 September Anno Domini 2016
Father Jay Watson SSP
“ Most of you have lost loved ones. Some of you have buried beloved parents—mothers and fathers. As heartbreaking as it is to lose a parent or sibling, words do not exist to share the pain of burying a child.
Not only can you not serve two masters—you either serve The Lord or you are meat-puppets to Satan—so too you are either in Christ’s parade of Life on the lonely, narrow highway of the Cross, or, you are being carried in a prison-coffin of hell fire where the worm does not die. That parade of death and damnation has all the noise-makers the demons can howl.
The original procession, parade, was the walk that Adam had with God in the garden, in the cool of the day. It was a joyful communion that surpasses our understanding. As the willful and disobedient child tears away its hand from the protecting parent, to run on its own way, where it chooses to go, so too your first parents severed The Lord’s hand and marched to a different path and parade. They kept time to a different voice—a sibilant hissing of cracking bones.
God would not let this carriage of destruction stand. The Lord went with His wayward children…accompanying his rebellious creatures. His parade was one of Peace—the protection of His very own presence. He went with Adam out into the briar infested desert and kept him alive with bread. The bread was also the faith that He gave the man and Eve by the Word of the coming Messias. The Lords long train of tender care continued from generation to generation. He was with Abraham all the way from Ur of the Chaldees to Haran, to Canaan. The same Angel of The Lord, the pre-incarnate Christ, went before and after Moses and the Israelites (the ones as stiff-necked as Adam…and you). For 40 years The Lord led His flock in the parade of life under the cross until He led them across the Jordan waters presaging your own baptisms into His One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. He brought His children to the very gate of the city of His Judea—but they too often bolted from His side and selected the snake. They wandered off after the pied-piper of perdition. Christ marched after them with His Judges, good Kings, Prophets, Priests, and David the penultimate shepherd savior. He led them in a rebirth of new life when He exorcised the tribe of Judah from 70 years of blackness in Babylon. Always God by His Word and the means of Grace—His Word applied through physical instruments—marched with His family toward heaven. He forgave them, and you, all sins. He did that which you are commanded to do and don’t…not any better than the Israelites or the Jews.
And The Lord came from His Trinitarian sharing, loving, and giving essence—from BEFORE creation into the fullness of time. Jesus’ ultimate journey—the Parade of The Prince of Peace and Lord of Light. “And it came to pass the day after, that He went into a city called Nain—Minneapolis, Denver, Topeka, Olathe, Nixa, Chicago, Shawnee, and “the world” which God loved in that way—that The Son became The God/Man veiling His divinity in humility and meekness. Where Jesus went He brought His disciples with Him. Where he goes this day He always brings His own with Him. The dead man was the son of the widow. Those without God are without family—they are all widows, widowers, and orphans. Satan delights in brokenness, dislocation, and aloneness. Jesus Who is God and Man—omnipotent God and perfect sinless Man, walked up to the soon-to-be rotting dead body, and reached out an immaculate holy Hand and touched death—sucked up death—let death bite Him as the poisonous serpent-spawn it is. The Christ over-turned tables in the temple, and His pure enfleshed-Temple over-turned His Levitical codes against touching dead corpses. Or, not so much over-turned, but fulfilled. For Jesus did become “unclean” when He “came and touched the bier.” Every time The Lord touched a person diseased: leper, corpse, mute, blind, bleeding, palsied; or sinful: thief, demoniac, prostitute, traitor—He absorbed that filth and decay.
That’s why He says to you who are aging, aching, suffering, weeping, and missing so deeply your own dead loved ones, “weep not.” He led His parade in its victory march on a donkey, through the streets of sinful Jerusalem, through the black back alleys of your hearts, right to the Crucifix. He touched all the “biers,” caskets, and dead bodies. He touched all the bones, maggots, worms, cancers, birth defects, still-births, strokes, aneurisms, coronaries, diseased and depressed minds, and took them in His wounds and all His indescribable suffering. Christ died the death of the Widow’s son that the young man might be given back to his mother. This points to you being given back to your Holy Mother the Church at your own Baptism when He again touched the font with His Blood and Water. This too points to you being given back to your Holy Mother the Church Victorious on the last day when you will sit up from your own “bier” at the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
This day, the old enemy’s funeral procession is washed down the drain of Hades by the flood of Messias’ Blood. The great Prophet is Here “for you” in His Easter Parade of Eternal Peace and Life. “Weep not,” for His compassion will soon be on your lips and tongues.
In the Name of The Father and of + The Son and of The Holy Ghost
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