Finding Wholeness Together (John 11:1-45)

It is a verse that we all remember.  For me, it was when my childhood Sunday School teacher challenged us to memorize a verse of scripture, and a friend sitting next to me said, “Jesus wept.” 

I said, “What?”

He said, “It’s the shortest verse in the Bible. ‘Jesus wept.’”

There never was an easier assignment.  “Memorize a Bible verse.”

“’Jesus wept.’ Done.”

Of course, we didn’t know why Jesus wept.  We didn’t really care. 

And that, of course, is part of the problem of Bible memorization, at least the way it’s often done.  And it’s part of the reason I don’t put much stock in the word-for-word memorization of scripture.  Memorization does have its value, but its value is not in just seeing how many words one can memorize.

Jesus wept.

The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1989.  I and many other mainstream pastors and scholars regard it as the most accurate translation available.  Its translation of the verse is, “Jesus began to weep.” 

I don’t like it.  As much as I like the NRSV, I don’t like this verse.  It’s twice as long as the one I memorized – four words instead of two!

“Jesus began to weep.”  No, let’s stick with “Jesus wept.”  It’s half as long.  Two words, instead of four.  Three syllables, instead of six. 

Jesus wept.

But why?  Why did Jesus weep? 

Some of you know.

Jesus wept because his friend Lazarus was dead, and Lazarus’s sisters – Mary and Martha – were distraught.

Now it is in this story – before Jesus wept – that Jesus declared that he himself is the resurrection and the life.  Jesus said: “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

If Jesus is so confident in this, that he is the resurrection and the life –and why shouldn’t he be, since he is God’s son? – then why does he get so upset at Lazarus’s death?  Jesus not only believes in the power of resurrection and new life, he himself is the resurrection and the life.  Why should death disturb Jesus so much?

Why does Jesus weep?

As Jesus approached the town of Bethany – home to Mary and Martha – first Martha, and then Mary, ran out to meet him before he even quite arrived.  They met him on the road and poured out to him all their emotion, their grief, their sadness, their anger…

Up until this point in the story, Jesus is full of confidence.  His thoughts and his actions are deliberate.  Even when he tells his disciples that it was time to go to Bethany because Lazarus had died, he was confident and sure.  He said, “Lazarus is dead.  For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.  Now let us go to him.”

Jesus is in complete control of his emotions.  The death of Lazarus which he acknowledges appears not to have affected him one bit.  And why should it?  Jesus is full of knowledge about the resurrection… Jesus has the power to overcome death, and bring Lazarus back to life…

Jesus maintains his emotional control when Martha comes to him on the road… but then, when Mary comes…

Mary wears her emotions on her sleeve.  And she doesn’t care much for convention.  Remember when she sat at Jesus’ feet, listening, rather than taking her place in the kitchen?  With Mary, what you see is what you get.  She doesn’t hide anything.  She doesn’t wear a mask, she doesn’t pretend a false stoicism in the face of tragedy, and she doesn’t simply carry on when carrying on is impossible.

At times, Mary disturbed those around her with her emotions.  She often expressed so freely what all the rest of us try to keep bottled up and hidden away.  In fact, it’s usually the case that what disturbs us about people is not the people themselves, but the parts of ourselves that we try to keep hidden, which they expose.  What we see on display in Mary is what we try not to see in ourselves, even though it’s there.  So often, when we judge another person, we do so because we are trying to distance ourselves from our own inner self which the other person reminds us of.

When Mary comes to Jesus, her heart is open.  She weeps, openly, right out there in the street, and she doesn’t care who’s watching.  So heart-wrenching is her display of open grief that those who are with her also began to weep…

…including Jesus.

Jesus weeps, because Mary weeps.

Jesus weeps, because his love connects him to her.

Jesus weeps, because even though he is whole and complete in every other way, he is not fully whole and complete unless those he loves also find wholeness.

