📖 Sunday: Luke 7:11–16
October 19, 2025 — Osaka Church
✝ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit ✝
Jesus is the Savior. The prophet Isaiah prophesied that the coming Savior would be “a man of sorrows, who knows our grief and has borne our sorrows.” True to that prophecy, Jesus is the one sent by God into this world who knows our sorrows.
Approximately two thousand years ago, near the gates of the town of Nain, a grieving woman accompanied a coffin. She was a widow whose only son—the last light of her life—had died after her husband. As she followed the funeral procession, head bowed and staggering with grief, Jesus, passing by, was moved with deep compassion.
The original word translated as “deep compassion” means “a deep feeling, as though one’s very insides are shaken.” The sorrow of “the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief” is not mild sympathy, but a pain so intense it twists the heart—a grief so powerful that the body itself trembles.
This is not the kind of “sympathy” that looks at a poor soul and says, “Oh, how sad,” while quickly turning to another topic.
Nor is it the self-dramatized lament: “How tragic human existence is!”
Nor is it the raised-fist cry of the so-called “champions of justice”: “Does the government truly understand the grief of the bereaved?”
No—Jesus’ sorrow, His compassion, is not like that.
The whole mind and body of Jesus are seized and shaken by the sorrow of this woman before Him. His sadness is not about the “tragedy of human existence” or the “deep sickness of humanity,” though He surely knows them both. But standing before this widow, it is different. It is nothing abstract. It is a sorrow so personal, so piercing, that words fail: “Oh, you poor woman!”—a sorrow so deep that it feels as though His very insides are being torn apart.
This grief is one with the grief of each and every person to whom it is directed. It is the sorrow of the One who embraces my own sorrow while weeping with me. It is the same sorrow we have known with our entire being—a sorrow that returns and freezes the soul each time we remember it. It is the sorrow we can hardly bear to face, the one we lock away in the darkest room of our hearts lest it destroy us—and yet, His sorrow is one with that very sorrow.
Here there are not two figures—a pitiful woman below and a compassionate Savior above.
In the next moment, Jesus touches the coffin and says to the woman, “Do not weep.” Then He commands the body, “Young man, I say to you, arise!”—and her only son rises to life.
But today, I would like us not to focus first on the greatness of this miracle of resurrection, but rather to be struck by the immeasurable, almost mad love of God—the burning compassion of the One who is God Himself, made flesh, and who pities us so deeply.
Each of us lives by the love of this One who knows our sorrow.
Even now, He is pierced with “gut-wrenching compassion” for this very me living here and now. He never turns His eyes away, but shares the sorrow of each one of us as His own.
Therefore, our sorrow—though still sorrow—is no longer sorrow.
For this is the One who has triumphed over the utmost tragedy of humanity—death itself—and has risen again.