The raising of Tabitha

The raising of Tabitha
a sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Sunday 11 May 2025

Acts 9:36-end and John 10:22-30

There’s a story that the late Pope Francis was once crossing St Peter’s Square when he was stopped by a group of pilgrims from Argentina. They offered him a cup of mate, a traditional South American caffeine-rich, infused herbal drink, and he drank it.  The Swiss Guards were furious.  But when they told him he could have been poisoned, he said: “There’s no need to worry. They were pilgrims, not cardinals”.

This week has witnessed the election of a new pope.  Conclaves are the stuff of novels and intrigue; a secret process to choose Pope Francis’ successor in one of the most politically and spiritually consequential roles on Earth was bound to invite speculation.  It was bound to provoke our imagination as to the process behind the closed doors of the Vatican, and the motivations of the 133 cardinals involved in this all too human process of determining God’s representative on earth.

Robert Harris, the author of Conclave, the novel and Oscar-winning film, in an interview earlier this week likened the conclave to the TV show The Traitors, with everyone suddenly swinging towards one person, but you don’t why – and so, often, as happened in this case with the American Pope Leo, a surprise is produced.

Interestingly, for Harris, the process challenges our idea that democracy is the most effective process for appointing a leader.  UK political parties throwing the election of their leaders open to the wider membership hasn’t gone very well, he argued.  But having a select number who know the candidates and understand the skills and qualities needed to do the job well, to discern and pray, and lock the door and not come out until they’ve come up with a result has, on the whole, he suggested, produced pretty good results.

A remaining problem, though, is the lack of female voices involved in the process, the exclusion of women from the Catholic priesthood so visibly out of kilter with modern day society.  “Can any sophisticated religion, with such a huge following, really go on and on into the future with such a secondary, demeaning role for women?” he asks.  “I mean, it just seems odd.  Would Christ really have only wanted his word to be spread by men?”  (BBC News interview, 4 May 2025).

Our New Testament reading this morning makes clear that the good news of the resurrection, is for all people, women as well as men.  Tabitha, her name in Aramaic, or Dorcas, as she was known, in Greek, is described as a mathetria, the only instance of the feminine form of the Greek word for “disciple” in the New Testament.  This unusual fact gives us a clue as to this lesser well-known New Testament character’s unique status.  The deep regard and esteem with which she was held in the community at Joppa (or Jaffa, in modern day Israel) reflects the wide impact and scale of her work heading up a welfare programme among the poor.  She was, we’re told, “devoted to good works and acts of charity”.

Widows, by definition, were poor, on the bottom rung of society, without anyone to represent them or protect them.  Yet Tabitha gives to these lowly and despised people the gift of life. Their coats and garments are tangible evidence of her highly effective ministry in this new Christian community, where no one stays in their allotted place in society.  This female disciple stands outside the accustomed order of things. And when she dies, the people are devastated.

The widows in this story are not concerned with questions of theology.  They’re not interested in the consolations of the possibility of a better world someday.  They’re too poor, too consumed with the need to get by one day at a time for such speculation.  With Tabitha gone, how will they survive?  As the New Testament scholar Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza has written, “in the first century – as today – the majority of the poor and starving were women, especially those women who had no male agencies that might have enabled them to share in the wealth of a patriarchal system”.  When, with news of Tabitha’s death, Peter is summoned immediately by the rest of the disciples and raises her to new life, her restoration is not just a revival, but a returning of a much loved- and much mourned- minister to the community.

Tabitha’s story is full of joy and hope. It’s very similar to other biblical stories of people being raised – by Elijah (1 Kings 17) and Elisha (2 Kings 4) in the books of Kings, or Jesus’s raising of the son of the widow of Nain, and later, Jairus’s daughter, in Luke’s Gospel.  Like the prophets of old, the apostles bring power to bear on behalf of the poor.  Lacking the power of the world, silver and gold, the new community has only one resource – the word, the name of Jesus, which transforms all structures and arrangements, changing them from structures of death into structures of life.

Pope Leo has been quoted as saying that our vocation as Christians is to convey “the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus”, before anything we say about doctrines.  The resurrection disrupts the established pattern of things.  The first Easter transforms the world; it shakes things up, and like the surprise election of a new pope we weren’t expecting, it surprises us.  Death, it turns out, is not the end of the story after all.

So often we live as if we are still dead. When faced with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the stories coming out of the Trump administration, we find ourselves tempted to turn off.  We stop engaging. Maybe like me, you turn away from news and listen to Radio 3 instead of Radio 4, because the news is so depressing. Apparently, this has a name: “news avoidance”, a phenomenon that seems to combine a long-term decline in seeking news with the intensity of current events.  The proportion of people in this country who say they have a high interest in news has almost halved over the last ten years, from 70% in 2015 to 38% last year, according to the News Agency Reuters.

The election of Pope Leo brings the hope of a new counterbalance to this: a champion of the poor and of the workers, and of treating migrants with compassion, a person who builds bridges. We rightly expect a lot of our leaders.  We hope that they will speak truth to power.  Yet facing the problems of the world, as well as those in our own lives, is still our responsibility.  As citizens of a democratic society, informing ourselves and standing up for what we believe in, engaging and sharing our views, is important. Caring about what is happening to ourselves and others, both those we know and those we don’t, is part of our Christian vocation. Our calling may not be that of popes, to stand on the world’s stage.  It’s more about being present and staying true to who we are: resurrection people, people of hope, even in this life’s darkest places.

We do this with prayer, through the gifts we have of listening, of being a good friend, of sharing our lives and vulnerability with others.  Tabitha is brought to life by the touch of Peter, another human being, whose hand to lift her up symbolises the presence of God.  Today’s Gospel speaks of “eternal life” not just as a future certainty, but as a something that is already bountifully present; even now, death cannot quench the life that Jesus gives and embodies.  The raising of Tabitha is there to show us that evil will not prevail.  Like her, may we be brought to life by the presence of God.  Like Tabitha, may we hear our name and get up and engage with the world around us, so that none may snatch us from the hand of God.