HOMILY: "Love Weeps" (Lent 4)

A Meditation on John 11

Sunday, March 10, 2024

1.

Weeping for Jerusalem

In just two short weeks, anticipating what will become a procession of palms and his own version of first century civil disobedience, Jesus will pause on a hillside overlooking Jerusalem. And there he will weep over the holy city, the city whose very name means City of Peace. The city whose reason for being is to bear the promise of inclusion and communion and justice.

And on that hillside, reflecting on his life, his world, maybe even human history itself—Jesus will weep over Jerusalem. And he will say: “Would that you, even now, might know the things that make for peace!” “Would that you, even now, might know the things that make for peace!” Jesus will feel all this violence in his bones, in the very marrow of his bones. He will grieve the militarism of empires, the calculated violence of nations, the hatred and venom unleashed in conflicts festering in human communities. And he will weep.

After last night’s offering of “The Armed Man,” I spoke with several singers who told me that there’s a point in the piece—when rage overcomes human decency, when violence roars in the lyric and music—where their own tears overwhelm even the director’s instructions and they just can’t sing. For a measure or two. For a heartbeat or two or three. We’re talking about Hiroshima and Auschwitz and Vietnam. We’re talking about genocidal wars and human pride turned demonic destruction. And I’m moved by each of you, by each of those singers, and by your Christ-like weeping, and your Christ-like humanity, and your Christ-like tenderness. Your tears, I might add, are the salty seeds of a world healed, a planet reconciled, a human community redeemed not by AR 15s and weaponized drones and atomic bombs—but by love. By love and hope and your own tears.

2.

Unbinding Lazarus

And, of course, in this morning’s story—this long and involved story from the Gospel of John—Mary and Martha are grieving for Lazarus, their brother, their beloved brother.  And their friends, their community has gathered around them, come to them with love and support.  And they’re all grieving together, weeping for the one they’ve lost, leaning into one another with love, and hanging onto one another through waves of sadness and the kind of pain that rolls through the human spirit like a tsunami.  And Jesus—who strangely delays—comes to them at last.  And there’s a special relationship here, between Jesus and Mary and Martha and Lazarus; they were particularly close, especially dear to one another.  So when he sees Mary coming, and when he hears her brokenhearted voice, and her despair for what might have been—Jesus weeps.  Again, for a life lost.  Again, for the circle broken.  Again, for a friend in distress.  Jesus weeps.

  

Early on, in this Lenten season, we talked about giving up fear for Lent.  Instead of chocolate or TV.  Giving up fear for Lent.  Maybe the flip side of that is taking up grief—allowing oneself to weep, allowing our grief to roll like waves through our bodies, through our voices, across our communities.  Maybe it’s our weeping that reveals the passion of God for life, and the love of Jesus for all peoples and all children and all kinds of communities and nations and human hearts.  Maybe it’s our weeping that will open fissures in our spirits through which new light can shine and new hope can break forth.  Give up fear for lent.  But let every tear flow freely.

Now it’s interesting about today’s story.  When you read the Gospel of John—the whole of it, or (really) any one piece of it—you are struck by how very different it is, how odd it is, and how wildly it wanders from the language and pacing of the other three New Testament gospels.  Matthew, Mark and Luke.  

Matthew, Mark and Luke are beautiful texts, to be sure.  But they move more quickly.  And they focus on Jesus’ deliberate movements, across Palestinian landscapes, in and out of human communities—welcoming and feeding, healing and teaching.  In one moment he’s confronting shameful purity codes, and in the next he’s upending oppressive systems of debt and judgment.  His teaching seems to have a clear purpose.  

But often the Gospel of John raises questions that are hard to answer.  Often it lingers around wonder and delight.  Even celebrates bewilderment and confusion. And throughout, the Gospel of John cautions against idolatry, Christian idolatry in particular, assuming we have all the answers and that this Jesus is ours alone.    “Concepts create idols,” said Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century Cappadocian bishop.  “Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.”  And that’s kind of a fitting summary of the Fourth Gospel, and what makes the Gospel of John tick.  “Only wonder comprehends anything.”  Even Jesus.  