This is the last of my “Finding Wholeness” sermons, and the point is this:  no matter how much wholeness you have in your life, no matter how complete your life is, you will not live in wholeness unless your neighbor is living in wholeness. 

No matter how complete your life is, you will never have complete satisfaction and happiness unless your neighbor also finds satisfaction and happiness.

That is the way God designed us, the way God created us.  I am not whole unless you are whole.  I am not free unless you are free.  I cannot live in joy while you are suffering.

If you weep, I weep with you.

If you suffer, I suffer with you.

We are tied together.

We are one.

If that makes me uncomfortable, I may try to distance myself from you.  I may insist that we have nothing in common.  But I can only fool myself into believing that for so long, because we really are one.  And because we are one, I cannot be happy unless you are happy.

Jesus saw Mary weeping.  Jesus saw how upset she and Martha were, how much they were suffering.  Jesus saw all those around them suffering. 

The scripture says he was greatly disturbed and deeply moved.

He asked about Lazarus’s body.  “Where have you laid him?”  Where is the source of all your suffering?

They said to him, “Come and see.”  Come and see the source of our suffering and our sorrow. 

And then, Jesus wept.

No, no… Jesus began to weep. 

Maybe that newer translation is the better one.  Jesus began to weep.  It implies that Jesus is weeping still.  After all, suffering and sorrow continue. 

Suffering continues for all those who have lost loved ones.

Suffering continues in the countless places around the world where conflicts are addressed through violence and warfare, where children are taken from their families and made into soldiers, conditioned to kill even those family members from whom they were torn apart.  It’s happening.

Suffering continues when education systems as well as courts fail to treat all people equally, resulting in dropout rates and imprisonment rates that are skewed along racial lines.

Suffering continues when people are told “you don’t belong here” or “you don’t deserve full rights” simply because they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

Suffering continues when governments give away millions of dollars in tax incentives to big corporations but ignore the needs of the poor.

Lazarus is alive… but Jesus continues to weep.

Remember the words of Ezekiel that we heard last week:  “The word of the Lord came to me and told me to prophesy and say to the people: ‘Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves!  You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with wool, you slaughter the fatlings, but you do not feed the sheep.  You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.”

The people are suffering, and therefore God is suffering.  The people are weeping, and therefore God is weeping.  Or, as we learn from the story of the Exodus, when the people who suffer cry out, God hears their cry.  It pierces God’s heart and soul.  It tears God apart.  God cannot stand it.  When the people suffer, God suffers.

God doesn’t cause suffering.  When something bad happens, don’t say, “It’s God’s will.”  Don’t say, “God must have had a reason.”  No, when something bad happens, when people suffer, God suffers.  When people weep, God weeps. 

Ezekiel continues:  “Therefore, thus says the Lord God: I am against the shepherds, and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves.  I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them.  I myself will search for the sheep and seek them out… I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.  I will feed them with justice.”

People who follow God cannot find wholeness in their lives if they do not follow God in caring for the sheep.  If we are to find wholeness for ourselves, we must work to bring wholeness to others.  We must work to bring wholeness to a fragmented world.  We must rescue the sheep, seek out the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak.

And when someone who is suffering offers to show us the source of their suffering, saying to us, “come and see,” there may be no better thing we can do than to go and see, and to weep with them.  If there is something we can do to help end the suffering, we should do it.  If not, then we can still weep with them.

Cesar Chavez, whose birth we celebrated this past Monday, said this: "We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community... Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own."

Martin Luther King Jr. said this:  “All of life is interrelated – somehow we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality - tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

And theologian Matthew Fox said this:  “Today’s creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe.  We all share the same atoms and the same molecules… We’re all kin, we’re all interdependent.  And that’s the basis of compassion, which was Jesus’s ultimate teaching.”

Our wholeness, our healing, our salvation: it’s all connected.  Yours and mine. 

So let us weep together.  Let us celebrate together.  Let us laugh together.  And let us work to end suffering… together.