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Sunday, August 10, 2008
Jesus Wept.
10th in a series on The Uniqueness of the Gospel of John
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
John 11:1-35
1 A man named Lazarus, who lived in Bethany, became sick. Bethany was the town where Mary and her sister Martha lived. 2 (This Mary was the one who poured the perfume on the Lord's feet and wiped them with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was sick.) 3 The sisters sent Jesus a message: "Lord, your dear friend is sick." 4 When Jesus heard it, he said, "The final result of this sickness will not be the death of Lazarus; this has happened in order to bring glory to God, and it will be the means by which the Son of God will receive glory." 5 Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 Yet when he received the news that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was for two more days. 7 Then he said to the disciples, "Let us go back to Judea." 8 "Teacher," the disciples answered, "just a short time ago the people there wanted to stone you; and are you planning to go back?" 9 Jesus said, "A day has twelve hours, doesn't it? So those who walk in broad daylight do not stumble, for they see the light of this world. 10 But if they walk during the night they stumble, because they have no light." 11 Jesus said this and then added, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I will go and wake him up." 12 The disciples answered, "If he is asleep, Lord, he will get well." 13 Jesus meant that Lazarus had died, but they thought he meant natural sleep. 14 So Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead, 15 but for your sake I am glad that I was not with him, so that you will believe. Let us go to him." 16 Thomas (called the Twin) said to his fellow disciples, "Let us all go along with the Teacher, so that we may die with him!"
17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had been buried four days before. 18 Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, 19 and many Judeans had come to see Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother's death. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed in the house. 21 Martha said to Jesus, "If you had been here, Lord, my brother would not have died! 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask him for." 23 "Your brother will rise to life," Jesus told her. 24 "I know," she replied, "that he will rise to life on the last day." 25 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me will live, even though they die; 26 and those who live and believe in me will never die. Do you believe this?" 27 "Yes, Lord!" she answered. "I do believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who was to come into the world." 28 After Martha said this, she went back and called her sister Mary privately. "The Teacher is here," she told her, "and is asking for you." 29 When Mary heard this, she got up and hurried out to meet him 30 (Jesus had not yet arrived in the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him.) 31 The people who were in the house with Mary comforting her followed her when they saw her get up and hurry out. They thought that she was going to the grave to weep there. 32 Mary arrived where Jesus was, and as soon as she saw him, she fell at his feet. "Lord," she said, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died!"
33 Jesus saw her weeping, and he saw how the people with her were weeping also; his heart was touched, and he was deeply moved. 34 "Where have you buried him?" he asked them.
"Come and see, Lord," they answered. 35 Jesus wept.
The story for today about Lazarus is another one of the detailed, rich stories that appears only in this unique gospel of John. It is so full and rich that we will be taking two Sundays to look at it.
Bethany, where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived, is only two miles from Jerusalem and we visit that site every time we take people to Israel – we will be taking the next pilgrimage to Israel in fall of 2009. There is now a beautiful little church built in Bethany on the site and there is a tomb that people can visit that is the traditional site of Lazarus’ burial.
We have said several times in this summer’s series of sermons on the Gospel of John that John’s gospel is different, it is unique: it gives us some stories of Jesus that we do not have from Matthew, Mark and Luke: the woman brought to Jesus to be condemned, the wedding where Jesus creates 180 gallons of wine, the conversation with the woman at the well in Samaria, the healing of the man at the pool where Jesus asks the man a basic question of whether he wants to get well, to mention a few. John’s gospel also leaves out some stories that are important to us: there is no story of the last supper in the gospel of John. And there is no story in John of Jesus praying all night in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was executed.
John’s gospel gives us more emphasis on Jesus’ divinity than on his humanity. The Christian movement has said for 2000 years that we believe Jesus is human and divine. Many times we lose one of those and favor the other. This gospel tends to emphasize the divine over the human, but today’s story gives us some balance by showing his humanity. Jesus had three friends – they were siblings – who live in Bethany: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Lazarus becomes ill and dies. For some puzzling reasons, Jesus waits a couple of days, but then he goes to be with Mary and Martha, who are angry with him because he did not come sooner, and they are grieving because they have lost a loved one.
When Jesus goes to be with them we see his full humanity. Jesus does not come to their door with some of the platitudes we mouth in the presence of the mystery of death – we feel so awkward we say some things that are not useful, and we will talk about those in a moment. Jesus does not greet them with a mouthful of formulas and clichés. We see his humanity in full in the shortest verse in the entire Bible: Jesus wept.
