“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
The last entry began to reflect on that first promise, and the good news that, when it comes to overcoming our own spiritual poverty, it not about what strength we’re able to muster for ourselves, but about the life and strength and flourishing that Jesus freely offers us in spite of ourselves. Now, we’re going to press into the reality and experience of mourning, and the promise of comfort that Jesus offers to everyone who mourns.
In the grand scheme of human relationship, I tend to think that there is nothing more difficult than these two challenges: to mourn well, and to comfort well those who are mourning. As Americans, particularly, we are - culturally speaking - terrible at both these things. We don’t know how to mourn and, for that reason, we don’t know how to comfort one another very well. Why is that? There are a lot of reasons for this struggle, to be sure, but underneath it all it seems to me the trouble is that mourning is, in its essence, about loss, and we just aren’t quite sure how to handle loss. In bold, generic strokes, the American narrative is about victory, overcoming obstacles, carving out a life for yourself from a land of wilderness and adversity. So when one of us misses a step on that road to triumph in a way that leaves us genuinely wounded, we’re just not all that sure what to say. Is there anything that makes us feel more awkward or powerless than being confronted with another person in mourning?
Maybe it’s a friend who recently experienced the loss of a loved one - a death in the family. Maybe they just found out that they’ve been cheated on or served divorce papers. Maybe they’ve been unceremoniously laid off and suddenly uncertain of how they’re going to provide for their family. Confronted with genuine loss, we quickly find ourselves at a loss for words. Or worse, we try to find comforting things to say, and end up saying the most terribly trite, empty things. What do you say to a friend who just found that their 4 year old child is going to die from cancer? (Or to Michael Brown’s mom, or to an Iraqi father who just lost his whole family in an emerging genocide?) Imagine: This is someone you care about, whose heart is being ripped out by an unspeakable circumstance, and they’re coming to you, their friend, looking for a word of comfort. What do you say?
Sometimes, when a word is the thing we need most, words are the one thing we just don’t have. Because we know that, no matter what we say, it can’t bring back that person, that elemental value, that has been lost. And we say, “I’m SO sorry…”, though we’re not apologizing for anything. Or, worse, we try and fill the void by saying something philosophical and profound like, “We just need to trust that everything happens for a reason.” Or, “God must think you’re really STRONG, because you know he never gives us more than we can handle.”…
Our bad theology becomes glaringly obvious at the worst possible times, doesn’t it?
If we are powerless and - at best - wordless in the face of genuine suffering and loss and mourning, how might we ever hope to find and offer comfort to one another? When a piece of ourselves has been lost, how can we ever hope to be made whole again? “Blessed are those who mourn”, Jesus says, “for they shall be comforted.” To understand what this means and how this works, we’re going to look at another story in scripture, and watch as Jesus himself engages with loss and death and grief. We’re going to observe as Jesus offers and embodies this comfort he promises. And as we do so, we’re going to find that: there can be comfort in mourning because we know that in the love of Christ, we do not mourn alone, and in the victory of Christ we will not mourn forever.
The Love of Christ: The God Who Mourns
In John chapter 11, we find the story of the death of Lazarus. Which, as many of you know, has a bit of a surprise ending. We’ll come to that in a moment. But to begin, the account unfolds something like this:
Jesus is traveling around teaching, ministering, healing the sick and freeing the spiritually oppressed when word is sent to him that this man - Lazarus - has fallen dangerously ill. Lazarus was the brother of Mary and Martha, and by all accounts these were some of Jesus’ closest personal friends. In fact, the message that Mary and Martha send along to Jesus was simply this: “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” A couple of verses later, John again reiterates the point. He tells us that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” There were a lot of people around Jesus most of the time, but it’s made pretty clear that these folks were not just a few more faces in the crowd.
For reasons that were not immediately clear, though, Jesus does not rush to Lazarus. In fact, we are told that after receiving that urgent message, he stayed where he was for two more days. And, by the time he and his disciples finally do begin to make their way towards Bethany, Lazarus has already died. Why did he stay away? Why did he not come sooner? These are questions that we’ll have to seek the answers for in time, but whatever the case may be, as Jesus arrives in Bethany we know that he’s no longer headed to the hospital to visit a sick man; he’s headed to the funeral home to mourn a dead man. And whatever the circumstances and questions may be that are swirling around the timing of Jesus’ arrival, we cannot miss the significance of this: Jesus DOES mourn. In verse 32 of John 11, John tells us this:
"Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” - (John 11:32-37 ESV)
As church kids doing memory verse exercises and memorization challenges growing up, John 11:35 was always a favorite. It was a really easy verse to memorize, because it’s only two words: “Jesus wept.” I remember joking about it as an 8 year-old boy: we might struggle to get more complicated verses memorized, but at least we always had John 11:35. We may not have had a clue about its context or meaning, but it was an easy one to check off a list.
But for a verse so quickly mastered by Sunday School kids everywhere, you could build a doctoral thesis on these two little words. Because, as Jesus weeps with and for his loved ones, we find ourselves introduced to the suffering sovereign. We see the God for whom life, death, creation itself spins around in the palm of his hand, crumpling to his knees, tears streaming down his face, mourning. Sharing in the suffering of his people to the point that he is overcome. The lower jaw of God himself begins to clench and quiver, his eyes glass over with tears, and he loses it in front of all these people. “See how he loved him!” they say.
Paradoxically and profoundly, it is in this discomfort of Jesus that we find hope for our own comfort restored. Because as we see in Jesus the heart of a creator God who, compelled by love, enters into and inhabits the journey of suffering and loss and mourning alongside of us, we come to understand that no matter where we are, no matter what we have lost and how broken that loss has left us, we have never been left to mourn alone.
