Title: Fear and Praise of God
Fear and praise to God
Today's text is a report about an event that occurred while Jesus was entering a village called Nain. The disciples and many others followed Jesus. When they reached the village entrance, they met a funeral procession coming out of the village. You can imagine the scene. Jesus and his companions entering the village met a funeral procession coming out of the village to go to the cemetery. The bonus is in front, followed by the residents and mourners. Such general funeral processions are common. The funeral in today's text was special. The dead man was a young man. Moreover, this young man was the only son of a widow. There is no more tragic situation than this, when a woman who lost her husband and had hoped for her only son lost her son. Although the biblical writer does not describe this woman's psychological state and ends with a very brief factual report, we can read the minds of the widow and those who attended her funeral procession. Despair and sadness that no words could comfort them covered them like dark clouds in the rainy season.
Don't cry!
When Jesus saw the widow following her son's bounty, he felt compassion and said, "Do not weep." and comforted you. don't cry Where the hell is this word? People should cry when they are sad. Also, is this woman's sadness normal? It is said that sending a child first is humiliation, that is, excruciating pain. Moreover, this woman has lost her husband, so no words can comfort her. The only way to survive this situation is to weep.
<Please Say One Word> is a book written by novelist Wan-Seo Park after the loss of her son. In my memory, Mr. Park Wan-seo also lost her son, who received residency training, in a car accident not long after losing her husband to an illness. He said he was in great pain. There was nothing in my daily life that I could get my hands on properly. It is said that after several months of entering the convent, he barely came to his senses.
Jesus' words not to weep are not just words of comfort. If it was meant to only comfort you from the heart, I would have let you cry. The saying not to cry already presupposes a situation in which you should not cry. There is only one situation. It is the rebirth of a dead only son.
Jesus touched the bonus. According to the law, coffins with corpses were unclean and could not be touched. Jesus didn't care about that. The bonuses stopped walking, thinking it was strange for a strange man to touch the bonus. Jesus commanded the dead body: “Young man, get up.” It is said that the dead young man jumped up and sat down and began to speak.
Your thoughts in this scene will be very complex. Some of you may wonder if this could actually happen. Or, yes, that's it, some of you may be proud of that, only Jesus can raise the dead. We only think in terms of whether what the Bible reports is scientifically true or not. Such thinking is not very important to reading the Bible. What the Bible is talking about is neither physics nor magic. The Bible testifies of God's salvation event. In particular, the Gospels testify of God's saving reign and saving acts that took place in Jesus.
You may think that resurrecting the dead is not God's act of salvation. Yes that's right. The ancients thought so. Because there is no greater event than the fact that you died and rose again. But in fact, many other ancient texts also tell stories of bringing the dead back to life. Even the Jews have a lot of such traditions. Today's text is mainly connected with the tradition of Elijah and Elisha.
Elijah is portrayed as one of the most powerful supernatural powers in Israel's history. There are numerous supernatural events associated with Elijah, including the story of the fire on Mount Carmel, the text of last week's sermon. 1 Kings 17:17-24 tells the story of Elijah raising the dead only son of a widow living in Sarepda. 2 Kings 4:18-37 tells the story of Elisha, a disciple of Elijah, raising the only son of a woman living in Shunem. Although these three stories are slightly different, the basic theological concept is the same. All three stories are set in the extreme sadness of women. In ancient times, for a woman to lose her only son is the same as losing her whole. God's salvation came to them in the midst of a terrible tragedy that this world could not endure. The dead son was revived.
You're probably still wondering how great it would be if that happened. You don't know how many children and young people die every day. Have you ever been to a pediatric cancer ward? Wouldn't it be great if you could bring these dead children back to life? But these things don't happen. No one can die and come back to life. Sometimes there are rumors that he died and then came back to life. Some even go to heaven when they die and write a book about what they saw. Such rumors are not very reliable. They're not really dead, they're just falling into a coma and coming out of it, or having a vision. This is because death is an absolute event that cannot return to the real life.
The Bible clearly says that the dead young man has come back to life, so you might be wondering why it says that it cannot happen. You may be thinking, are you a non-Bible believer, or are you a deist who does not acknowledge special intervention from God? no. I believe the Bible as it is. The Bible is the living Word of God. But I think you need to know what the Bible is all about. For example, it is not wise to believe as a fact the saying, “You will not do any harm if you hold a snake or drink poison” (Mark 16:18). We need to know and believe what this story tells us that the son of a widow in Nain died and met Jesus on the way to the cemetery and was raised to life. Faith is not believing unconditionally, but believing rightly is faith. This is unavoidable, not because we doubt the Bible, but because the Bible contains the worldview of the ancients.