Can you weep? Can you remember the last time you cried? What was it that touched you? If you have not been able to weep as well as to laugh and to feel other strong emotions, you may have cut yourself off from your own humanity. We men have more trouble giving ourselves permission to weep than women typically do. I can remember a couple of occasions as I was growing up when I saw my father weep – one was at the death of his brother, one was the day he had forgotten his wedding anniversary and my mother surprised him with her anniversary gift and he was so embarrassed and chagrined that he wept.
Can you weep? I hope so because tears give us a healthy release of emotion, and I even recollect some studies of the chemical composition of our tears that say our tears can release some toxic things in our bodies as well as our hearts, so that we can be healthier people. In the presence of death, we usually weep. I worry a bit when we are planning a funeral if there have been no tears.
We tell people at the funerals we conduct that we usually bring a variety of feelings to a memorial or funeral service, including our tears, and our tears can be a sign of our love for each other. God understands how we want to hold on to each other as long as we can because God has created life to be good and precious. Our tears are not a sign of lack of faith in God or in a world to come; our tears are usually a sign of our love.
Jesus wept. Jesus was in grief at the death of his friend Lazarus. Grief is a complicated mixture of feelings; it comes in spasms. It can include anger, regret, fear, loneliness, sadness, guilt, shame, uselessness, railing against God or the health professionals, emotional and physical pain. Grief takes us a while. It is typically two steps forward, one step back. When we lose someone close to us, it leaves a hole in our heart. It does get better with time, but the loss is always with us. To lose a spouse or a child we need a couple of years to be able to work through that loss and begin to get our lives back in some semblance of routine, and we live in a grief-denying culture that typically does not give us enough time to mourn.
I said that we often are so tongue tied when we are with someone who has lost a loved one that we say unhelpful things. Look at what Jesus does here. He does not come to Mary and Martha and say some things that we clumsily say: he does not say, “Don’t cry Mary and Martha –Lazarus is in a better place.” He does not say, “Don’t feel bad Mary and Martha, everything happens for a reason.” Though some might hear some echoes of that, Jesus was not a Calvinist! (Calvinism believes that God causes everything that happens, that whatever happens, it is just God’s will – which was the reason when vaccines were first invented some church leaders opposed them, because they believed disease was God’s will!) In fact Jesus says in Luke’s gospel that everything does not happen for some cosmic reason – that there are accidents, random events. He does act here in a way that confirms Paul’s belief later on in Romans that in everything that happens God is able to work for good. It does not mean that a tragedy is good; it means that God is able even to work with a tragedy to bring good and light and hope. That is what the children’s musical on the Biblical character Joseph told us last week: “What you meant for evil, God turned into something good.”
There are some other phrases we use with grieving persons and families that we should not use. Rabbi Kushner tells in his classic book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, of a person who came to a child whose father had died suddenly and told the child that God needed the child’s father in heaven. Kushner said the child will grow up with a dangerous and destructive image of a God who wanted a child to grow up fatherless. God does not cause people to die. Random things happen, and we are also in control of our health to some degree. God hurts with us when we hurt – I don’t believe God sends the hurt or the grief. Some people do, but that is not the God I see in Jesus.
A couple of other suggestions of what not to say: “I understand what you are going through.” Well, probably not. It is presumptuous. Or, “Everything happens for a reason” – well, maybe not.
Jesus came with none of those formulas and clichés. Jesus wept.
What can we do to help people grieve? We have a pamphlet about that called How to Comfort Those Who Mourn. Be there. Be present. Weep with them if we need to. Listen. Do some practical things like being sure there is food around. Accept their feelings without judging. Let them feel angry with God – God is big enough for that. Look at the psalms for examples of this! Listen with your heart and reflect back. Don’t abandon. Give them time. Grief takes time and our culture wants to rush people through because we are uncomfortable with our own residual grief and sadness. You will have other ideas. What has been most helpful to you when you have been in grief? Send me an email about that and I will do a compilation of those.
Be aware that any new grief, even small ones, will stir up feelings about another, larger loss as well. If you are grieving, be good to yourself, give yourself time. And there may be a time when you may find it helpful to write a letter to the one you have lost and tell about what you feel, what you remember, how you are a different person now.
Jesus wept. And I imagine something else in the story for today – I imagine he put his arms around his friends Mary and Martha and let them weep as well.
Jesus said in another gospel, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” And Jesus said in another place in John’s Gospel, “In this world you will have trouble, but be of good courage for I have overcome this world.” We will look next week at more of the hope Jesus gives to us in the remarkable story of Lazarus.