Jesus wept

It has the distinction of being the shortest verse in the New Testament, at least in English translations. It also has the distinction of being one of three passages in the Gospels where Jesus meets us mourners in the presence of the deaths of those who are dear to us, and as such, it seems, dear to God.

 

The Gospels only come to be written in the light of the resurrection and reveal the power of that idea at work on human minds. It changes us and changes how we face hard and difficult things such as sorrow and loss, such as suffering and death. Thus, these three passages read in Chapel show us something of the patterns of death and resurrection as it pertains to human experience. In this way, these passages connect to other powerful works of literature and religious philosophy that equally concern how we look upon suffering and death.

 

Jesus raises the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, who has just died. Mark gives us the word in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke: Talitha cumi - “little girl, I say unto thee, arise”. Jesus raises the only son of the widow of Nain as he is being carried to the grave. “When the Lord saw her”, the widow, “he had compassion on her and said, ‘do not weep’”. It is an amazing and touching scene. Do not always be weeping. Compassion is an exceptionally strong and significant word in the New Testament. At a time when we are worried about things on the surface, about contagion through touch and by way of proximity with one another, this word refers to the inner core of someone’s being, to the heart, lungs, liver, bowels, or the womb.

 

It is in the heart of Jesus that he holds converse with the Father and gathers us into that eternal love. Compassion is the deep care and concern which we have for one another. The conjunction of seeing and having compassion appears in several places. Jesus sees the multitude in the wilderness and has compassion on them. Jesus sees the crowd and has compassion on them for they are like sheep without a shepherd. In the great parable of the Good Samaritan, “a certain Samaritan” sees the man who was wounded and lying half dead and has compassion on him.

 

These two stories about Jesus encountering our suffering humanity as mourners in the face of death complement the story in John’s Gospel where Jesus raises Lazarus. He is the brother of Martha and Mary in Bethany. They symbolize the active and the contemplative life respectively. But Lazarus has not just died; he is not being carried to the grave; he has been dead and buried four days! “Behold, he stinketh”, Martha says. The whole story reveals the underlying logic about death and resurrection. Jesus tells Martha that he is “the resurrection and the life”. Something of what that means appears in this dramatic scene. Like the other scenes, it is a resuscitation to life but like the other scenes it is predicated upon something much more radical. “Jesus weeps” is his deep love and care for someone whom he knows and cares about. His tears are the visible expression of his compassion for our humanity. We are gathered into the love of God, not in flight from our world and its woes, but in and through them.

 

These encounters with our suffering humanity belong to an essential feature of the literary and philosophical traditions about human mortality and its overcoming. Gilgamesh, in the oldest literary work known to our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is moved by the death of his friend, Enkidu, much as Christ is moved by the death of his friend, Lazarus. Gilgamesh sees in Enkidu’s death his own mortality. It launches him on his greatest journey, the quest for wisdom. He goes, quite literally in the Sumerian imaginary, where no man has ever gone before. He goes to the ends of the world to find Utnapishtim, the more ancient Noah figure who has survived the chaos of the flood in the Epic. He wants to question him “concerning life and death”. He is moved with compassion to the quest for wisdom, we might say.

 

Siddhartha Gautama lived a privileged and entitled life in various palaces in Nepal. He is changed when, stepping outside the palace gates, he encounters a poor man, a sick old man, a dead man, and a Hindu Guru with a face of calm. How to find peace and calm in a world of tribulation? It leads him to contemplate the nature of suffering or sorrow, dukkha, and to his enlightenment as the Buddha and so to the traditions of Buddhism which are all about the question of dukkha. Classical Buddhism’s radical rejection of the idea of the self - ‘there is no you’ - relates to the idea of dying to ourselves. Only so can we live with and for others. Love is sacrificial. It is about the giving of ourselves.

 

Here Jesus weeps but he is more than just another mourner, another sad soul in the company of the miserable. In all of these scenes, he speaks out of his divine compassion and there is resurrection, at least in the form of resuscitation. “Lazurus, come out”, he says; “unbind him and let him go”. We are freed from the things which bind us, our sins, our sorrows, and our fears, including the fear of death. It is a profound illustration of the return of our humanity to God, to our life and freedom in God.

 

This story complements one of the great Eastertide Gospels. “In the world”, Jesus says, “you have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world”. That overcoming is not our modern technocratic domination and destruction of the world. It is about the world as returned to its principle. It is about learning to love the world, not as opposed to God, but as in God. As one of the poets, Thomas Traherne (17th c.), so beautifully puts it, “you never love the world aright until you learn to love it in God”. This counters our fearfulness of the world in the time of this pandemic by returning us to the idea of the world as God’s world and to the world in God. The true overcoming or victory is over our mistaken and broken relationship with the world, with one another, and with God. In these stories, we are being gathered into the love of God, not in flight from the world in fear, but as returned to God in love. Such things may encourage our hearts and enlighten our minds, if for no other reason than they remind us of things which we have forgotten or ignored; at the very least, they show us other ways than fear and hate. “Grant to us all a cheerful and forebearing spirit”, we pray in the School Prayer, a cheerful and forebearing spirit even in the face of the tribulations of the world. The overcoming is the return of all things to God. Such are the lessons of love.