Don’t worry. You’re going to die.

Sermon for Trinity 16

Ephesians 3:13-21  +  Luke 7:11-17

In last week’s Gospel, the Lord Christ taught us very patiently not to worry. In today’s Gospel, He teaches the same thing, except in a much more striking way. Last week, He taught us to look at the birds and how our heavenly Father provides for them. This week, He teaches us to look at the dead man being carried out of the city of Nain in a casket and how He, the Lord Jesus, took care of the problem. Don’t worry, He says. You’re going to die. But it’ll be all right in the end.

You’re going to die. Everyone is. For as much as people want to avoid it, deny it, or prevent it, no one can. Not for long, at least. Oh, they frantically take their precautions and treat anyone they view as a threat to their health as a villain who needs to be removed from society. But Moses says it plainly and truly: The days of our life are seventy years; or eighty, if we have the strength. Yet their boast is only toil and sorrow. For it passes swiftly, and we fly away. Now, some make it a little past eighty, but many don’t even make it to seventy.

Take the young man in today’s Gospel, the young man of Nain. Death came for him sooner than it does for most people. We may call it tragic. We may also call it tragic that he was his mother’s only son. And we may also call it tragic that she had already dealt with death; we’re told she was a widow. Her husband had already died, so that she was now left husbandless, childless, and destitute. So much tragedy and sadness!

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be a happy world, a world filled with laughter and life, a world without sickness or death, where family members were never separated from one another by death or by anything else. That’s the world God intended. That’s the world God created. That’s the world God blessed.

But you know where death came from. You know whom to blame, and it isn’t God. It’s, first, the devil, who wanted to see his Creator’s creation suffer, who tempted Eve to do the one thing that God had already told them would surely bring death on the human race. But she did it anyway. And so it’s also her fault. And Adam’s fault. And the fault of every child of theirs who has sinned, and that’s everyone—except for One. Our culture hates to admit that death is what we all deserve and the wages we’re all going to get, and so it will go to any lengths to pass the blame on to someone else. But no one can change the fact: Death comes for all of us. You’re going to die.

And so it was that death came to the young man from the city of Nain. He wasn’t the first young man to be taken too early, and he won’t be the last. Death continues its nearly perfect record of victory over the human race. But on this one occasion, for the very first time (at least, the first time recorded in the Gospels), death encountered its Destroyer in the Person of Jesus.

Jesus saw the grieving mother and went up to her and comforted her. Do not weep. Why not weep? Because Jesus had come. And death was about to be undone.

He touched the casket, and the procession halted. He spoke to the dead man, Young man, I say to you, arise! And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.

It wasn’t the permanent ending of death’s march against our race. That young man would eventually die again. His mother would die. All the people of Nain would die. All the people of the world have died or are dying, quickly or slowly. It wasn’t the end of death that day. But it was a foretaste of death’s ultimate defeat.

Death is defeated in two ways. Jesus describes them both in John 5. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in Himself, so He has granted the Son to have life in Himself.

We all begin life dead already, spiritually dead in our trespasses. But the time is coming and now is when the Gospel of Christ goes out, Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved! And where the Spirit works faith, that person passes from death to life, to life so real and so strong that even death can’t interrupt it, as Jesus says in John 11: I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.

That’s our first consolation when we face death. For the believer, death has already been defeated. There is no death, only the temporary sleep of the body in the grave. The soul is safe with God, and very much alive, no longer fighting, no longer wrestling with the devil, the world, or the flesh, but resting in the true peace of Paradise. That is no small comfort.

But there is more. Jesus goes on in John 5, Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation. That’s what we get a taste of in today’s Gospel, the actual raising of dead bodies when the voice of Jesus speaks over their graves. For those who died in unbelief, who rejected Jesus the Life-Giver, it won’t be a resurrection to life, but to condemnation. But for those who died in faith, it will be a much better life.

This is what gives believers strength to face a hostile world and a future in the world that may often appear bleak. You’re going to die, and you know it. You’ll die of COVID. You’ll die of cancer. You’ll die of stroke or heart failure or old age. You’ll die from cold. You’ll die from heat. You’ll die from an accident. You’ll die from foul play. And yet, nothing the world throws at us can interfere with the life that Jesus now gives, or with the life that He will give at the resurrection. No disease, no accident, no tyrannical oppression, no amount of hatred, no amount of danger can change the fact that Jesus has conquered death by His own resurrection from the dead, after making payment for sins of the world with His own death. Nothing can change or overturn Jesus’ promise to deliver His baptized believer from every evil of body and soul. As St. Paul writes, Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

For now, it’s OK to weep when death wins yet another battle. But don’t weep as the world does, without faith and without hope, without knowing that you, united with Christ in Holy Baptism, have already won the war. The same Lord who approached the grieving widow mother approaches each grieving child of God in Word and Sacrament, to comfort and to heal and to assure you that death is about to be entirely undone. Yes, you’re going to die. But don’t worry. You’re also not going to die. You’re going to live, because God has taken this horrible thing called death and has made it work together for good to those who love Him. If you remember that now and cling to Christ continually, then you truly have nothing to worry about. Amen.