Transcript
An Encounter with Grief and Loss
First Baptist Richmond, November 3, 2024
All Saints’ Sunday
John 11:32-44
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep.
I was in Washington, DC, last Tuesday morning, packing up my things to come home from a board meeting, when I discovered that the Museum of the Bible offers free admission on the last Tuesday of the month, and there I was, with an hour to kill on the last Tuesday of the month. So, not knowing quite what to expect, I went, and here’s what I discovered: it’s huge! You could probably read the entire Bible quicker than you could get through the museum. In fact the brochure says that there is enough content to occupy nine eight-hour days.
I didn’t have that much time, but I did want to see if they had a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and so I made my way as quickly as possible to the fourth floor. There it was, not the entire Bible but an entire epistle—Paul’s letter to the Romans—printed with moveable type in 1454. Amazing! And just a few feet away was a first edition of the King James Bible, printed in 1611, and for some reason still the most popular version in the world.
They had that Bible in a glass case, open to the Book of Ruth, chapter 3, where the first edition says that Boaz put six measures of barley into Ruth’s vail (sic), tied it up and put it on her back, and then “he (meaning Ruth) went into the city.” The second edition, which was right next to it, corrects that mistake by
saying, “No, she went into the city.” So the first edition is sometimes called the “He” Bible and the second edition is called the “She” Bible.
I couldn’t turn the pages of either of those Bibles to see what they said about the death of Lazarus in John, chapter 11, but the King James Version I keep on my phone says, beginning in verse 32, “When Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see.” And that’s when we come to John 11:35, the shortest verse in the King James Version of the Bible:
“Jesus wept.”
I’ve been walking around with that verse in my head all week, thinking about what it means to say that Jesus wept, especially in the Gospel of John where Jesus seems to be more divine than human. As I sometimes say, “He seems to float about three feet off the ground.” And so it seems strange to hear John say that Jesus wept, as if Jesus had feelings.
When I was in seminary my pastoral care professor warned us about our feelings. He told us that it would be important to maintain a kind of “professional distance” in our work. He said, “You can’t feel all the things your people are feeling at the level they are feeling them. If you do you won’t be able to help them.” And that made sense. I spent years developing that kind of professional distance knowing that if I felt the same grief as a mother who had lost her son, I wouldn’t be able to do his funeral. And it has helped me through the years, when I begin to feel emotional, to think of the family I’m trying to help, to focus my
attention on them instead of me. That helps me do what I have to do like a “professional.”
And when it comes to grief and loss, that’s what I am: a professional. I’m the pastor of a church that averages more than forty deaths per year, and in some years as many as one per week. On my way to a funeral last Wednesday I got the news that another church member had died. I didn’t pull my car over to the side of the road and begin to weep. I am a “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” On a professional level I am deeply acquainted with it, but until my father died ten years ago I didn’t have much personal experience; I hadn’t felt my own heart break. But here’s the thing about staying any length of time at one church: you stop burying church members and start burying friends. Sometimes now, when I’m doing the funeral of one of those friends, my voice will catch in my throat, the tears will come to my eyes, and someone out there will think,
“See how he loved him.”
Well, it’s true. I’ve lost church members who had become close friends, people I loved very dearly. But so far I haven’t lost my best friend, and that’s where we find Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson. At the beginning of John, Chapter 11, the sisters of Lazarus send a message to Jesus saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” It’s the first we’ve heard of Lazarus in this Gospel, and it makes us wonder: “The one Jesus loved? When did he get to know Lazarus? How did he come to love him?” I’ve wondered about that for years, and thought that it may have happened at the annual Passover festival. We know that Jesus came to Jerusalem for that festival every year from the time he was twelve and we also know that whenever he came to Jerusalem he spent the night in nearby Bethany. It’s not hard to imagine that Jesus’ parents and Lazarus’ parents were friends or even
relatives; that Jesus and Lazarus were cousins of some kind, about the same age; and that they looked forward to Passover as a kind of annual family reunion.
