Fourth Sunday in Lent
Western culture doesn't think much of death. I’d go so far as to say that we do everything we can to deny death and its reality. We don't even really talk about death, avoiding words like "death" or "dead", and instead say that someone has "passed away”, "moved on," or that they've been "called home by God." If we're in a more crass mood, we might say they've "bought the farm" or "kicked the bucket." Funeral directors do amazing work in caring for grieving families, but part of their job is to make someone who has died look like they're not dead.
Our culture rewards us for being able to pull ourselves together and carry on with life in the face of death and mourning. Speed, productivity, and denying the big, messy emotions that come with grief are the hallmark of our culture. In our rush to get things done we buckle down, button ourselves up, and try to move on. We put up walls to help keep the grief from spilling over into our days.
Compare that to the Japanese ritual of kugizushi, where family members of someone who has died use a stone to drive nails into the lid of the coffin of the one who has died.
Or as the custom used to be in Germany when Anke was growing up — that at the end of the funeral service, after the casket had been lowered into the grave, (Everybody watched the casket being lowered into the grave) every family member would throw a handful or shovelful of dirt onto the casket sitting at the bottom of the grave.
These kinds of practices make it hard to deny the reality of death and the grief that comes with it.
As many of you know, my father died on the 20th of November of this past year. Of course, he had not been himself since his stroke two and a half years ago. A year after that, a case of pneumonia landed him in the hospital, and he never went home again. Instead, he became a resident at one of the local nursing homes, along with my mom, who still resides in their memory care unit. Being able to visit only every few weeks, his decline was apparent to me — especially with the last couple of times I visited him.
So, it wasn't a tremendous surprise to me when I received a text from my sisters, telling me that he had fallen ill and that I should probably drive up to Pennsylvania sooner, rather than later. So, I drove up to the Nottingham Village nursing home, in Pennsylvania. My sisters and my cousin and I visited that evening, talking more to one another than to my dad, who lay motionless in his bed. And when it was time, we bid him goodnight, we told him we loved him, and we left.
I went back to my sister Cora Lynn's house, where I was staying. We each had a couple of martinis and were about to get ready for bed when her phone rang. It was around 2:00 AM, so we both immediately knew what the call was about. And when the call was over, and she confirmed my well-founded suspicions, we both burst into tears and hugged. We hugged one another until our tears and our sobbing finally ceased. And then we decided that the occasion called for bourbon and a cigar, because that was the epitome of my dad. It ended up being probably a couple of cigars and multiple bourbons, because it was about 5:00 AM when we finally went to bed. But it was not unproductive time. It was time spent actively grieving — time spent, at turns, crying and laughing. Time spent mourning our father's death, but also bathing in the legacy of a life well-lived.
Of course, that was not the end. I continue to grieve. But as I allow myself to be confronted by my father's death; as I contemplate its meaning and impact upon me, I find that it has begun to soften. And I find that I, in turn, have softened a bit. I'm more ready to laugh. I'm more ready to tear up.
In the tradition of the early Christian desert mothers and fathers, softening was the fruit of committed prayer and practice. Tears were considered a gift, shed over our grief due to loss. But also tears shed over the places in our lives that had become hardened; the times when our path turned away from God.
There are, of course, different kinds of tears. Tears of joy, tears of sadness, tears of rage. One type of tears are penthos tears, tears of sorrow or compunction, a puncturing of the hard shell of the heart, which pierces us to our core, reminding us of who we are at our deepest. This "gift of tears," as they are sometimes referred to, reveals to us the misguided perfectionism, the games we play, and the stories we tell ourselves, in order to convince ourselves that we are above the typical human mess of emotions. Penthos tears free us from lying and any form of pretense that takes over when we feel anxious or sad.
Theologian John Chryssavgis writes: "Tears and weeping indicate a significant frontier in the way of the desert. They bespeak a promise. In fact, they are the only way into the heart." This frontier is the boundary between our old ways of seeing and believing and the new wide-open expansiveness into which contemplative prayer calls us. Compunction awakens us to all the ways we lie to our deepest selves and to the profound longing that’s kindled when we pay attention to hearts.
The "gift of tears" written about by the desert elders was celebrated several centuries later by the Spanish mystic St. Ignatius of Loyola. These tears, he says, are not about finding a reason for our pain and suffering. They don’t give answers but instead call us to a deep attentiveness to the longings of our heart. They continue to flow until we drop our masks and the self-deception, and return to the source of our lives and longing. They are a sign that we have crossed a threshold into a profound sense of humility — a practice of remembering we come from the earth and to the earth we will one day return. (Sounds a lot like Ash Wednesday, doesn’t it?) This sign and this humility help us to hold our griefs and losses with great tenderness and compassion.
