Don Friesen
The daily business of the Ontario legislature begins each day with a recitation of the Lord's Prayer and has done so for a century or more. Recently, however, our esteemed premier signalled his intention to replace the Lord's Prayer with something else. I assumed it was because members of the legislature found some of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer objectionable; "Lead us not into temptation," for example. No, said the premier, we need an alternative that better reflects the multicultural makeup of this province.
I do not celebrate secularism, and I certainly do not celebrate a superficial political correctness that tinkers with language but transforms nothing, but I also do not feel compelled to rise to the defence of retaining one of the last vestiges of a heritage that is, or was, supposedly Christian. Imagine my surprise, then, when at an ecumenical meeting earlier this week a number of Christian leaders expressed deep feelings about our premier's plan, publicly mourning the loss of Christian language, prayer, and customs in our public institutions. One person felt so deeply about it that he is rethinking his membership in the group, even though there were only two of us who disagreed with him!
I like to think that I'm a fairly empathetic person, and it became clear to me that this issue touches a nerve among our fellow citizens, but I could not summon any tears for the cause. For one thing, I consider the Lord's Prayer a prayer of the Church, a prayer given by our Lord to those who call him Lord. Secondly, Mennonites have been persecuted by a number of "Christian" nations, and our reading of Church history has engendered in us a healthy suspicion of emperors who don the Christian mantle.
A Weeping Saviour
It may be small-minded of me not to mourn these grand losses, but my own mourning is more intense at a personal level. My tears tend to come to the fore when I yearn for a friend lost to me, either through death or other circumstances. Therefore I am moved by the touching vignette in our Gospel reading in which Jesus wept when his close friend, Lazarus, died. Jesus was often a guest at the home of Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha. It was a place of sanctuary for him, a haven of warmth among good and trusting friends. The Gospel says that Jesus "loved" Lazarus. (John 11:5) Jesus was about thirty years old, and perhaps Lazarus was about the same age. They were buddies. Then Lazarus died, and naturally Mary and Martha sent for his friend, Jesus, knowing he would want to be there.
It was several days before Jesus got to Bethany, however, and John tells us that by the time Jesus and his disciples arrived there Lazarus "had already been in the tomb four days". People had already assembled for a funeral. Martha was not pleased with Jesus' tardiness and told him so! The story is told in great detail, but the dramatic conclusion to the story is Jesus' command to take away the stone from Lazarus' tomb (John 11:39), and when they had done so he cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" (11:43) And then, without a trace of irony, John writes, "The dead man came out (and) ...Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.'" (11:44)
The story is not without traces of humour. A "dead man" emerges from a dark tomb into the bright Palestine sunshine, blinking rapidly, and no doubt disoriented! Then he sees Jesus standing in the light, and perhaps for a moment Lazarus is not sure which side of death he's on! Was he entering eternity or returning to his earthly existence? Sometimes people who go through near-death experiences are not completely happy when doctors pull them back. They relate stories of seeing a bright figure standing in the light, and starting to go toward that figure, but then their journey was interrupted when the heart defibrillator yanked them back to this world! Perhaps Lazarus had a similar experience, and when he saw Jesus standing in the light he may have asked, "Is this heaven?" and Jesus replied, "Nope, it's Bethany."
There is a fascinating mixture of the sublime and the practical in this story. There is the raising-to-life of a four-day-old corpse (John 11:38-44), and at the same time attention to practical details, like the smell of decay. (11:39) What I want to focus on is not the miracle of the resurrection – which is, after all, the climax to which the Gospel is relentlessly heading – but rather, on the sadness of Jesus, the grief and mournfulness of Jesus.
"Jesus wept." (John 11:35) The seventeenth century poet, John Donne (1572-1631), remarked that there is "not a shorter verse in the Bible, nor a larger text". (Sermon XII, preached at Whitehall, March 8, 1621, The Works of John Donne, 1839) It may be the shortest verse in the Bible – one even I can memorize – but it speaks volumes. John tells us even more about Jesus' emotional state. John tells us that when Jesus saw those around him weeping, his heart was touched, ...he was deeply moved." (11:33, TEV) And when the people saw Jesus weeping, they said, "See how much he loved (Lazarus)!" (11:36, TEV)
A weeping Saviour may be an anomaly to some Christians, but it is a vivid indication of Jesus' humanity and the depth of his emotions. Jesus wept because he felt, and feels, our pain and suffering. He wept because he had a tender heart, a heart open to the pain of others. The Scriptures tell us that Jesus also cried when he prayed for others. Hebrews tells us that "in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save...." (Hebrews 5:7) This is a saviour who is able "to sympathize with our weaknesses, (because he) ...in every respect has been tested as we are...." (Hebrews 4:15)
Jesus Wept over Grand Vistas of Sadness
I am moved by the story of Jesus and the loss of his close friend, Lazarus. This is a Jesus I can understand, a Jesus who hurts like I do, and who has no little compassion for those who are hurting. The Gospels tell another story of Jesus in tears. As Jesus and his entourage approached Jerusalem, Luke tells us that Jesus wept over the city! (Luke 19:41) The mournfulness of his response to Jerusalem is not as personal as his grief over Lazarus, but his feelings of sadness seem deep, nonetheless. "As he came near and saw the city," Luke tells us, "he wept over it, saying, ‘If you ...had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! ...you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.'" (Luke 19:41-42, 44)
This occasion for Jesus' tears occurred, ironically, during Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. (Luke 19:28-44) All around him people were celebrating! As Jesus came down from the Mount of Olives crowds lined the way, shouting praises and expressing their adulation. And then Jesus stopped the parade, looked out over the city, and began to weep, his weeping on this occasion a mournfulness, perhaps, for what could have been.