In a previous sermon I said: “Imagine them going into the city of Jerusalem during the festival, walking down the road from Bethany with their arms around each other’s shoulders, seeing the sights, hearing the sounds, and then staying up late into the night whispering about all they had seen and heard. Imagine them playing together as boys, romping over the hill country of Judea, trying to stay away from those two pesky girls, Mary and Martha. Imagine all that and you can see how Jesus might have come to love Lazarus, and how they might have become best friends.”
And so when Lazarus got sick, Mary and Martha sent for Jesus. They didn’t think twice about “troubling the teacher.” They said, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Jesus was on the other side of the Jordan, near Jericho. They expected him to come right away, but he didn’t. For reasons we may never understand he waited two more days before leaving, and when he got to Bethany Lazarus was already dead. Our reading for today opens with Mary coming to Jesus and saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
It wasn’t an accusation; it was an affirmation. Mary believed that Jesus had the power to heal, and that if he had been there he would have healed her brother. Of course he would! He was his best friend! But Jesus saw her weeping, and those who had come out from Jerusalem also weeping, and he was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” And that sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it? How often in the Gospels does he look on the suffering of others and find himself moved with compassion? Maybe he wept because everyone else was weeping, but maybe it was because the one they were weeping over was Lazarus.
Jesus said, “Where have you laid him?” And they said, “Come and see.” And do you know how it happens sometimes, that the finality of someone’s death just hits you? You knew they had died but it didn’t become real for you until that moment when you were standing at the funeral home, looking down into that open casket. That’s how it was for Jesus. When they said, “Come and see,” he knew they were going to take him to a tomb with a rock rolled in front of it where the cold, dead body of Lazarus had been lying for four days. Lazarus. His friend! Suddenly Jesus couldn’t control himself; his bottom lip began to quiver; tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Those who were watching saw it and said,
“See how he loved him!”
And he did. He wept because his best friend had died. He wept because Mary was weeping and his heart went out to her as it always did to those who were suffering. And maybe he wept because he saw in the death of Lazarus a preview of his own suffering and death. It wouldn’t be long until he was the one in the tomb, until Mary would be weeping over him. In the Gospel of John Jesus doesn’t pray in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would take the cup of suffering away from him, but this may be his Garden of Gethsemane moment: when he can see what’s coming and get a sense of how painful it’s going to be, when he can feel it, at the center of his chest, and the tears begin to flow.
But while we’re speculating, let’s consider this: that maybe what Jesus is weeping over is not just the death of his best friend, and not just the grief of his friend’s sister; maybe he’s not even weeping over his own death as he sees it coming; maybe he’s weeping over the whole sad state of the world. Because think about it: life starts out so hopefully for us. We grow up, some of us get married, some of us have children, but then as we get older we watch our parents age and
die, we watch our partners age and die, our children watch us age and die. It’s like we’re all tubing down a lazy river on a sunny day, circling up in little groups, talking and laughing, but up around the next bend is an enormous waterfall and eventually everyone we love goes over. Eventually we ourselves go over, and that’s not the way God wanted it in the beginning.
In John’s Gospel Jesus was there in the beginning. He was with God and he was God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, not death, and this life was the light of all people. And even though that light continues to shine in the darkness, and even though the darkness has not been able to put it out, there is so much of it: so much darkness, so much sickness, so much suffering, so much death. On that day in Bethany it got the best of Jesus, just as it sometimes gets the best of you and me. Jesus wept. He wept until his grief turned into frustration and then rage, until he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And in that moment the river reversed its course. The water began to flow backward, and Lazarus, who had gone over the falls, popped back up again, as surprised as anyone to find himself alive and well.
It wouldn’t last, of course. Eventually, for Lazarus, the river would begin to flow again in its usual direction. But for a moment at least Jesus showed us that the way things are is not the way they will always be. It’s something he hoped his disciples would remember a few weeks later when he was the one lying in a cold dark tomb. He was hoping they would look at each other and say, “Remember Lazarus? The way things are is not the way they will always be.” And if you are one of those people who is even now weeping, thinking that all hope is gone, maybe you can remember Lazarus too, and remember that the way things are is not the
way they will always be. “Weeping may last for a night,” the psalmist says,
“But joy comes in the morning.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
