+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
A few years ago, while lamenting the lack in biblical literacy in the culture and in the church, our then presiding bishop, Michael Curry, said that a good start might be for everybody to be able to identify and quote their favorite bible verse. “But,” he quickly added, “you don’t get to choose ‘Jesus wept.’” Famously the shortest verse in at least the Authorized or “King James” Version of the bible. While the good bishop rightly identified this as a potential way to cheat on the assignment, these two words do present a lot to think about. We see Jesus’ humanity on full display, which is a good correction to those of us who tend to focus on his divinity to the former’s exclusion. (The opposite error might be more common these days, but I for one am more prone to downplaying the weakness and fragility Christ chose to take on for us and center my own thoughts on his perfection and godhood.) There is also a pastoral element here. If even the Lord of life who knows that death is temporary (and in this case, very temporary) grieves the death of a friend, then it seems clear that our own sorrow at loss will not by itself be reckoned a lack of faith.
But a prior question occurred to me for the first time ever this week. What is Jesus weeping about. We assume it’s because his friend is dead. Could it not also be because despite spending three years teaching and performing miracles, so many still haven’t got the message. Certainly the crowd of bystanders questioning either his power or motives don’t “get it.” “Could not this man… have caused that even this man should not die?” But Mary and Martha, too, who seem almost to accuse Christ of absenteeism and St. Thomas, whose gloomy fatalism assumes the worst possible scenario—“Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
So are Jesus’ tears for Lazarus or for his unbelieving generation? I can’t say for sure, but I’d propose this “why not both?” Grief can be complex. I am not suggesting that Christ suffered from Prolonged Grief Disorder according to the definition of the DSM-V. I wouldn’t be qualified to say that, and anyway, I’m not comfortable with the other questions that would raise. I am saying, however, that Christ is nearing his final test, the crucifixion, and I am comfortable saying that “when it rains it pours” as one approaches a spiritual turning point.
Perhaps the adversary redoubles his efforts when one is walking the right path, and the most proper path ever trod was the way of the cross, on which Christ begins the final phase of his journey immediately after raising Lazarus. We didn’t hear the rest of the eleventh chapter of John this morning (understandably, since it was already a pretty long Gospel reading), but it was this miracle which led directly to the chief priests and pharisees under the leadership of Caiaphas to hatch the plot to have Jesus killed. I suspect Jesus knew that raising Lazarus would be the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were, the act that would seal his fate. Maybe Christ’s real last temptation (with apologies to Nikos Kazantzakis and Martin Scorsese) was whether or not he should raise Lazarus, and this is why Jesus is “groaning within himself” on the way to the tomb. If so, he triumphed once again.
Last week, in reference to the healing of the man blind from birth, I warned against seeing the beneficiaries of Christ’s miracles as mere object lessons, as only means of Christ making a point. They are that, too, though. Jesus healed the blind man because he had compassion and he raised Lazarus because he loved him and his sisters. But he meant these signs to point beyond themselves as well. He says as much about giving the blind man his sight, and the symbolic implication is unavoidable here. Jesus loved Lazarus and he is Lord over life and death. This makes clear to those given eyes to see (as I pray we have been given) that in order to live we must die, just as Christ did.
One of the books I read while on retreat week before last was St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. It’s not the first time I read it, but it’s one of those books that, for me at least, one can only appreciate when one is ready for it. (There are lots of books like that in my experience that I either read or started to read as a young adult, but didn’t really “get” until picking it up again after a decade or two of life.) As for The Interior Castle, fully appreciating it required me to combine my scrupulous religious adherence (which I’ve always had) with a genuine desire for spiritual growth (which honestly took a lot longer to take hold). Anyway, Teresa outlines the journey one may take into one’s own soul, proceeding through seven sets of mansions, the seventh and most interior being where Christ himself dwells.
The first time I read the book, my immediate thought was “if this is what spiritual progress looks like, who the heck would want it!?” It’s a way beset by disquiet and temptation; the further one delves into one’s soul in search of God’s dwelling place, the more one experiences periods of discomfort with worldly things, even coming to despise that which once gave pleasure. There is consolation along the road, but that road is still the way of the cross, beset by dangers both external and internal.
But rereading Teresa after twenty years of life experience, I now see its wisdom. Would that honesty were a more popular evangelistic method. Interested in dying to yourself by means of a lifelong process of conversion that won’t always be comfortable? Consider Christianity! We find appealing the prospect of a heart strangely warmed, but what of the weeping and groaning that may well precede the breakthrough?
Our greatest consolation, I think, is that Christ himself—fully divine yet sometimes to my easily-scandalized heart, all-too-human—experienced just such a process. He was not converted, of course, but in growing in favor with God he lost the favor of man, and triumphed over every temptation to take an easier, softer way.
As Christ turns to Jerusalem this week, so do we. The old lectionary called today “Passion Sunday.” (I was delighted to see that “throw back” on the hymn board this morning, caused I think, by the fact that the particular calendars I order every year slip in some old, high-church stuff that liturgical renewal tried to suppress during the second half of the last century.) In all events, the Gospel we have now for this Sunday, the raising of Lazarus, is just as appropriate as the old Gospel reading (detailing a turning point in the persecution of Jesus) as a reflection on the Passion, since this too, as I’ve suggested, is a turning point which leads directly to Calvary.
In all events, let us turn ourselves now to the contemplation of those mighty acts whereby Christ saved us and the whole world. Let us enter into Christ’s sorrow, just as he entered fully into ours. That road is perilous to body and soul, but traveling it with integrity and determination and courage and faith is the only way to find its end, which is life and peace.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.