This is the sermon I preached yesterday at United Church of Zambia Mindolo Congregation, coming out of my recent wrestling with questions about God and grief.
Scripture Lessons: Psalm 22:1-2, Habakkuk 1:2-4, John 11:17-35
The passages of Holy Scripture we have heard this morning have one important thing in common: they all have at their center a grieving person of faith. Grief isn’t an easy thing to deal with. It’s something no one likes and no one wants. It is painful, difficult, and just plain no fun. But grief is something that everyone experiences. I am sure that most of us present this morning know the pain of losing someone dear to us, the hole we feel in our heart with the knowledge that we will never again in this life see one who we loved so deeply. And yet it is not only loss of life that creates in us these feelings of grief. Loss of love, loss of health, loss of work, loss of financial resources, loss of educational opportunities—all of these things and more can cause us to feel sad, angry, hopeless, even abandoned by God.
Since arriving in Zambia last September, I have encountered so many people of such deep faith who have taught me much about how to carry on in the most difficult of circumstances, how to place trust and faith in God even when the burdens of life seem unbearable. Zambian culture is so, so good at this. And yet what many of the Christians I have met here are not quite so good at is expressing and confronting their feelings of sorrow and grief. Some almost seem to think that real Christians don’t cry, that the function of faith is to make us happy all the time, a permanent smile pinned to our faces. At times, I have found this confusing, sometimes even disturbing. The reason for this, as a wise friend reminded me, is that I have been experiencing a big cultural difference between how my home culture (the US) and my host culture (Zambia) deal with suffering, sorrow, and grief. While Zambians do observe a time of mourning after certain events of loss, like the death of a family member, many, especially Zambians of faith, seem to think--perhaps not even consciously but deep down--that after that official period of mourning, any expression of sorrow or grief is a sign of lack of faith in God.
Americans are almost the opposite. We love our feelings. We are all about our feelings. We want to express them, talk about them, analyze them, we like to go to see counselors and therapists who will help us express, talk about, and analyze our feelings even further. If the temptation of Zambian culture is to put on a happy face even when we are hurting, the temptation of American culture is to become so over-awed by our feelings, to indulge them so prodigally, that we scarcely think of anything else. The Bible, I think, tells us that the way to go, the truly faithful way to deal with sorrow and grief, lies somewhere in the middle of these two cultural habits.
One of the things I like best about the gospel lesson we read this morning is that it paints such a vivid picture of what a faithful response to grief and loss actually looks like. After all, Jesus was a man, fully human like every one of us, and so he experienced the same human feelings of grief that we all feel when something terrible happens, when we come to a crisis point in which we lose someone we love or something we value deeply.
In John chapter 11, Jesus is called to Bethany because his good friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, is very sick. Even before he arrives, Jesus knows that Lazarus is dead. Jesus arrives in Bethany to a scene of intense mourning and sorrow for this good man who has been struck down in the prime of his life. Martha, upon hearing that Jesus is coming, runs out to meet him. “If you had been here,” she tells Jesus, “my brother wouldn’t have died. And yet even now I know God will give you whatever you ask for.” Jesus knows Martha well, and senses that she needs to talk, so he answers her words of trust in him with beautiful words of comfort and peace, some of the most beautiful words in the Bible, I think—“I am the Resurrection and the Life. The one who believes in me—even if he dies—will live. Everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die.” Mary needs words of comfort and Jesus gives her such wonderful words of comfort that we are still repeating them 2000 years later.
Mary is dealing with this crisis somewhat differently than her sister. She is consumed by sorrow, anger and pain, and she will not, cannot go out to greet Jesus until he calls for her. When he does, she throws herself at his feet and cries, like her sister, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” But unlike her sister, Mary cannot manage any more words of hope or faith. Jesus doesn’t rebuke her for this, but stands there silently, accepting her, loving her, entering fully into her pain. That’s Jesus’ way, isn’t it? He knows each one of us by name, gives us just what we need, meets us right where we are, even if where we are is anger and pain.
I don’t know why this is, but it has become something of a tradition among Bible translators to mistranslate verse 33. I’m not sure if it’s the same way in Bemba Bibles, but English Bibles almost always say something like, “he was moved in his spirit, and troubled.” That is not what the original Greek text says. What the Greek words of verse 33 actually mean is something closer to, “his spirit snorted like an angry bull and he shook with rage.” Jesus doesn’t just feel bad for his friend Mary and the neighbors surrounding her. He is not just sorta touched. He enters fully into their anger and pain. Despite his knowledge that not ten minutes later, he will have raised Lazarus from the dead, he still chooses to join them fully in their pain. Why? Because Jesus is perfect love. And this is how perfect love behaves. It weeps and it rages at evil and death.
Like any normal, loving human being, Jesus responds to loss with anger. But it’s important to take a look at how he does not express that anger. He doesn’t blame the people surrounding him. He doesn’t say, “You must have done something wrong. Lazarus must have died because of your sinfulness, or your lack of faith.” He doesn’t say, “One of you neighbors must be a witch. You must be practicing witchcraft.” No. He refuses to blame or to direct his anger against the victims. Neither does he blame himself. He doesn’t say, “This must be my fault. What have I done? Why didn’t I prevent this?” He refuses to direct his anger against himself. So if he’s not angry at the crowd around him, and he’s not angry at himself, who or what is he angry at? He is angry at evil. He is angry death.
