Luke 7:13

ὁ κύριος. “The Lord” is far more frequent as a title of Jesus in St Luke (Luke 10:1; Luke 11:39; Luke 12:42; Luke 17:5-6; Luke 19:8; Luke 22:61) than in the other Evangelists except St John. The fact is a sign of the spread of Christian faith. Even though St Luke’s Gospel may not have been published more than a year or two after St Matthew’s, yet St Luke belongs, so to speak, to a later generation of disciples.

ἐσπλαγχνίσθη. Jesus, who was always touched by the sight of human agony (Mark 7:34; Mark 8:12), seems to have felt a peculiar compassion for the anguish of bereavement (John 11:33-37). The fact that this youth was “the only son of his mother, and she a widow” would convey to Jewish notions a deeper sorrow than it even does to ours, for they regarded childlessness as a special calamity, and the loss of offspring as a direct punishment for sin (Jeremiah 6:26; Zechariah 12:10; Amos 8:10).

μὴ κλαῖε. ‘Be not weeping,’ i.e. ‘dry thy tears.’ The consolation, as Bengel says, involved the promise of the miracle. The hypothesis that this was a case of suspended animation might have served to explain a single instance. It becomes utterly absurd when applied to five or six similar miracles in the New Testament. The only choice lies between belief in a fact and repudiation of a deliberately invented falsehood. Comp. Luke 7:22; Matthew 11:5.