I. Note the mournful occasion which called forth this miracle: a widowed mother following the corpse of her only son.
II. Observe the sympathy which was shown for the widow's affliction. "Much people of the city was with her."
III. Our Saviour addressed the broken-hearted mother in words of comfort.
IV. The same Divine Lord who wrought this miracle shall hereafter awaken not one but all the dead, and restore all who have fallen asleep in Him to the beloved who have mourned their loss.
J. N. Norton, Golden Truths,p. 405.
"He delivered him to his mother." That is the Saviour's one comment in act on His miracle. Life has many purposes. Death has many secrets. Here was a soul, one among the very few that have recrossed the great gulf, have been in the world of substance, and come back to the world of shadows. What would we give to ask questions of it! But we cannot. "Something sealed the lips" of all concerned in the story. We know not if that momentary glimpse of another life faded as a dream fades when we wake and seem to remember vividly for a moment, and then all vanishes and cannot be recalled. Did life look changed to him? Had temptation lost its power? We might have thought that such a recall from eternity to time would have been the prelude to some great demand on faith and resolution, some great renewal of spirit and life. But our Lord does not say, "You know now what in life is worth anything; sell all that thou hast, and come, follow Me." "He delivered him to his mother." That was the aspect of the young man's life most in the Saviour's thoughts. The son's place was by his mother's side his place of duty, his place of safety. If his life was to be lived again, the first note of its renewal would be truer filial devotion, more complete filial service. Note
I. A mother's love. What else is like it? in its tenderness, its unselfishness, its inexhaustible patience; the love that finds no tasks too humble or too exacting; the love that waits for us, unchanged, even deepened, by the sorrows which strike deepest, by fears, by wrong.
II. A mother's claim. It is a claim which grows more urgent as her need grows sorer; when her burdens are no longer divided; when the greatest desolation that life can bring has fallen upon her; but it is a claim that belongs to her from the first, resting on nature, on God's primal law.
III. A mother's sorrow. Death is not the only one, not perhaps the saddest. Death, the death of the dearest, is not to us, if we are Christians, what it was even to the widow of Nain in that hour of desolation. There is to us light and love behind the veil. But a mother may lose a boy in another way, and one in which it is harder to gain trust and peace. Her son is going a way that she cannot follow him, a way that never meets again the way he has left.
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 181.
References: Luke 7:15. R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons,2nd series, p. 205.Luke 7:17; Luke 7:18. C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons Chiefly Practical,p. 89. Luke 7:17-19. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 293; Luke 7:18-23. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xii., p. 286; Ibid.,vol. xiv., p. 305.Luke 7:18-24. E. de Pressensé, The Mystery of Suffering,p. 191.Luke 7:19. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 107. Luke 7:19-28. Ibid.vol. i., pp. 128, 211.