This weekend we begin a journey, one that will take us to a parade, an upper room, a cross and finally an empty tomb. It is a strange and wonderful time. I’ve been through it at least 55 times in my life, yet I am always surprised by the overwhelming ugliness and pain that comes before we get to the shockingly good news of the resurrection. By the end of the seven days I’m left stunned by it all.
I recall the presentation of a sorrowful solo on Good Friday that left all of us who heard it emotionally worn out. I suspect every person in the sanctuary had tears in their eyes. My good friend and colleague, Richard Wing, likes to refer to this time as “Wholly Weak.”
Our tears are often a shorthand way of revealing the truth of what we are really experiencing. They are like messengers from the soul. The author of the Gospel of John knows this is true. He is the one who wrote the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” When Jesus cried those tears he was standing near the tomb where Lazarus had been laid. Why is he crying? Jesus is because he knows that he must call Lazarus out so that he may enter in. Jesus weeps because he sees his own impending death.
Barbara Brown Taylor, preaching on this proclaims, “The next death we will hear about is Jesus’ own, which will be scarier and stink far worse than Lazarus’s did, and I believe we are given this story as a kind of dress rehearsal…It is the truth we are given to trust. ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ he says. Not later but right now.”
We are wholly weak before this promise but we can live with it now. It is not something we wait for at the end of all that is but a promise come true right now because we see in Jesus’ tears a reflection of our death and the promise that it is not the end.
As Richard Wing says, “The worst thing to happen to you is never the last thing.”
Grace and peace to you,
-Glen