Words fail us when we are faced with a crippling loss. And we know that, more often than not, what our friends in mourning need from us are not our hasty and ill-conceived attempts at a philosophy of suffering. They just need our presence. They need to know that they are not alone; that there are others who are willing to bear their burden of grief with them. That’s what good friends do for one another in times of mourning. And if there is any comfort to be gained from the presence and compassion of friends in our seasons of grief, how much more so may we be comforted by the knowledge that, should even every earthly friend fail us, the very creator of the universe still remains at our side, on his knees, sharing our tears?
In the love of Christ, we know that we do not mourn alone.
The Victory of Christ: Suffering and Mourning Undone
It’s incredible, and it’s totally unheard of - even blasphemous - to consider under almost any other worldview or system of religious thought, but the God we meet in Jesus is a God who suffers with us, and shares our tears. Isaiah refers to Jesus as a “Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”; “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows… upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.”
Jesus suffers and mourns, but that is only half the equation. And as profound as it truly is, on its own that is not enough. The tears of Jesus are not enough to make hope possible. Because if Jesus is only a co-sufferer; if all he has to offer are his tears, then he is little more than just a really good friend. But Jesus is more than that; oh so infinitely more! You see, Jesus has tears. But it turns out that the tears of God are profoundly different from our tears. And as we continue to unpack this story around the death of Lazarus, we discover just how different they are.
Our mourning - human mourning - is an expression of sadness and heartache that comes from being in a place of powerlessness and loss. We mourn, because we have lost someone or something that we have absolutely no power to bring back, so our tears are tears of emptiness and frustration and injustice. Human mourning is a sadness that has no place to go for consolation - with no escape from the emptiness - so we end up depressed, or destructively angry, and eventually our heart just gets tired, and we resign ourselves to the fact that there’s nothing that can be done and so do our best to carry on, trusting that the passage of time will dull the pain. But the tears of Jesus are not tears of powerlessness. In fact, they are quite the opposite. When Jesus hears that Lazarus has fallen ill, scripture says that Jesus tells his disciples: ”This illness does not lead to (end in) death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Of course, Jesus then stays where he is, Lazarus succumbs to his sickness and dies, and then Jesus and his disciple finally arrive in Bethany in the midst of this community’s season of mourning. And, as we have discussed already, the heart of Jesus is “deeply moved”, he is troubled, and he mourns. But our English translations of the originally Greek new testament can be a little misleading, however. Because where our bibles read that Jesus was “deeply moved”, the word being translated there is “embrimaomai”, the emotional thrust of which is one of prophetic anger; righteous indignation. (Think: Snorting of horses. Nostril-flaring indignation) Jesus sees the pain of these people whom he loves, he comes face to face with the evil of death and loss that has thrust itself upon the good creation of God, and laid waste to these persons created in love, and to reflect the image of, God himself. And what is his response? Jesus doesn’t just get weepy… het gets heart-rendingly pissed off. And this Jesus, who proclaims that he, himself is the resurrection and the life that humanity’s hopes hang upon, with tears still in his eyes walks up to death itself and just throws down. Jesus steps up to the grave of his friend and declares the authority to overturn death and loss. “Lazarus!” Jesus speaks into the darkness of the grave; “Come out.” And Lazarus gets up and walks out of his own grave. Do you think the tone of that party changed a bit?
What we realize is that even though you and I may be powerless to stand up to death, powerless to restore those things that have been lost and left us broken and a little less whole, Jesus is not. He is the one who declares victory over death and brokenness, and he is the one who will restore all things to rights. As dramatic as the whole Lazarus episode may have been, that was only a picture and preview of what Jesus will one day work over all of creation itself; made possible by the price paid, and the victory secured, through his own death and resurrection. The Apostle John writes of his vision of this future day:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away…. And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”, Jesus says. It is in light of the victory of Jesus that we believe and can cling to the knowledge, that in the end even the most unspeakable losses will be completely overcome and undone. It isn’t just that in light of heaven we will somehow forget the pain and losses of this present life, but the victory of Jesus goes backwards as well as forwards. Jesus does not only redeem our future. One day, in his glory and utter victory, he will redeem and restore our past, too. And that is why Jesus can say “Blessed are those who mourn.”; because he knows that when Heaven crashes into Earth, the deeper our wounds have gone, the more deeply his healing will go… “They will be comforted.”
C.S. Lewis put it this way: that “Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into glory". In the Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien envisions a time in which "everything sad is going to come untrue."
The Apostle Paul puts it this way: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” - (1 Corinthians 2:9 ESV)
The truth is that sometimes, when a word - a profound word, a comforting word - is the thing we need most, words are the one thing we just don’t have… and that’s ok. Because Jesus has the LAST word. And that word is healing. It is comfort. It is restoration. That word is Jesus himself. The temptation for us, though (particularly in the social media age), is to FORCE a word - to find SOMETHING to say in the face of suffering/mourning, no matter how trite or terrible or empty that something may end up being. But what our world - our friends, our loved ones - what we need is not a quick and empty word. What our world needs is not 100 million twitter users leaping to 100 million bully-pulpits, raging and railing or offering saccharine platitudes. What our world needs is a people who are practiced in the ministry of faithful, tearful, but hope-filled PRESENCE. We are called to be a people in whose tears the world may see the tears of Christ, and in whose hope the world may see the victory of Christ. A people who are willing to sit in the humility of wordless tension long enough to let Jesus speak HIS word of compassion and victory, over and through our mourning.
There can be comfort in mourning because we know that in the love of Christ, we do not mourn alone, and in the victory of Christ we will not mourn forever.
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