“Jesus began to weep” says our Gospel reading this morning. Or, as the old King
James version of the Bible simply puts it, “Jesus
wept”. It’s famous for being the shortest verse in the Bible, and yet
there’s a whole world of meaning - and a whole world of questions – packed into
it. .
“Jesus wept.”
But why is Jesus weeping?
What is he weeping for? On one level it’s obvious. His friend Lazarus has died.
But when we look at the whole story Jesus’ tears are a bit more puzzling.
A few days before, somewhere
on the other side of the River Jordan, Jesus had received a message to say that
his friend Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, was ill. His disciples
expected him to rush to his side and heal him, but Jesus didn’t go. For two
days he waited. Then, all of a sudden he announced that they were going to
Lazarus after all. But by the time they got there, it was too late. Lazarus was
dead. Lazarus’ sisters were as baffled and distressed. “If you had been here, my
brother would not have died” said Mary. It looks to them and to the other
disciples as if he is playing games with their brother’s life. What right has
he to weep? And if he knows Lazarus is going to be raised, why not just get on
with it? Why stand around crying?
Tears are strange things.
Some people cry at the drop of a hat, others hardly ever, but generally
speaking, people can’t cry to order. Tears come when they come. They are a sign
of real , deep, genuine emotion, that is too important to be able to stifle. We
cry because we can’t not cry.
Why does Jesus weep in this
story? For the same reason, it seems to me. He weeps because he can’t not
weep, and his tears reveal what is going on in his heart, just as ours do. They
remind us that he is fully human, fully part of the world into which he has
been born. As the opening of John’s Gospel tells us, in Jesus “the Word became
Flesh and dwelt among us”. Jesus came to be right where we are, in the middle
of our stories, in the muddle and mess of the present moment, not in some shiny
future where everything has been resolved.
Stories are great. People
love them. And part of the reason for that is that they have a beginning,
middle and end. There is a definite conclusion. The princess finds her prince.
The murderer is unmasked. The mysteries are revealed and the loose ends are
tied up in some way or another. We can shut the book with a sigh of relief and
move on – we literally have closure, if you like. The stories of our own lives aren’t like that,
though, because we are in the tale, and it won’t be fully told until we have
taken our last breath, and it will be others who will read it. We don’t know
what’s going to happen next. We live in the middle of the story.
A Chinese folktale tells of a
farmer whose horse ran away. “What bad
luck! “, said his neighbours. “I
don’t know if it is bad or good,” said the farmer. “Time will tell.”
The next day the runaway
horse came back, with a wild horse it had found wandering in the countryside. “What good luck!” said the farmer’s
neighbours. “I don’t know if it is good
luck, or bad” said the farmer, time will tell, “ answered the farmer.
The next day the farmer’s son
decided to try to tame the wild mare. But she threw him and stepped on his
legs, breaking them badly” O what bad
luck after all!” said the neighbours, “ I
don’t know if it is bad luck or good”, said the farmer once again, with a
sad sigh, “time will tell.”
Not long afterwards, the
country was forced into war by a cruel emperor, who conscripted all the able
bodied young men, but the farmer’s son, still suffering from his injuries was
left behind when all the others were marched off. The neighbours turned to the
farmer and said “What good luck that your
son is able to remain behind.” But
the farmer shook his head and said once more “I don’t know if it is good luck, or bad. Time alone will tell”. The
traditional ending to this tale is “This
is a story without an end. Take from it what you will, my friend.”
It’s a rather unsatisfactory
tale, because it breaks that rule that stories need a conclusion, but that’s
the point. In real life, we never get to the conclusion. To be honest, I’m not
sure I‘ve ever met anyone with the sort of detachment that farmer had, and I
certainly don’t achieve it myself, but that Is also the point – we know how
hard it is to look beyond the present moment – it is the only thing that is
real. The past has gone, the future hasn’t arrived. As human beings, we live in
the “now”, and we often judge how are lives are going by how that present
moment feels. If all is going well, we assume it will continue to do so. If
life is tough, we find it hard to imagine that it can change. We are convinced
that nothing will ever be good again.
