Lent 5, 2023

 My grandma Vorderstrasse’s favorite piece of Bible trivia was, what is the shortest verse in the Bible?  Jesus wept, of course.  For those of us who were terrible at memorizing Bible verses, here was one even we could handle. 

            Why did Jesus weep?  Because he loved.  Grief is an expression of love.  This Lent we heard the story of Nicodemus and the favorite verse, “For God so loved the world that God gave the only son, so that we would not perish, but have eternal life.”  Jesus stands at the grave of Lazarus and weeps and the mourners there recognized in that moment how much Jesus loved him.

            Jesus knows the end of the story, that Lazarus will be raised, but still he grieves and mourns, still he weeps.  And we know the end of the story, that we will be raised, that Jesus will redeem this broken world, but still we weep and mourn, and that is completely appropriate, as we see modeled in Jesus emotion and behavior this day.  It wasn’t a little tear that fell that from Jesus’ eye, but he was greatly disturbed in spirit—a sweet beautiful biblical way to say his guts were wrenched.  He full-on wept. 

            In our society, we move too quickly away from grief.  We push death away so many ways.  We have lost the familiarity with death—of generations living together and watching the process of aging, of people dying in the home and the body laid out in the parlor for people to pay their respects.  We don’t know what to say to people who are grieving, especially grieving parents of a child.  And we expect people to move on from grief so quickly.  We might be willing to give someone a year and then it’s time to move on.  In my experience with people who are grieving someone very close that second year can be even more difficult.  Maybe it is because all the shock has worn off, the paperwork is done, and other people have moved on.  Support systems are gone and people expect they themselves will move on, too. It’s a realization of just how long a journey of grief is—forever, which is also an acknowledgment of just how deep that love goes.

            Jesus knows the end of the story and yet he weeps because of his love for Lazarus.  We weep too even though we trust in God and know the end of the story.  We weep because we’re not at the end yet.  We’re in the middle of the story.  For Jesus that meant maybe regret that he wasn’t with his friends in their time of most urgent need and pain.  Maybe he wept because of what Lazarus went through, his suffering and pain as he came to death.  Maybe he wept because of the blame of Mary and Martha, maybe because of their pain.  And maybe he wept for the fragility of life, that in a moment everything could change and did change.

            Even though Lazarus was raised, his life did change.  If we think everything went back to the way it was before, no.  Lazarus became, like Jesus, a wanted man.  He was evidence of Jesus’ power.  I don’t know if he went into hiding, or if after Jesus was crucified the authorities lost interest in him, but his life was changed.  He had been to the other side.  He had known suffering and he had known peace.  He and his sisters knew the feeling of losing one another and that would certainly have changed their relationship.  Did Lazarus’ sisters try to protect him more after that?  Did they treasure each day more and more?  How did Lazarus approach his second death?  Was it with dread?  Was it with peace?  How did he and his sisters prepare differently for his second death than his first?  How did his death and resurrection affect their other relationships?  Were other people afraid of him after that?  Were they expecting him to be someone different or someone unchanged?  Did Mary and Martha and Lazarus respond differently to other people’s grief after that? 

            In case we hesitate to cry, Jesus gives us his example.  Crying is so human.  It feels so primitive to give ourselves over to emotion like that.  It feels uncontrolled.  And that’s ok.  God gave us crying to express love, as Jesus and Martha and Mary and the crowd today.  God gives us crying to express need.  Crying is the first thing we do after we’re born.  I remember anticipating that cry at the birth of my son, to know he had a healthy set of lungs.  That cry in that case is a sign that all is well.  Then crying begins to alert us to attend to a baby’s needs, a child’s needs.  Different cries mean different things and parents can learn to interpret their child’s cries.  So when we cry as adults, it is an outward sign of an inner reality, that we are hurting, that we have deep love within us.  It is a signal for us to gather together and support each other. 

I always say that church is the best place to cry.  We have tissues in the pews to be ready for that emotion.  I love that just when Jesus was crying and at his most human, he was most divine.  Even as he used his power to raise Lazarus from the dead, he also experienced profound sadness and grief.  This is a moment when Jesus’ true nature is revealed to us.  Crying is not the opposite of Godly, but it is in the nature of God to weep and when we do, we express something holy.

I remember the first time I saw my dad cry.  I was 14 years old.  He received some terrible news on the phone, called my mom home from ceramics class and told me that my best friend had died.  She had a heart condition.  It was a turning point in my relationship with my dad.  For the first time I saw that he loved me.  He wept because he cared about me.  After that he treated me with much more compassion.  He treated me tenderly.  Weeping can bring us together, if we let it.  I’ve seen it at many funerals—families coming together who had been divided, to mourn and support each other and weep together.

            On this day we learn that Jesus is weeping with us.  He could have avoided this scene all together, but Jesus goes to all the difficult places with his friends, which he counts us among.  He goes with us in our sorrow and grief.  He knows pain, sorrow, and tears, and he doesn’t run the other way.  Jesus knows the end of the story, but he knows we’re not there yet, and so we cry and Jesus cries with us.  We love and Jesus loves with us.

            Jesus doesn’t weep to make us feel bad or to accuse anyone.  He weeps because the world he lives in does not match God’s vision and he weeps because this world hurts.  Hurt happens to cause us to stop and take note and to prevent that hurt from happening again, it is an opportunity to ask ourselves what is our vision of how this world might be, could be?  What can we do to help bring this world more in line with our vision, with God’s vision?  How can we help people who are hurting?  How can we prevent them from hurting more?  And when we can’t prevent the hurt, how can we uphold one another and be divinely human together in our time of pain.

            Today we might want to rush past the grief, but we are invited to stay in the grief and the hurt and weep with Jesus.  Jesus weeps for the nations of this world at war and all the waste of human life in war.  Jesus weeps for our planet, this good creation made to be fruitful and multiply and yet being abused and exploited.  Jesus weeps for all those who are sick and suffering, for all who are stressed, for all who are hungry and homeless, cold and incarcerated and lonely.  Jesus weeps for all who have died and for all who are grieving.  He knows the depth of our pain and it wrenches his guts.

Today Jesus weeps—he hurts—he loves.  And he is willing to give his life that this world would be transformed.  He is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice so that we would weep and have compassion, so that this world would be changed, so that we would get fed up with the hurt and change this world for those who need it most to change.