Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Widow of Nain
Luke 7:11-17
11 Soon afterwards, he went to a city called Nain. Many of his disciples, along with a great multitude, went with him. · WEB
Two crowds meet at a town gate, one going to a burial — and nobody has asked him for anything.
Soon afterwards, he went to a city called Nain Luke 7:11.
Only this Gospel records it, and the arrangement of the scene is worth seeing before anything else. Two processions converge at a gate. One is coming out — a funeral, with the body and many people of the city behind it. The other is going in, with disciples and a great multitude. Life and death meet in a gateway, and one of them gives way.
One who was dead was carried out, the only born son of his mother, and she was a widow Luke 7:12.
Every word of that is doing work. An only son. A woman already widowed. In that society a woman's security ran through her husband and then through her sons, and this funeral is the end of hers — she is burying her child and her livelihood in the same procession. She has no one left to speak for her, which is why nobody speaks for her here.
When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Don't cry" Luke 7:13.
This is the first time the account calls him the Lord in narration, and it uses the title at the moment he does this. And the movement of the sentence is the point: he saw her. Not the corpse, not the crowd. The whole miracle begins with a man noticing a woman in a crowd of mourners where she was the least conspicuous person present.
No one asked. In every other raising in the Gospels somebody begs — a father, a pair of sisters. Here there is no request, no statement of faith, and nothing said about her belief before or after. The account is deliberately clear that this happened because he saw her and was moved.
Don't cry is a thing people say at funerals and it is usually useless. It is not useless here.
He came near and touched the coffin, and the bearers stood still Luke 7:14. He touches the bier, which made a person unclean Numbers 19:11 — the third time in three chapters he has crossed a line of contamination rather than kept it. And the small human detail is that the bearers stop. Somebody has put a hand on the stretcher, and a funeral halts because it has to.
"Young man, I tell you, arise!" He addresses the dead man directly, in the second person, as though he were there to be spoken to.
He who was dead sat up and began to speak. Then he gave him to his mother Luke 7:15.
The last clause is the one that should be read slowly. He does not present the young man to the crowd or use him as evidence. He gives him back to his mother — the same words used when Elijah brought a widow's son down from the upper room 1 Kings 17:23, in a story about another widow, another only son, and another prophet who was sent to a foreigner. He had preached on that very episode in Nazareth Luke 4:25–26.
"A great prophet has arisen among us!" and "God has visited his people!" Luke 7:16. The crowd reaches for the highest category it has, and it reaches for the word Zechariah sang in chapter one Luke 1:68 — visited, God coming to do something about it. They are more right than they know, and not yet right enough.
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