March 29, Lent 5; When Jesus Wept

Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45

“Unbind him, let him go.” Mic drop. That’s it. No “Hello, Lazarus, dearest friend, and welcome back!” No joy, no laughter, no embracing. Does Jesus just turn away? “Look, I did it, what else do you want? You think I did this for me? Don’t you know how soon I’ll be losing him again?”

This story is the last of our Lenten dramas by St. John. It’s in three acts. You didn’t hear the third act because it was left off by the lectionary. The third act is the denouement, the aftereffect. It takes place in a council chamber in Jerusalem, where the Judean leaders decide they must get Jesus killed. The third act is crucial to the larger story, but we we’ll not get into that today.

Act One takes place outside of Judea, where Jesus is keeping safe with his disciples, across the border of the Jordan River. Act One sets up the issues that the second act develops. I won’t say more about Act One.

Act Two takes place four days later, back in Judea, near Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. It has three scenes: the Martha scene, the Mary scene, and the Lazarus scene. With each scene St. John gathers more characters on stage.

First, Martha meets Jesus, on the road outside of town, with his disciples in the background.

Second, Mary meets Jesus, at the same spot, plus the crowd of mourners right behind her, and the disciples.

Third, the whole lot go the tomb, and the last to make his entrance is the dead man, at the command of Jesus. Then, “Unbind him,” and the dead man comes alive. Lazarus, born again.

The three scenes are in tension. Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Belief, grief, relief. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Positive, negative, resolution. Discussion, emotion, release. The unbinding is less a triumph than a letting go. It’s not for jubilation but for vindication, for demonstration. Yes, it’s a miracle, it’s a wonder, but it’s only a sign, because Lazarus will die again someday. It’s a sign to demonstrate what Jesus says to Martha, and to vindicate what Martha says to Jesus.

The conversation of Martha and Jesus is the thesis. It goes: Martha, Jesus, Martha, Jesus, Martha. So, Martha: “If you’d been here.” Jesus: “He’ll rise again.” Martha: “I know he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 

Mind you, she did not mean the Christian vision of resurrection but the resurrection that the Judeans believed in. It’s not in the Torah. It got started with Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones. That prophecy was intended as metaphorical, for the revival of the Judean nation after the catastrophe of Babylon. But in the six centuries following it came to be taken more literally—that at the end of time, God would raise up every Jew who had ever lived, to live a second time around, this time with the blessed kind of life that God had always promised them. And it was for Jews.

Jesus answers her and changes it. He makes it universal, and for the present, not the end of time, and he makes it a claim about himself. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believe in me, though they die, they’ll live, and will never die. Do you believe this?” Martha confirms what he says in her own way: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” 

Well, Martha, there’s a faith-claim, the strongest one so far in John’s Gospel. Only Thomas will make one stronger, and only after Jesus’ resurrection. And to vindicate what she says and to demonstrate what he says is why Jesus uses the sign of Lazarus. The strong claims of the two of them are the thesis.

And just as strong is the antithesis, the Mary scene. From the positive to the negative, from the belief to the grief. I think that when Jesus weeps it is the strongest moment in the whole story, even stronger than the miracle. I assume that’s by design, by St. John’s dramatic and theological design.

When Jesus wept, a falling tear
in mercy flowed beyond all bound.
When Jesus groaned a trembling fear
seized all the guilty world around.

This past week was the week of weeping. The previous week we were frantically adjusting—making plans, changing plans, taking stock, stocking up, getting ready. But last week you started crying. When you had to let employees go. When you got laid off. When you felt your isolation, when you felt how much you would be losing. Now, stuck at home, your feelings hit you and you wept. We have not yet wept for a death in our congregation, but we all have lots for us to grieve about.

And in our grief is anger too, which is often true of grief. An anger we can’t pin down. Notice that Our Lord was angry too. Twice it says that Jesus was “disturbed” and “greatly troubled.” Disturbed is putting it mildly. The Greek word has heat in it—groaning and growling. What is Jesus angry at? The whole situation. The power of death in the world. The resistance of unbelief. The mendacity of the leadership. How this situation is putting his own life at risk. He growls in his grief.

You hear people say that the weeping of Jesus shows how fully human he was. Okay, if that corrects our tendency to underplay his humanity when defending his divinity. But honestly, I think that gets it exactly wrong. I think it’s showing something about his divinity. St. John is telling us that God weeps. Indeed, it’s partly so that God could weep that God became incarnate. In Jesus God is one with us in all our grief and suffering. It was the grief of God when Jesus wept.

God grieves our mortal weaknesses and illnesses, even when they’re natural and morally neutral. This virus is just a weird form of life that is trying to maintain itself, as every life-form does. And as usual, God does not intervene. As Jesus let his best friend die. God does not intervene and yet God loves us and suffers with us, and God grieves our natural suffering, when Jesus wept.

But the anger in God’s grief is over the more grievous suffering that results from unbelief and sin. God grieves our violence and dehumanization, our pollution and desertification, our wanton destruction and our destruction of God’s image in us. This too God grieves, when Jesus wept.

And Jesus weeps for himself and his own death. He knows the price that he must pay, that the sign of Lazarus will be the death of him. He growls and groans for what he will lose, like his friendship with Lazarus. That’s why the mic drop, and why at the climax he turns away. To gain his friend he’ll lose it all, when he gets killed. His miracle of life does not cancel death, nor soften it. Where Jesus shines his light is in the valley of the shadow of death. The sign of Lazarus does not ameliorate our suffering nor soften death, rather it stands up in the midst of death and dramatically against it, and the mic drop is the angry NO of God to the proud pretensions of death in the world. For now.

But the mic drop is not the very last thing in Act Two. The last thing is that “many of the Judeans who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.” That’s why he did all this—and he said so, that the crowd could believe that his Father in heaven had sent him, and that if Martha believed, she would see the glory of God. He did this demonstration and vindication that you too might believe, even you who are looking at your computer screens, even in this strange Lent enforced on us.

Who of us knew what we’d be giving up this Lent? That I’d be giving up my last Easter service in the sanctuary? That we’d be giving up Holy Communion, and the pipe organ? That you’d be giving up your social life, and employment, and income and security? Some of you have had to give up far more than I have, during this unexpectedly grievous Lent.

I have no good news to tell you about this pandemic. My good news is for your belief. My news is that your grief and anger are not the denial of your belief, but your proof of it. That your losses and your fear of greater loss are not the negation of your belief, but your reason for it. That this Lent enforced on you is not the repudiation of your Easter faith but your preparation for it. And that you can believe this kind of news is why you are watching your computer screens right now.

When Jesus wept, the crowd said, See how much he loved him. That is why God grieves and why God groans. Not because God is powerless, but because God is love, and God so loves the world. You are watching right now because you believe this and you want reminding of your belief, that in this trial of the world your belief in the love of God is what sustains you in your hope for the world.

Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.