Jesus is angry at evil and death because he knows their true nature. From the very beginnings of our tradition, Christians have affirmed the truth expressed in the first chapter of John’s gospel—that God is pure light, and in Him there is no darkness at all. Since God is the source of everything that is, seen and unseen, since everything that exists is an expression of God’s goodness and love, then God couldn’t have created evil. Evil doesn’t come from the good God of all being, and so it has no existence of its own. This doesn’t mean, of course, that evil isn’t real—it is terribly, painfully, woefully real. But it isn’t, like everything else, a created thing. It is like darkness, which is nothing but an absence of light. Or cold, which is nothing but an absence of heat. Evil is like a wasting disease sucking the good out of God’s creation. It has no ultimate spiritual value or meaning, no real substance or purpose—evil, suffering, and death are useless and meaningless. God doesn’t need them. God doesn’t want them. So God didn’t create them. Possessed of this knowledge, the knowledge that an utterly purposeless and meaningless evil has stolen the life of his friend, what can Jesus do but rage and weep?
“Surely,” many of you must be thinking, “the preacher has got something wrong here.” Who among us hasn’t seen God use evil to bring about good? Who hasn’t experienced God’s ability to make us stronger, more patient, more compassionate through suffering? Didn’t Jesus say, back in verse 4, “This sickness will not end in death…but is for the glory of God?” Indeed he did, and make no mistake about it, God is able to bring good out of evil—this is what we call providence—but we must never use the good God may bring out of evil to affirm the evil itself. Whatever good results God may in his providence bring out of the worst possible circumstances, evil always remains evil. The body of Christ may indeed be sustained and fortified by suffering together with and on behalf of others and—like Jesus—without hostility or hatred. But this kind of loving discipline is just one more example of God’s providence; the fact that God can make us better, stronger, and more loving as a result of our suffering does not make the suffering itself good. The suffering itself, as Jesus taught us by holy example, must and can only be grieved.
So how do you do that? How does the person of faith faithfully grieve? If the answer is not, as I was saying earlier, to deny or suppress our feelings, and it’s not, as many Americans like to do, to overindulge and wallow in our feelings, then how are we to deal with such strong, overwhelming emotions like sorrow and rage? Our Old Testament readings this morning show us that the Bible’s answer is that we deal with our feelings not by denying them, not by wallowing in them, but by praying them.
No matter what they are, we can bring our feelings to God. Even when we are angry—even when we are angry at God!—we can talk to God about it. We can say, like the prophet Habakkuk, “How long, O Lord, must I cry out for help and you do not answer me?” Can you hear the tone of outrage in the prophet’s voice? And yet he is not shy about bringing it to God.
Like the Psalmist, we can cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Though the person who wrote these words is clearly feeling utterly alone, desperate, abandoned, he isn’t afraid to bring these feelings to the very God who he feels abandoned by!
Why is this? Because the Psalmist knows that God understands. God understands our feelings of desperation and pain, our feelings of abandonment. On the cross, God’s Son himself cried out the words of Psalm 22 that we read this morning: “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” Why didn’t Jesus use a happier, more hopeful lyric to express his feelings here, maybe something like, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me?” Instead he cries out in utter abandonment, utter despair, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”
Jesus uses the words he does because he understands the evil of evil. He understands the darkness of darkness. He understands the pain of pain. And he refuses to sugarcoat it, to paint a happy face on it. Jesus, the Truth, insists on telling it exactly like it is.
And so I want you to know that if easy assurances that “God is able” and simplistic exhortations to “be joyful always and give thanks at all times” sometimes fail to satisfy the harshest hurts and deepest wounds of your soul, you are not alone. Jesus felt it too. It is true what Psalm 30 says, that “Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” And yet, until that morning comes, until that day when God’s heavenly reign comes in its fullness to make all things new--until that day--the only proper thing to do sometimes is weep.
In fact, it is precisely because we know the end of the story, precisely because we know that joy is coming in the morning, precisely because we anticipate the fullness of God’s reign in which all things will be restored and every wrong made right, that we can take the time we need to grieve. We don’t have to rush it. Because we know what’s coming, we can take the time weep for ourselves (as Jesus instructs the daughters of Jerusalem in Luke 23:28), and weep with others (as Paul instructs the Church in Romans 12:15). We can offer our tears and those of our beloved sisters and brothers in Christ up to God, knowing that we have a God of unending mercy and grace, who knows and understands it all.
And what’s more, sisters and brothers, bitter as weeping is, we do not weep alone. Look around. Look at the people sitting next to you. Look at the people sitting in front of and behind you. This is your family in Christ. Jesus has given us to one another to rejoice together and to weep together, he has bound us together in the Church in good times and bad, so that we never have to face life’s trials and tribulations alone.
Together, we are called by Jesus to weep, to cry out, to shout with rage to our God of mercy and grace, until that day when every tear is wiped from our eyes and weeping is no more.
Amen.
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