When Jesus weeps in this
story, it seems to me that his tears recognise and honour that present moment,
and allow us to be there. Yes, Lazarus will be raised, but right now he is
stuck in the tomb, lifeless, gone, just as so many of those we love are. Yes,
Martha and Mary will rejoice, but right now they are devastated, bitter,
baffled, angry, desperately missing him, just as we do when our loved ones die.
To Martha and Mary this agonising moment of grief may as well be eternal. They
don’t know, can’t know, that it will pass. They weep, and Jesus weeps with
them. Where they are, he is too. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. He
is present in our “now”, in the moment which we have to live in, whatever that moment
is like.
This week, eleven people’s
lives were taken away from them in a moment when a gunman burst into the Tree
of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. A day or so ago, nine Coptic Christians were
killed by another gunman in a church in Egypt. We don’t know how such hatred
can be healed, and even if we did, we couldn’t take away the sorrow of those
bereaved families. Jesus weeps.
This week, millions of people
in Yemen are facing starvation because other, more powerful nations are
fighting their own proxy battles on their soil. We don’t know how that
situation can be resolved. Jesus weeps.
This week, I know that people
in our own community are struggling with personal crises – illness, bereavement,
family problems – which seem as if they will have no end. No one can know when
or how those things will be resolved. Jesus weeps.
Sometimes that’s all we can
say, and all we need to say, that Jesus weeps. Sometimes there is no choice but
to sit in the darkness. But Jesus’s tears tell us that he is willing to sit in
the darkness with us for as long as it takes. Sometimes that’s all we can hear
and all we need to hear. If that’s where you are today, that may be enough.
But while we are sitting
there in the darkness, maybe it’s worth taking in a little of what our other
readings say too, because they were also written for people who were in the
darkness, in the middle of their own, very difficult and painful stories.
Exiled by the Romans on the
dry, dusty island of Patmos, an early Christian leader called John worries and
weeps for the congregations he has had to leave behind. They face the same
persecution as him. What will happen? How will they cope? God doesn’t wave a
magic wand and make the Roman Empire disappear – maybe that wouldn’t be the
answer anyway - but he does give John a vision to share with his churches, a
promise that the time will come when they will weep no more. Their tears will
be wiped away. It might be this side of death or beyond it, but this current
suffering is not the end of the story, the whole of the story. The end is in
God’s hands, not the hands of Rome.
In the first reading we
heard, from the book of Wisdom, people were also going through struggle and
pain. It was written a couple of hundred years before the time of Jesus. Israel
was under the thumb of Greek rulers. Many had died for their faith. Were their
deaths in vain? Was it all a waste? It must have looked as if it was. No, says
this writer. “The souls of the righteous
are in the hand of God…In the eyes of the foolish they seem to have died, and
their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be
their destruction, but they are at peace.”
What we see now is not all
there is to be seen. We can’t force or hurry our way through to the end of our
stories. We have to be where we are – that’s what it means to be human - but
God is with us in this moment, and in every moment that comes after it. The
beginning, middle and end of the story are in his hands, not ours, not the
worlds. That’s what these writers discovered, in the midst of suffering and
fear at least as appalling as anything we will experience. This message is
their gift to us.
Today is All Saints' Sunday,
when we remember the “great cloud of witnesses” as the Bible describes them, people
like those who wrote these Bible passages, people who have dared to believe that
though they might be defeated, God is not defeated, that though they might die,
God is not dead.
Saints aren’t superheroes, people
with special powers to endure times of trouble. They are just people who, stuck
in the middle, like us all, sitting in the darkness weeping, as we all
sometimes must, heard Christ weeping alongside them, and knew that if he wept
with them, suffered with them, even died with them, there could also be the
possibility that they would rise with him, live with him, rejoice with him too.
That was enough for them, and it can be enough for us too id we will take it to
heart and ponder it. So whether you are sitting in the darkness, or shining
with light today, Christ is with you, weeping or rejoicing.
Amen
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