In today's Gospel, we find ourselves at the tomb of Lazarus, and we find Jesus, weeping. When Mary, the sister of Lazarus, came to where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:32). She doesn’t try to hold herself together. She doesn’t offer a composed theological reflection. She falls… apart. And she falls at his feet — and she weeps.
Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not tell her to pull herself together. He doesn’t tell her about the five stages of grief. The text tells us that "when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved" (John 11:33). The word translated "greatly disturbed" in the NRSV carries, in the original Greek, a sense of being shaken to one's core — even a kind of holy agitation.
And so, Jesus asks a simple question: "Where have you laid him?" (John 11:34). And when they show him, the shortest verse in all of Scripture follows — and it is perhaps the most profound: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35).
The crowd saw it too. "See how he loved him!" some of them said (John 11:36). But others — and this is telling — said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" (John 11:37). Even in the face of Jesus' tears, there are those who cannot resist the urge to reframe vulnerability as failure. Surely someone with his kind of power shouldn’t feel the need to weep.
But weeping is neither a failure of strength, nor of faith. It is a most honest expression of grief. Certainly, Jesus' final hours nailed to a cross, crying out "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" were a profound witness to the call of radical vulnerability as an expression of divine grace. From the manger to the cross, from Lazarus' tomb to Gethsemane, we see a God who does not stand apart from human anguish — but enters it fully, is shaken by it, and weeps.
We seek and experience God in the places of pain and sorrow, in the places of paradox and contradiction. Our tears can reveal our deepest gratitude, like when we finally discover that we cannot possess anything that has been gifted to us. We cannot possess the blossoming spring any more than we can possess our partner in life. We learn to love without holding on.
The times my marriage has bloomed even further have often been the times of shared vulnerability, when we allow ourselves to reveal our soft underbellies to one another. In the time of our 35 years together, Anke and I have experienced different losses; a parent, a grand-parent, friends, aunts and uncles… And each of those losses was a fresh sorrow that gave us permission to make space for us to walk together, tenderly, through those deserts.
Humility was essential to the desert elders in overcoming what they described as demons. Demons were essentially a metaphor for the things that vex and challenge us and break our hearts. Theodora of Alexandria, the amma — the "Mother" — of a monastic community of women near Alexandria, wrote: "Nothing can overcome us, but only humility." "Do you see how humility is victorious over demons?" (Theodora 6). Humility is a way of consciously bringing ourselves into relationship with all that is tender and vulnerable within us and honoring our humanity. When Mary fell at Jesus' feet, she was practicing exactly this kind of humility. Not the humility borne of self-abasement, but the humility of honesty, of allowing her grief to be seen, of not pretending that everything was fine. And Jesus, rather than stepping back from her pain, stepped into it with her. He was shaken to his core. He was moved. He cried.
There is a certain seductiveness to the myth of strength — of pretending that everything is fine while, on the inside, we’re struggling. How others mumble and pull away sometimes when we reveal that our grieving persists, when they think we should be over it. How the demands of work continue to call, asking us to push through it all.
What I’ve discovered over the past sixty years, and especially over the past couple of years, is that the places of the greatest disruptions in my life have, surprisingly, been the occasions where I’ve stumbled upon the most profound gifts. The times when I’ve allowed myself to feel my broken heart, and to know my woundedness, are the times when my compassion for my fellow human beings has deepened beyond my previous capacity.
Tyler Sit writes about this as well, in his book Staying Awake: The Gospel for Changemakers, describing this resistance to vulnerability as a form of toxic masculinity in our culture, in which "we men weaponize stereotypes of masculinity (like being forceful or unfeeling) to perilous effect on other people, the planet, and ourselves." He goes on to highlight how toxic masculinity is so pervasive that it’s hard to see it — and churches often reinforce it. It affects women and men both. This culture of strength and aggressiveness means we bypass our grief and never allow it space so we can move forward toward healing. Our pain becomes directed in other ways, and our lives and relationships suffer. In my training as a grief coach, this was one of the things that we were constantly brought back to. Grief will always express itself. The only question is whether it does so in a healthy way, or not. Because if we don’t allow ourselves to deal with it, it will come out sideways. And that’s when our lives, likewise, start going sideways.
The Lenten discipline for this week is to allow a great softening this season and, in the fertile earth of your heart, to see what begins to sprout there that never had a chance in the heretofore hardened soil found there. Like Mary, let yourself fall. Let yourself be seen in your grief. Let the one who was greatly disturbed in spirit — who asked simply, "Where have you laid him?", and then wept — let that Jesus meet you in front of your own tomb this week.
As you practice a fast from strength, you learn to let go of the ways you've tried to hold everything together. Resist the demand to continue pushing when everything in your body and heart cries out to you to rest. Give space for the exquisite vulnerability of being human. Jesus wept. And in his tears, the world was not made weaker. It was made whole. AMEN