Luke 7:11-17

When the widow in Luke 7 sees her son revived, she isn’t thinking about biology.

My friend Laura Kelly Fanucci, a blogger and writer, recently lost her twin baby girls. She wrote a blog post about the experience, and then a follow-up as she continues to process her grief.

In Luke’s Gospel, many of Jesus’ encounters with people are described in terms of whether or not they have faith. Yet this week’s story of the widow of Nain stands in contrast: the person in need never asks for help.

I have neither given or received, nor have I tolerated others' use of unauthorized aid. At the university where I teach part time, students write this honor code statement on every exam, essay and homework submission. It is up to the instructor to identify what constitutes authorized aid for each assignment or exam.

When Luke set out to write his “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us,” there seems to have been no concept of unauthorized aid.

The Bible is full of strange things—oil cruets and flour containers that never become empty and young bodies that are restored to life at a word from Jesus. Are we supposed to believe that these things happened? Maybe the ancient peoples did, but we moderns suffer under the curse of Bultmann’s lightbulb: we know why the light switches on. We are cursed by rationalities that prevent us from seeing the Bible as one overarching story in which our own lives play a key role.