The church is not a seminary classroom, but I guess I have to explain this issue a little bit more now that it has been said. Two thousand years ago, the ancients thought of this world as a three-layered structure: heaven, earth, and the underworld. They could not even dream that the earth orbited the sun. I had no medical knowledge. All malignant skin diseases were thought to be leprosy, and all such difficult diseases were attributed to human sin. It was difficult to tell exactly whether a person was momentarily fainted or really dead. Even a generation ago, such things were common in Korea. I thought the child was dead because I stopped breathing, so I pushed it up to send it to the crematorium at dawn, but in the morning it came back to life.
Some scholars explain that the young man in today's text is not actually dead, but Jesus found it and brought it back to life after people thought that he was dead. That's not to say it's not entirely possible. Even so, it is clear that the young man who had no choice but to die was brought back to life through Jesus, and the widow, who had fallen into utter suffering, also gained life through this. We must read the Bible on the premise that the ancients had no choice but to experience God's saving action in their own way. It is similar to how young children experience this world through their child's worldview.
fear and praise
What the biblical writer really wants to tell his readers is the reaction of those who have experienced this event. The Bible says that the resurrected young man began to speak, but it does not explain what he said, nor does it explain whether the mother who was handed her son thanked Jesus. Because the biblical writer is not interested in them. Verse 16 says that those who had gathered there were overcome with fear and praised God. The content of the praise is, “A great prophet has appeared among us” or “God has visited his people.” It is a song of comfort with the praise of the Messiah.
Earlier, I said that the text event is connected with the events of Elijah and Elisha in the Old Testament. Elijah is especially important. Elijah is a man who ascended into heaven without dying and is known as the One who will come before the Messiah comes. What do you mean? People again experience Elijah's supernatural charisma right in Jesus. He experienced the fact that God's salvation and reign had just happened to Jesus.
People were afraid of it. Those who have experienced the fact that God is actually with them cannot help but fear. You might think that the experience of God is a joy. The joy is later. Fear comes before joy. Moses was afraid, and so was Isaiah. Even Peter was afraid when he realized that he was a sinner before the call of Jesus. There are those who will say that they jumped up and down because they realized God's love and loved it so much. Running is second. Anyone who has ever tasted God's love is afraid. Do you know why? Because we cannot fathom its depth. That's right. God is deep. His love is too deep for us to fathom. His saving works are too deep for us to predict. We cannot help but be afraid.
Anyone who can get a glimpse into the depths of God's created world will feel this fear. Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. For a very long time, there was no life on Earth. The first traces of life are 3.5 billion years ago. It is said that about 3 billion years later, 542 million years ago, living things large and small appeared on Earth like a sudden explosion. This period is called the Cambrian, and it is the beginning of the Paleozoic. After many years, including the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic, it was only 3 million years ago, at the end of the Cenozoic, that the ape Homo erectus, the ancestor of humans, appeared. I'm not talking about geology and biology that I'm not familiar with right now. I'm just telling you that I'm afraid in front of such a huge time. It is not the fear, but the distant feeling in the face of the mystery of the creation event.
The fear of the people in today's text was similar. When we think about how God's saving works can happen in a person named Jesus, we cannot be without fear. If he doesn't feel fear, he's either an idiot or a lazy and irresponsible person who doesn't think deeply about what God's saving works are. Which one are you?
This fear leads to praise. This is the fundamental difference between the fear of this world and the fear of faith. Only in the fear of God's existence and his rule can we praise God. You can sing the gospel hymns because you are happy alone, but it is a song you sing out of your own joy. There is a difference between a song sung by human emotions and a song sung out of fear of God's redemptive reign. In the previous song, the self becomes the center, but in the second song, the self becomes infinitely smaller. In the former, my joy and my happiness are sung; in the latter, the exaltation and power of God are sung. It's not just the lyrics, it's the song itself. To recap, in the former, a person's emotions are heightened, but in the latter, it is suppressed and spirituality is enriched.
That's right. The people in today's text praised the appearance of the 'great prophet'. Jesus is a great prophet like Elijah. But this is just one example that people at the time could understand. Jesus was not one of those prophets. He is Christ. He is the God who “discovered his people.” God came as a man. He is Jesus. If we believe in this Jesus, God will acknowledge us as righteous. So how can we not praise God!