26 March 2023
Checkbox Grief
John 11:1-45
The gospel traditionally attributed to John the Disciple does not get a spot in the three-year rotation known as the Revised Common Lectionary. The other three gospels are similar, with Luke and the authors of Matthew drawing on a version of Mark, then adding material from a lost gospel we call Q, as well as from their own unique sources. The events and teachings are sometimes reorganized, and not always in the same geographic location, but they represent essentially the same narrative.
John, on the other hand, is odd, with many stories not found in those other gospels. Not only are many of the stories in John unique, they are often long and highly developed. Some scholars have argued that this sophistication means John must have been written much later, though there is no basis for that assumption. Later doesn’t necessarily mean smarter. Just watch the news.
Passages from John are sometimes difficult to work into a Sunday reading because of their length and depth. Such was the case last week, with the story of the man born blind, and such is the case this week, with the story of the death of Lazarus.
And gosh, does this story have problems! Does Jesus really believe Lazarus won’t die from the illness, as he actually says? Or does he believe the death of Lazarus will be a chance to demonstrate his power, which he also sort of says? That makes him a bit of a jerk, since resurrection or not, there are those four days of unnecessary grief, but it makes sense in the context of John, since the gospel attributed to John is organized around signs of the power of Jesus, beginning with the wedding at Cana and the cisterns of water turned into wine, and not rot gut, but the good stuff. John is sometimes thought to be based on a proto-gospel scholars refer to as a “signs” gospel.
With Lazarus, we’re left with lots on unanswered questions even after the happy resurrection. The ancient credal formulas claim Jesus as the first-born of the dead, text taken from the Revelation to John of Patmos. So what is Lazarus? Jesus ascends to heaven and so once resurrected, escapes a second death. Presumably, Lazarus is going to die a second time, which really doesn’t seem fair.
Plus we’ve got the problem we wrestled with last week, the supposed antagonism between Jesus and the Jews.
Here, at least, the text seems to suggest that Jew means specifically residents of Judea, which is different from other passages in the gospels that describe Jesus as being in conflict with Jews generally, with Pharisees, the movement within the Israelite religion with which he actually had the most in common, and with the Scribes, the literate class associated with political and religious power, and none of which changes the fact that Jesus led a social movement and religious reform that angered both those who held power and those who had other ideas about reform. Nor does it change the fact that Jesus was himself a Jew, at least as we use the term today, though from Galilee, a region Judeans considered a backwater but that was actually kind of cosmopolitan.
Because of thousands of years of Christian antisemitism, we must always provide this asterisk when dealing with the texts of conflict.
And if you feel like that is a whole lot of context for a story you thought you already knew, it is going to get worse, for I don’t care about any of that stuff this morning. I want to focus on one verse in this long story. Verse 33 if you are keeping score, which reads in the New Revised Standard Version “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.”
Isn’t that sweet! Putting aside that Jesus presumably let his friend died so he’d have a chance to show-off, at least he is compassionate when he encounters the grieving, which is all any of us could hope for from our pastors.
Except that is not what the text says. The Greek says that Jesus became angry and agitated.
Now that is a whole different kettle of fish.
We are so busy trying to turn Jesus into the wimp that those with privilege and power prefer him to be that scholars even bend over backwards to soften his edges, changing his emotions completely. At least when Martin Luther translated this verse into German he was accurate rather then sentimental, something that remains true in German language translations today.
Now, I learned about the stages of grief decades ago, though we know now that they are not so much stages as they are waves that we may or may not master, that may or may not see the worst of the storm pass, but that will always be there. And I am pretty certain that one of those waves is anger.
Jesus is angry and agitated. Is he angry at himself for not getting to Bethany sooner? At Mary because she doesn’t display sufficient trust in his abilities? At the Jews just because they are the “Straw Men” in John? The text doesn’t give us much information, so we can only speculate about why he is angry and who is the target of his anger, and that speculation says way more about us than it does about him.
What I do know is that sappy maudlin Jesus who is deeply moved and disturbed doesn’t work for me, and angry and agitated Jesus does, because I’m an actual human, and grief is not one thing, not one affectation, not one emotion, and sure as heck not one day.
I don’t want My Little Pony Jesus with rainbows and sparkles. I want Batman Jesus, always on the side of the good, but a little dark and willing to go to the desperate side of Gotham City. Because, you know, there is a desperate side of Gotham City, and the Joker is most definitely out there. In fact, they talk about him on the news frequently.
Emotions are not neat little boxes, easy binaries you flip on or off. You don’t check off grief and you are done with it. You can be angry and sad at the same time. You can even be happy and sad at the same time because we’re human. The world is weird and quantum and entangled and amazing and terrifying and beautiful, all of these things, all at the same time.
Though I’m not quite ready to go the Schrödinger route and declare that Lazarus is in his tomb both alive and dead at the same time until it is opened. If the myth and pictures are to be trusted, mostly he just stinks.
We can be incredibly sad that the best parts of a loved one are gone from our life and kind of relieved at the same time, especially if the final years brought out a different person, for pain and fear can bring out the best in someone but doesn’t always.
We can love the best of our country and repent for its many sins and grieve for missed opportunities and destroyed lives.
Jesus is angry, for whatever reason. But disturbed and moved is easier. Wimpy Jesus is easier.
Grief is hard. You know what is even harder? Bringing back the dead.
And so I close with this, as we march toward Gethsemane and Golgotha. We can’t reanimate a cold lifeless body in the way Jesus does in this story. But we can certainly bathe the stinky and bandaged, call loved ones from the grave of overwhelming grief, become angry and agitated at unnecessary death, and roll away the stone of guilt. Because God, the God the disciples experienced in Jesus, is there, at the margins, in the dark places, with those in the wee hours of the night, thinking they can’t go on.
You are loved.
You are love.
Amen.