So the Gospel of John insists that just when we think we have Jesus pegged, just when we think we know exactly who Jesus is and what he’s about, just when we think Jesus is “our” guy—Jesus is going do something unexpected, or flip a table in the temple square, or ask an odd and unanswerable question.  Just when we think we have Jesus and God figured out, Jesus aims to surprise us.  To throw the doors of our hearts open wide again.  To cause us to reassess his message and purpose all over again.  Because it’s all about wonder for Jesus.  Wonder and faith and divine compassion.  And there’s no way around the messiness of life.  And there’s no way around the hard edges of human experience.  And there’s no quick theological shortcut through the mysteries of grace and love and incarnation.  God is in the details.  You heard that right, God is in the details.

3.

So what you find, in this Gospel, are these long, drawn-out narratives.  Long stories, with pathos and dialogue, and relationships unsettled by strange questions and even stranger answers.  It’s especially odd, this morning, that Jesus doesn’t go straight away to his friends when they need him.  What’s that about?  There’s no question that Mary and Martha and Lazarus are special friends, a kind of intentional community for Jesus.  Why wait?  This is the Fourth Gospel at its confounding best: provoking questions, unsettling assumptions, begging our curiosity. 

This morning, I was tempted to edit this particular passage down to just a few highlights—but I wanted instead to give you a feel for the length of this text, and the back and forth of story and conversation, and the feelings it captures on all sides, and the wonder, the wonder, the wildly improbable turns in this narrative.  Ending, of course, with Jesus calling his friend Lazarus out of the tomb, where Lazarus has been bound in burial cloths for days, and saying: “Unbind him, and let him go.”  Unbind him, and let him go!

You see, this kind of storytelling is the Fourth Gospel’s way of inviting you and me, inviting the church even now, into the drama of loss and grief, into the unimaginable sadness of Mary and Martha, and even their disappointment.  Who is this Jesus, who claims to be lover and friend?  What makes him do the things he does?  And how can he possibly think that Lazarus’ death is itself an opportunity for grace and wonder and possibility and new life?

One important clue, of course, is Jesus’ own insistence on metaphor in the midst of all this.  He knows, even from within the story, that this Gospel is much less interested in physical fact than it is spiritual possibility, divine promise, and hope.  “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep,” he says to the disciples, “but I am going there to awaken him.”  And clearly these disciples are inclined toward literalism—because they don’t get it at all.  But nevertheless Jesus persists.  

4.

Maybe then the unbinding of Lazarus, indeed the resurrection of Lazarus, is an invitation to reflection and bewilderment in the church.  Even among us.  Yes, Jesus is a powerful, provocative teacher; and yes, he’s a transgressive rulebreaker and community builder.  But maybe we allow for the wild and improbable possibility that Jesus brings hope out of hopelessness and a desire for life from our obsession with death.  

Maybe Jesus really does intend to wake us up from our slumber, to draw us out from our many tombs, to lift us from the violence that has for too long scarred human communities and torn brothers from sisters and sisters from brothers: from Auschwitz and Dresden to Gaza and Jenin, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Sandy Creek and Wounded Knee.  

And maybe, just maybe, the sacrament that transfigures our transformation begins in grief, in our weeping, in our capacity for tenderness; maybe the prayer that evokes the new world we seek is not a war cry, but a tear.  

And this brings us back, I think, to “The Armed Man” and to our calling as a community of Christ in 2024.  What we’re doing, Sunday after Sunday, season by season, is leaning into the wonder and mystery of this strange Lover—who dares to weep and dares to love and then dares you and me to unbind one another.  To love one another so bravely, to love one another so completely, to love life so fully and defiantly that we might release one another from shame, and then release one another from fear, and then release one another from the violence and hatred that so diminish us.  What we’re doing—in partnership with the Holy Spirit, as a beloved community of all genders and orientations, races and backgrounds—is leaning into the wonder and mystery of this strange Christ—who steps into the darkness, even into the tomb, and invites us to sing and dance our way out; invites us to lay our guns and weapons and grievances down; and invites to live for love and to live for one another.  In the New Jerusalem.

Amen and Ashe.