Fifth Sunday in Lent
John 11:1-45
A few years ago, Kate and I decided that we could be television programming executives. Every year, we watch the new shows on the television, and determine, with surprising accuracy which will be the first to cancelled.
Every year. Without fail.
And, do you know what our single criterion is? It’s the show that’s the most intelligent. That’s the one they cancel first.
This year it was Journeyman, about a reporter who gets sent back in time by--who knows, God? Anyway, he gets sent back in time to fix what once went wrong in the lives of families--often at the expense of his own relationships.
We saw the first episode, and we knew, it was simply too good. I think they’re running War of the Gladiators or something like it in its place.
Eighteen years ago, it was a show called American Dreamer, starring the late Ohioan Robert Urich--also as a reporter. His character had been a world traveling reporter who, following the death of his wife, had decided to settle down in a small Mid-Western town and write a column for the local paper.
The show only ran a handful of episodes (again, it was too good), but I will never forget one episode as long as I live.
In this episode, the reporter and some others go down to the local coffee shop to meet the new Episcopal priest in town, who’s something of a novelty--a woman.
In the course of the conversations, talk turns to God, and the reporter goes silent. The priest asks him why he doesn’t want to talk about God.
He says he doesn’t believe. She presses for the reason.
He then tells the story of how his wife had been killed by a terrorist bombing in Beirut, while they were sitting together at a café not unlike the one they were now in. He described in detail how the bomber came into the place and detonated the bomb at the counter where his wife had stepped to get more coffee, and blown her to bits.
He then turned to face the priest and asked, “if your God is real, why didn’t he stop that bomber? Why did God let this happen to my wife?”
The priest looked right at him, and said these unforgettable words, “I don’t know. But I know this; the first tears to fall were God’s.
I have never forgotten those words, and I pray I never will. I pray that after this morning you will never forget them, either, because they are so very important.
This story--the bible story, that is--is a very interesting one. Jesus gets word that his friend Lazarus was sick--even close to death, and he does nothing. He doesn’t set out for Bethany, but waits until Lazarus will have been dead for four days. Unlike the Journeyman in the TV series, who goes back in time to set things right, Jesus makes them right in real time--here and now.
We know, because we’ve peeked ahead, that Lazarus is going to be alright. But this story is a major crisis in the life of this family. Given the dynamics of life in that day, the loss of their brother was devastating emotionally, but may well have meant financial disaster for Martha and Mary--maybe even homelessness. Women couldn’t own property. Maybe they would be out on the street.
And this story is a metaphor for the salvation of the world. Mary and Martha are tested and they are faithful--even though they let their anger and grief flow freely. What is really going on here is not only a family crisis in Bethany but the crisis of the world, not only the raising of a dead man but the giving of life to the world.
On one level the story is about the death and resurrection of Lazarus, but on another it is about the death and resurrection of Jesus. The sisters want their brother back, to be sure, but Jesus is also acting to give life to the world. Jesus says this to Martha at the heart of the reading: "I am the resurrection and the life."
The cruel irony of this story is striking. In John’s gospel, one of the events that precipitates the trial and execution of Jesus is the unrest caused by the raising of Lazarus from the dead. In other words, Jesus, by raising Lazarus from the dead, is now sentencing himself to death. In order to release Lazarus from the tomb, he will place himself in a tomb.
When we were little, we all learned what was the shortest verse in all of the bible. In those days it was probably the King James Version, or even the RSV. In both of those, the shortest verse is John 11:35.
Jesus wept.
Some have commented over the centuries that Jesus stood at the tomb weeping because he was experiencing the pain of knowing that he himself was headed toward the grave. That he was experiencing a kind of precursor to Gethsemane. I don’t buy it.
In order for that to be true, Mary and Martha and Lazarus would be props in a larger play, or mere pawns in a cruel game. They are real people with real pain and real grief. And when Jesus stands at the entrance to the tomb where Lazarus lay, I want to scream, “don’t just stand there crying, DO SOMETHING!”
But, the shortest verse of the bible tells us so very much. Because Jesus is doing something. In that moment where the savior of the world--with the power to raise people from the dead, and heal the sick, and restore sight to the blind--in that moment, Jesus is connecting on a very intimate level with you and me and every human being who has ever lived on this planet.
In that moment, Jesus is experiencing the pain of losing a loved one. Jesus is experiencing the depth of human emotions in such a way not previously known first hand by God. In that moment, the Savior of the world is getting in touch with us in a way that God never had done before.
At Christmastime, I marvel at the incarnation--God becoming flesh--and proclaim that when God becomes human in Bethlehem, nothing can be the same. Not for us, and not for God. John says in the prologue of this gospel, “and the word became flesh, and lived among us, full of grace and truth.”
In that moment at the tomb outside Bethany, Jesus is touching all of us by crying, just like we do.
I’ve shared with you my fondness for the Orthodox belief that Jesus was baptized in order to make all waters holy. So that when you are baptized, when we are baptized, when Craig and Autumn and Charity were baptized on Easter morning, Jesus Christ is in those waters.
I believe that Jesus cried in order to make all tears holy. Jesus cried, so that when you cry, God is in your tears.
When God in Jesus Christ cried at Lazarus’ tomb on the outskirts of Bethany, as with all the other remarkable things John records, nothing is the same. We are not alone in our grief. We are not alone. We are never alone.
Frida Kahlo was a brilliant Mexican surrealist painter of the first half of the 20th century. Due to a horrible accident in her teens, she spent most of her short life in pain. Her paintings reflect that.
She was also a communist, and befriended Leon Trotsky after Stalin exiled him to Mexico. In fact, she had an affair with him. In the 2002 movie of Kahlo’s life, Trotsky says to her, “you paint what most people feel--that we are all alone in pain.”
Thankfully, we are not Trotskyites. We are Christians--which means that we belong to the living God in Jesus Christ. And that God is not a distant far-off being unconnected to us. No, our savior has suffered physical pain on the cross, where he also endured the spiritual pain of feeling abandoned by God, his Father. And he has suffered and endured the pain of grief and loss, and has shed his tears on this earth for our sake. We are not all alone in pain. We have each other
I have told you before that one of the worst days of my life was the day my brother died. One day, we’re talking on the phone, the next, he is dead. I went home--numb, blind. Kate left her office to travel the hour it would take to be with me.
During that hour, I sat in my living room in the parsonage, and cried my eyes out. This was my big brother--the buffer between me and my own mortality. As I sat and cried, two church members came in the house, and sat with me in the living room. David and JoAnn King. They were Stephen Ministers in our congregation--the leaders of that program, in fact.
They sat. I don’t remember if they said anything at all. But they cried with me. Their tears and my tears and Jesus’ tears were all mixed together and I remembered that line from the TV show so long ago. “The first tears to fall were God’s.”
Even in the midst of the pain I still feel in my grief, I can proclaim good news to you, because all of us, and each of us have cried, and will cry again. Both Isaiah and Revelation point to a time to come in which God will wipe away all tears--notice it does not say that there will be no tears, but that they will be wiped away. Matthew’s Jesus says, in the Sermon on the Mount, that we who mourn are blest, for we will be comforted.
That comfort begins in knowing, each time we are in pain, the first tears to fall are God’s.
First Christian Church Sermons
March 9, 2008
