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‘A’ // Lent 5 // 3-9-08 // Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church
Scripture John 11:1-45
Jesus Wept
Prayer: “The cattle are lowing,/the Baby awakes/But little Lord Jesus,/no crying he makes.”
Gracious God: What is it about us – what is it about our discipleship – and what might it mean for the story, our story, of crucifixion and resurrection if, per one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time, we cannot imagine even the infant Jesus as capable of tears?
May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable unto you, O Lord – our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.
Legendary preacher Ernest Campbell tells the story of the Sunday night youth group of his adolescence where each teen was required to memorize a verse of the Bible by the time he or she arrived for their fellowship.
Once, Campbell said, he was out in the New York City streets delighting in the Sabbath by playing stickball when he and his friends suddenly realized it was time for the group. They rushed into the church and raced down into the basement, all along wondering among themselves what biblical verse they would use.
When one of the adult group leaders began to make the scripture verse rounds, Campbell quickly spoke up – saying, simply, “Jesus wept.”
His group mates shot him several dirty looks. Some – the more thoughtful ones – were upset because they knew he could have done better if he had put his mind to it. His stickball friends were upset because he had stolen what many of them were going to say.1 It’s the shortest verse of our Bible, after all – even after the New Revised Standard Version retranslated it as “Jesus began to weep”: “Jesus … wept.”
That verse might not seem much – much less, have meant much to a forgetful teen struggling to please his elders. But I think it means a lot more than we generally give it credit for meaning.
Standing as we do on the doorstep of Jerusalem, it is good to drink deep of the mercy incarnate in Jesus’ tearful outburst – and the healing that flows from it.
For it seems no accident that Jesus’ tears and Lazarus’ raising occur in the same narrative. How intriguing, that this is the only story we have of Jesus weeping – and it is coupled with the only story we have of Jesus raising someone from the dead after they have been entombed.2 One might say that in this story, on this side of the palms and passion and resurrection of Holy Week, the pendulum swings more wildly between suffering and joy, between crucifixion and resurrection, than in any other story.
And if this pendulum were to achieve a place of equilibrium, I believe we could call this resting place compassion. A word that means “suffer with”. No word I know represents the interplay of crucifixion and resurrection any better.
We social justice-types often fancy ourselves as progressive: trusting in the inevitable progress of God’s kingdom, the long arc of history bending toward justice, and our call to see it worked out in the world. And yet, I wonder if we progressives would do well to ground the naivete of our linear vision in the equilibrium of compassion over which the Lenten pendulum of crucifixion and resurrection so wildly swings.
For it seems we just can’t “do” social justice, waving our best efforts forward and our best petitions skyward, to call forth the Lazaruses of the world from their closeted deaths. It seems our Jerusalem journey calls us first to ground that mandate of resurrected justice in the tears and fears of our common humanity.
Crucifixion … Resurrection: Can they ever exist apart? In our world: Sadly, we try. Yet: in God’s world?
We would do well to hear these words from the great Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran – himself a Christian:
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives? …
Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.3
Inseparable, indeed. As our Prayer of Communal Confession two Sundays past reminded us, “May the dying we dare to see reveal the life we dare to seek.” And that same Sunday in Lent, the lectionary epistle engaged some of my favorite words from the Apostle Paul on this very subject: “ … suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
At the risk of sounding trite: We cannot fly unless we can cry. We cannot take the leap unless we can weep.
And yet: Why should we cry, much less weep, when there are no guarantees we will ever fly, or ever take that leap?
I wonder if, in this triumphal and suffering-resistant new age – where there are only personal souls to tend, and where there are no Lazaruses to raise – we might simply be too afraid to weep with Jesus. Afraid, because we don’t want to wake up one day and find ourselves trapped in our tears – with no place to go.
I was walking through downtown Ann Arbor this week with my agnostic friend Leonard (not his real name) after a pleasant lunch together.
Leonard is fairly new to 12 Step recovery from addiction. His concerns reflect those of many a newcomer on the recovery – read, spiritual – journey. Leonard asked me about those who have been coming to the meetings for years, and who always seem to say the same thing. Those stuck in their shame so deep, that – although they claim sobriety from a particular addiction – life anew seems to elude them. “I don’t want to be hear them,” he moaned. “I’m afraid that’s what I’m going to sound like if I keep attending these darned meetings.”
I had no easy response for Leonard. All I could reply was that many had found a place in recovery groups where they simply belonged. The telling and retelling of their story was their thing. Although these chronically suffering individuals did not ever seem to find access to what are often called the promises of recovery, they had one thing going for them: their ever-present pain seemed to provide them the best way to be present to someone else’s pain.
Perhaps it is important for many of us, in our impatience and our impertinence, not to shame chronic sufferers from their reverie of pathos. We certainly pray for a way to help them find relief – dare we say, with God’s good grace, an avenue of resurrection even. But sometimes the leap is never made – never made, between one line of a beloved old hymn, “Love to the loveless shown”, to the next: “that they might see their loveliness.”
Sometimes, the leap is never made. And we’re afraid of that. Afraid of that because, deep down, we may be afraid of a similar shame – a similar sense of defect in our own souls – that we can never seem to free from the dirt and the mire of it all. And we simply don’t want to be reminded that that place in us still exists. That it … still … lingers.
What can we do … but weep? What can we do … but trust that God is weeping with us? What can we do … but trust that, on the other side of all our tears, a resurrection beyond our wildest imaginings awaits?
So let us be about this journey we trudge with Jesus: the one who taps with us into the deepest places of our failures, who mourns with us in our powerlessness, who takes the time with us to stop and weep – for ourselves, as well as for others. For if we do not stop, look, and weep first, for our failures and for the futility of it all: How can what the world deems as dead possibly be raised by God?
Around this sanctuary – around this table – around our communities – around God’s world: Jesus weeps.
Do you hear him cry?
It’s not too late.
Listen.
1From a sermon given at Massanetta Springs (VA) Conference Center, Bible Conference, August 1981.
2The only other story of Jesus raising someone from the dead can be found in Luke 7:11-17 -- the raising of the recently deceased son of the widow of Nain.
3Khalil Gibran, The Prophet (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), p. 27.
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