Contemplating the sin and shame and death that tars us would do us good. But when you do, make sure you rise up afterwards, and turn your face to the heavens and cry tears of quick delight as you remember that God in Christ is for you. How do you know? Because he shut the dragon’s mouth, he bore the burdens we can’t set down after prising them from our grip, he made himself a spectacle of shame so we could be honoured as royalty. Because God loves you, and he wants you, and he has come to get you.

At the height of the pandemic, I was invited by one of my best friends to preach at his church in Manchester, which of course meant via Zoom from my living room.

This collided with the height of our house renovations—we had a labourer in to strip the old plaster off the halls, stairs and landing, and then plasterers in to board and skim. We do our own plastering, but we want to be precariously perched on a ladder halfway up the stairs about as much as the average tradesperson does.

Because they’re a law unto themselves, the plasterers announced on the Saturday that they would be back on Sunday morning to do some more. I carefully explained that I was preaching that morning, hoping to dissuade them, but they just assured me they would be quiet when we needed them to be.

So that’s how on the morning before the church meeting started, I was in the kitchen with the kettle on making everyone a drink and chatting with one of the plasterers about what church was like. We’d been talking earlier in the week—he was Irish, and it emerged he was a lapsed Roman Catholic who had walked away from the church long ago. He was deeply curious about faith, and this morning asked what I was going to be speaking about, so I told him the story from the gospels (Luke 7) that I was preaching from that day.

Jesus encounters a funeral procession outside of a small town. There’s a widow, who is accompanied by the town to bury her only son. Her beloved child is dead, and with his death her livelihood and hope for the future has gone. She has nothing left, no one to care for her. She is bereft.

Jesus stops the procession, comforts the mother and then reaches out to touch the bier his body is placed on. This is a taboo act, you don’t willingly touch the dead—the death transfers to you, spiritually speaking. Which is, by the by, the logic behind the Old Testament food laws, though I didn’t explain that to the plasterer.

He was rapt listening to the story. I’m a good storyteller, but this was a bare bones narration in the kitchen while I stirred a mug of tea for him to drink, the story was doing its own work.

Then we come to the climax. Jesus looks at the young man, who he is not afraid to touch, and says “get up.” In a beautifully understated line in Luke’s narration,

And the dead man sat up

The plasterer looked at me, eyes wide, and viscerally expressed his surprise in a way I will not repeat in print.

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