“When mortals finish, they are only beginning,
and when they stop they are still bewildered.
That is why the Lord is patient with them
and pours out his mercy on them.
He sees and understands that their death is wretched,
and so he forgives them all the more.”
(Sirach 18:7, 11-12)
In today’s gospel of the raising of Lazarus, we are invited to contemplate the Jesus who weeps.
Why does Jesus weep? Is it for Lazarus, his friend whom he loved? While Jesus was absent, Lazarus passed from living man to corpse entombed. Lazarus was and is no longer – a shocking development. They send Jesus the message: “He whom you love is ill.” This is not just a piece of information, a statistic. We all know the difference between learning that so many people are sick or have died in such-and-such a place, and learning that someone we know, someone we love, is sick or dying. Three times we are told that Jesus loves Lazarus and his family. The man who is ill is all of us. For Jesus, everyone who suffers and dies is his intimate friend, his beloved. There is no distance, no abstraction, no possibility of forgetting or being distracted. His heart is torn, and he weeps.
Why does Jesus weep? Is it for Martha, Mary and the Jews who are weeping and crying out: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”?
Is he moved by their loss, their sense of abandonment and their bewilderment in the face of death? Is he struck to the heart by the all too familiar conclusion that his absence indicates a lack of care? Three times he allows himself to be accused of culpable inaction by those who do not know any better:
“Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man
have done something so that this man would not have died?”
In Jesus, God enters into the powerlessness of the onlooker, the one who has to watch another die, feels his loss, and weeps.
Why does Jesus weep? Is it for himself, for his own loss and bewilderment? Was he, too, moved by that sentiment that touches any one of us as we stand before the grave of a loved one: “Today he, tomorrow me”?
Jesus is on the point of choosing to experience death, to drink the cup of mortality to the dregs. He is about to become the one who was and is no more, mourned and wept over, lost, abandoned. He will be that man, once warm and full of life, who becomes cold, grey and flaccid. His body will be washed and anointed, wrapped and bound, laid in a rock-hewn tomb to decompose and produce a stench. The death of Lazarus gives Jesus the opportunity to look his own death in the face before it happens. He stands before a tomb that might have been his own. Did his heart beat faster, his knees shake? “He was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved…. Jesus began to weep.”
“Take away the stone.”
What is he going to do? Is he going in there? Does he want to look on the dead face of his friend, to take in the vacant stare, the open mouth, the waxy skin? Does he want to feel the chill of death and breathe in a lungful of its stench? Jesus, however, is about something else altogether.
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
He does not prevent the death of a certain man because he is here to face down death in itself and rob it of its prey. He means to transform it from the ultimate triumph of evil into a passageway to unimaginable, abundant, everlasting life. But Jesus’ tears make it clear that, even as Lord of life, he does not dismiss death with a wave of the hand. He draws near to grief and loss; he takes upon himself the descent into darkness; he allows himself to be consumed by it.
“Lazarus, come out!”
How many bereaved voices have cried out similar words before a hospital bed, a coffin or a grave, in vain. Jesus cries out his human grief in union with all who experience loss. He cries out his divine grief that death should have carried off his beautiful creation, which he did not make to die. And Lazarus comes out. The prisoner of death is unwrapped, unbound and set free. The free man is all of us.
Each year during Passiontide, which begins tomorrow, we are given the opportunity to walk with Jesus toward his death. We will feel the rising tension and hear of whispered plots. We will be caught up in the crossfire of controversies. We will sit with him and his disciples for a last meal. And then we will step out into the darkness with him to witness his betrayal and abandonment, his mistreatment and humiliation, his torture and shameful, agonizing death. Likewise, every year, and in a particularly poignant way this year, we are invited to witness the passion and death of humanity. We do not know how far we, as a community and as individuals, will be invited to walk along that road. Already, the present crisis has moved from being something unfortunate happening in China, to a menace moving across the globe, to something crossing our borders and afflicting our big cities, something emerging in town after town, and now it is in our neighboring towns. We may not yet know anyone who is sick or who has died, but we do know people who know people who are sick or who have died. Will it touch our friends, our families, those whom we love? Will we share in the mourning of those who cannot go to be with the sick or the dying, but only hear, as Jesus did: “He whom you love is ill.” Will our hearts accuse us like Martha and Mary: “If you had been there, he would not have died”? Will this scourge enter the intimate circle of our own community and the bodies of those closest to us, threatening to take them away from us, ready or not? Will our monastery become a field hospital and each able-bodied sister a nurse? Will one or another of us find ourselves facing the dark threshold of death?
Hans Urs von Balthasar says that Jesus does not invite us into the depths of his misery, into the very pit of death. This is because there is a depth to which only he, the Son of God and Son of Man, can go. There comes a point where we, like the disciples and the women who followed Jesus, will excuse ourselves, or be excused, and this is fitting. He went there because we cannot, to save us from destruction. He touched bottom so that no matter how far we sink, we can find him with us. We do not know how deep our participation in the passion will be this year. What we do know, in faith, is that every passion and death now leads to resurrection. What we know, in faith, is that wherever we walk, in the light or in the darkness, Jesus has walked there; Jesus walks with us; Jesus will call us forth with a loud cry: “Lazarus, come out!”