jesus wept

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Alban’s, Kurow

FIFTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 26^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

          

Ezekiel 37: 12-14

Psalm 95

Romans 8: 8-11

John 11: 1-45

 

It’s too easy after 2000 years of conditioning to forget that gods of the ancient world were not supposed to weep. It wasn’t that they were without emotion. They could be angry, jealous, biff a few thunderbolts around. But crying? That was beneath their pay scale. This was particularly so of any god who claimed to be Boss God.

It was just not the done thing. Real gods could not show anything that could be interpreted as weakness. This passage in John 11 breaks a whole heap of protocols. We have the God carrier, the God Man, the Lord himself weeping. But we have at least one other protocol broken too. As with the Samaritan woman, we find a strong woman daring to break expectations. It was incidentally one of the great innovations of feminist theology to recognise and affirm that sin for women, or perhaps for womankind, was not so much stroppiness but submission, token acquiescence to a dominant male narrative. 

I would leave that for another time, except insofar as in the past few weeks we have seen or referred to the incredible strength of the Samaritan woman who argues with Jesus, the Syrophoenician woman who argues with Jesus, the brave women who will carry the gospel message out into the world, despite their fear and marginalisation, on the first Easter morning, and now brave Martha who is willing, as we know from Luke’s gospel-account, to be recognised as a disciple, and is here willing to confront Jesus with her rage.

Martha an Mary alike overstep the boundaries of submission. They expresses their grief and her rage to a man in whose presence they would be expected by society to remain silent. He in turn is not afraid, to absorb like a lightning rod their grief.

Mary and Martha had no hope with their brother gone, so her desperation can come as no surprise. She already had the idea that Jesus had some kind of mastery over life and death greater than any human she could conceive of. Why now, she howled, were she and her sister to be left with nothing?

It is also one of the most poignant verses in the Bible. John is telling us something here that is critically important. Jesus wept. Decent gods even in the first century didn’t weep. They were not particularly interested in absorbing human pain. But something is getting turned upside down here.

Martha and Mary are trapped in that visceral grief which really knows no measurement. We humans have the capacity to feel deeply our losses – partner, parent, above all perhaps our children or our grandchildren – there are no words sufficient. This grief is what Jesus encounters in the bereaved sisters. Traditional gods of the first century remained unmoved by such a scene, our silly human problem not theirs. Jesus wept. But his tears are not the final word.

Jesus calls Lazarus out of death. I don’t know what that means. The gospel writer is at pains to demonstrate that the situation was pretty unusual, that human decomposition was reversed. Of course Mary, Martha and indeed Lazarus are one day going to have to experience this scene again in all its dimensions. One day we will too, and there are dimensions of it that we will have already experienced in our lives.

But there is a still greater extent of divine love which is yet to be revealed in John’s telling of the gospel. Soon God in Jesus, Godself, will enter that same experience of brokenness, desertion, even Godforsakenness, and death. We will too, though thanks be to God we are unlikely to feel the utter desertion, the utter Godforsakenness of the death of the crucified Messiah.

Technically the experience Lazarus undergoes is a remarkable resuscitation, not resurrection. He will undergo the dying journey, the death journey again. This experience that John relates, whether we see it as a metaphor or, as I am happy naively to prefer, as a literal if unique event, This scene reveals only a foretaste of the absolute and unparalleled depths to which God in Christ will journey in order to bring resurrection light and life to human experience. Those themes of light and life have been reverberating through John’s gospel telling from the very beginning, those famous first eighteen verses. Shortly in the events of Holy Week and Easter we will read not just the deadness of Lazarus and the brokenness of Mary and Martha but the absolute hell depths of every curtailed life and every crippling grief. And though it is beyond words, it is there that a greater light and life will break out, and the weeping women will experience not only the reversal of Lazarus’ life and death but the beyond words restoration and resurrection of all life.

It is to that life and life we are invited each day.