Grief over a city seems less personal than the grief one suffers over the loss of a good friend or loved one. It's a vast landscape of sadness. Years ago I lived in a small northern city, and when returning to my home at night I had to climb a high hill. I would always turn around at the crest of the hill and look back over the city, alight in a vast landscape of darkness. While I never wept over it, that moment of looking back over the city always inspired intense feelings: feelings of love for that city and the community I had found there; deep feelings for the northern landscape; a deep sense of loneliness engendered by the isolation of our community; thoughts of family; thoughts of friends; thoughts of what could have been; thoughts that encompassed an infinite sadness about life.
I will confess to a leaning toward melancholy, but I'm not one of those who feels that I'm only alive if I've been put through an emotional wringer. A little like the fellow who told a friend who had been absent from church, "We had a wonderful worship service last Sunday; everybody cried!" I don't require my emotions to be tugged this way and that to feel that I've met God. In fact, I'm suspicious of people like Jimmy Swaggert and the late Tammy Faye Bakker, who could cry at the drop of a coin in the offering plate!
The Gospels do not picture Jesus as a chronic crier, but I think he knew sadness, and I think I have some – if but an inkling – some understanding of that moment when he looked out over Jerusalem, and wept. Although the Gospels record only a few instances of Jesus weeping, there would certainly be cause to weep in the days ahead, as Simon Peter denied him, for example, and then went off to have his own crying jag. (Luke 22:60)
There is one more occasion in Jesus' life that may qualify as weeping, and that is when Jesus cried out from the Cross, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) This, however, was more a cry of anguish, pain, and spiritual desolation. Small wonder that the first believers seized upon the Old Testament description of the Messiah as a "man of sorrows," and as one "acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3, KJV), a figure intimately acquainted with sadness and sorrow.
Prophets who Weep for a God Who Weeps
Jesus' mournfulness was not unlike the mournfulness of the prophets, who were caught between empathy with God, on the one hand, and compassion for their fellow-citizens, on the other. Walter Brueggermann suggests that one way to look at prophets is as poets who tried to get their nation to weep! Jeremiah, for example, cried to those in power:
Someone (Daniel Meeter) has said that in the weeping of Jesus John is showing us the weeping of God. The grieving of God. The groaning mournfulness of God. A startling view of God to some. Aristotle said it was impossible. Thomas Aquinas called it heretical. And yet it makes sense that what made Jesus sad are the same things that might make God sad. Or, to say it in a less anthropomorphic way, we can see the emotions of Jesus and know the heart of God.
A little girl stayed out at play much longer than she was supposed to stay, and when she got home her mother scolded her and demanded an explanation! The child said that one of her playmates had broken her doll and she stopped and helped her fix it. This did not satisfy her mother, who wondered why on earth it took two hours to fix a broken doll. To which the child replied, "Well, I couldn't fix it, but I sat down with her and helped her cry."
Some things are beyond fixing, and I find it a great comfort to think that God weeps with us in our sorrow. There are many times when tears are not enough, but there are times when tears are quite enough.
Lent: The Weeping Season
Lent is the season of the church year that might appropriately be called "The Weeping Season." It is a season of the soul that calls for tears of repentance. We weep for a variety of reasons. Some people weep in moments of happiness, like at weddings. There are tears of sorrow, tears of nostalgia, tears of regret, tears of joy. There are tears of anger, tears of frustration, tears of estrangement, tears of sadness, tears of pain. Lent, the season of weeping, is an appropriate occasion to get in touch with our sadness, to mourn our losses, and to shed our tears.
Job, the archetype of sadness, said, "My harp is tuned to mourning, and my flute to the voice of those who weep." (Job 30:31, NIV/NRSV) Lent is a time to tune our harps to mourning, to ask ourselves: What makes me sad? What makes me weep? The Church often makes me sad. I was sad when my first church broke apart fifty years ago on the weighty issue of who could use the pulpit and who could not. Think me melancholy if you will, but I went back years later and retrieved one of the broken pieces of the foundation of that church, to remind me of the human folly that bedevils Christ's Body. I am sad when a child of God is lost to the Church. I am sad when I see hearts harden, and relationships among believers strained beyond measure.
I am even sadder when I sense my own heart hardening. And to that end I received a lesson this week through a brief meditation written by Rachel Naomi Remen, reflecting on the nature of an oyster. "An oyster," she writes, "is soft, tender, and vulnerable. Without the sanctuary of its shell it could not survive. But oysters must open their shells in order to ‘breathe' water. Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain of sand will enter its shell.... Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft nature because of this. It does not become hard and leathery in order not to feel. It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and breathe in order to live. But it does respond. Slowly and patiently, the oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over time, it has created something of great value in the place where it was most vulnerable to its pain. A pearl might be thought of as an oyster's response to its suffering." ("Pearls of Wisdom," My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging, by Rachel Naomi Remen, pages 139-140)
The biblical vision of the Church is much greater than my own vision, much greater than my own more immediate response to things. The psalmist's cry, "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!" (Psalm 130:1) is a tender cry of desperation and exasperation, borne out of worry and anguish, but it is also a cry that assumes the existence of One whose presence transcends human anguish. The crier has reason to believe that his or her cry captures the ear of God. He writes:
"...if you will not listen,
Jeremiah frequently called upon God with tears. He is called the "weeping prophet," for he mourned deeply, eloquently, and publicly for his people, saying:
my soul will weep in secret for your pride;
my eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears...." (Jeremiah13:17)
"O that my head were a spring of water,
The prophets as well as other biblical writers gave expression to an intensity of sorrow, not a mourning for themselves as much as a mourning for their community. Psalm 130 expresses it well: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!" (Psalm 130:1)
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people! (Jeremiah 9:1)
"I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord... For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and...plenteous redemption." (130:5-7, RSV)
AMEN
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.