Dear Friends,
Yesterday, I received word that the Reverend Sherrie Johnson had died from complications of the Covid-19 virus. Sherrie and I were friends, not the kind of friends who talk every other day, but friends who knew each other during more than twenty overlapping years of ministry in New Jersey. I respected her as a pastoral colleague, and I grieve her death. It took this virus two weeks to kill 1,000 people in the United States; the second thousand died in only two days. In the days ahead, I have no doubt that grief will become a much more prevalent emotion in our everyday life.
The Gospel reading for this the Fifth Sunday in Lent is taken from John 11:1-45. I ask you to prayerfully, meditatively read today’s gospel, which addresses the very difficult theme of grief.
John has often been called the gospel of signs. The events generally understood In the other gospels as miracles – the powerful and mighty acts of Jesus – are for John not so much mighty acts. Instead, they’re signs that point to who this man is, that signify that he is the Son of God. What’s important for John is who Jesus is, not the miracles themselves.
The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and final miracle, the final sign, that John recounts. After this story, the pace quickens, and the second half of the gospel describes events spanning fewer than a couple of weeks, and ending with the resurrection of Christ. Reading about those few weeks is like being on an emotional roller coaster. There’s barely time to catch our breath, but the story is of such consequence and magnitude that we must do so.
Our breath-taking journey begins with the death of Lazarus. John’s vivid, heart-rending description of the grief and pain experienced by Lazarus’s family and friends, including Jesus, doesn’t mince words. When Jesus tells his disciples that “Our Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him” (verse 11), John is using a widely recognized synonym for death, one that was used at various points in the New Testament by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul. It may seem like Jesus is avoiding the hard truth of death when he speaks of Lazarus sleeping, but he was actually putting the raw truth out there: Lazarus is dead, and Jesus and the disciples know it.
With Lazarus’s death, grief grips the hearts of his family and friends. Martha, Lazarus’s sister, runs to meet Jesus on the road as he approaches their home. In her anguish and raw grief, she blurts out to her beloved Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (verse 21) It’s an awkward, supremely uncomfortable moment; Martha seems almost disrespectful. But try to imagine the rawness and pain Martha was feeling. She and her sister, Mary, have been mourning their brother Lazarus for four days. They are, thankfully, not alone; their neighbors and friends are with them to console them and grieve with them as they sit together in a room in their home in Bethany. This is the Jewish practice of sitting shiva, when family mourners sit together, often on low stools to symbolize how they have been brought low by their loss. They remain in their home or in the home of the deceased for up to seven days, during which time they are visited by friends who come to console them, care for them, and express their own grief.
This age-old practice continues to this day, providing structure in the emotional chaos that immediately follows the death of a loved one, as well as the support and consolation of community and the comfort of a rite shared through millennia, displacement, and captivity.
Their mourning is intense. And the fullness of Jesus’s humanity comes through in this moment, when in verse 35, he weeps. I normally use the NRSV version of the Bible, in which verse 35 is translated as, “Jesus began to weep.” But that translation lacks the immediacy and power of the King James version’s “Jesus wept.”
He is more than the rabbi who teaches love and humility; he is more than the miracle-worker who turns water into wine at Cana to salvage the celebrations; he is more than and different from the remarkable one about whom God whispers, “This is my Son, the Beloved, the Chosen” in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This weeping man is fully human, just like the mourners in Bethany.
Jesus wept. Those two familiar words are extraordinarily powerful. As I grieve my friend, I also grieve the desolation of this crisis, and I grieve once again all the losses I’ve suffered in my own life. And yet, I know that Jesus wept – Jesus weeps – with me.
The overwhelming theme of this passage is the expression of grief. And it is an ongoing reality in our lives today. Too often, especially as we confront the raw emotion of grief, we pull back and try to downplay our emotions. We try to put up a good front, as if that were a sign of strength. Somehow, we cannot allow ourselves to acknowledge or share the pain of grief. To acknowledge such depth of emotion would be, for far too many of us, a sign of weakness. That’s one of many reasons we as a society are so shamefully slow to understand and accept mental and emotional illness as real illness, just like physical illness. Sadly, there are some among our Christian brothers and sisters who believe that grieving means questioning God. My heart aches for them as they are then unable to seek and find God’s comfort in their pain.
And there is no question that grief is pain. Even though the pain of grief doesn’t manifest itself like the observable, pathological pain of a broken arm, or a cut, or a sore throat, our bodies respond to grief in measurable and painful ways. We need to acknowledge, especially to ourselves, that pain is pain, whether its source is physical or emotional. In these days of our global pandemic, we are experiencing genuine grief, with all the emotional, psychological, and physical pain that accompanies it.
For a generation of psychologists, counselors, and seminarians, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying was a crucial tool in understanding grief. A few days ago, I saw David Kessler on television. He worked closely with Kübler-Ross before her death and has continued to analyze and address issues of grief and loss. He defines grief as change that is unwanted, which I find to be a particularly elegant and comprehensive definition. The death of a loved one, as we saw in John’s recounting of the death of Lazarus, may be the most intense of the unwanted changes we suffer over our lifetimes.
But death is far from the only source of grief pain that we experience. The current crisis has brought us a new reality that is deeply threatening and hard to fathom. In the midst of so many unknowns and questions, it’s hard to find our footing. We grieve. Whether we isolate ourselves voluntarily or in response to a government mandate, we experience wrenching, unwanted change to the freedom we’ve enjoyed all our lives. We grieve. We are unable to see and touch those whom we love. We grieve. We are unable to be with those who are lonely, or those who are ill, or those who mourn. We grieve. We read about the rising global and US death rates from coronavirus, and we have no way to harness our alarm. We grieve. When that death rate takes on a personal reality, we grieve. I grieve Sherrie’s death.
The Gospel of John acknowledges that we grieve, and so we should. Indeed, the Gospel of John permits us to grieve. Grief is painful, and it is not a sign of weakness or faithlessness. As Christians, we proclaim Jesus as truly God and truly human. The human Jesus weeps in grief; the divine Jesus gives life. In verse 25 Jesus says it forcefully, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is a future promise and it is a present reality. Even in the painful midst of our immediate grieving, we are a resurrection people. No matter the cause or degree of unwanted change we experience, be assured, my friends: our God is trustworthy. In God’s love and with God’s generous grace, we have life, here and now, and eternally.
Let us pray together this prayer from the Book of Common Worship:
God of compassion, you watch our ways, and weave out of terrible happenings wonders of goodness and grace. Surround us who have been shaken by tragedy with a sense of your present love, and hold us in faith. Though we are lost in grief, may we find you and be comforted. Through Jesus Christ who was dead, but lives and rules this world with you. Amen.