Today’s Gospel reading is one of my favorites, plain and simple. It is a reading that has guided me throughout Seminary, especially in my Pastoral Care classes because I think Jesus is offering us an incredible example of how to care for one another in our grief. Something, that as author Lauren Winner points out in her book Mudhouse Sabbath is something that Christians aren’t always the best at doing.[1] I’ve noticed this quite a bit, and I’m guilty of it too that it can be really easy to drop off cards and food for a week or a two after someone has died, but then we keep going as if nothing has changed, leaving behind those who are still grieving. We aren’t taught how to sit with the grief and the discomfort for longer.
The other thing that I noticed in my Pastoral Care class and chaplaincy experience is almost the expectation that everyone will react to grief and death the same way. So, one of the things that I love about this story is that we get to witness the anger and frustration of Mary and Martha, expressing their anguish that Jesus could have done something to save Lazarus (John 11:21). I think the Biblical writers did a disservice to that real emotion though when they only give Martha about one line to express that. But grief and death meet us in different ways, especially depending on the context, which is something that I have experienced a lot in my time at Foss, and in doing my hospital chaplaincy internship primarily in a Children’s Hospital. We relate differently to death in those two places.
This past week, we had our quarterly memorial service at Foss, where we honor and remember the residents who have died in the last few months. Because of COVID, the memorial service got delayed for two months and we ended up having a service for 20 people this week; which is a lot, even for a place like Foss. Yet, even though it was delayed, as we were in that service, I was reminded of why it is so important for us to have those rituals together. To be a community in our grief. To laugh, cry, and share stories, just as we do when we have funerals in church. It is more than just something that we do, but it is a way for us to hold our grief together, especially when many of the deaths happened while the residents were quarantined.
In today’s Gospel, we witness Jesus hold the grief of the community as he enters into the midst of the ritual mourning. And, the thing that I appreciate the most is that Jesus wept too (John 11:35). There are varying degrees of thoughts about whether or not a pastor/chaplain should cry while giving pastoral care and leading funerals, etc. One the one hand, it is important to not let our grief get in the way of the grieving process that we are stewarding in the community, i.e. people still need to be able to hear you when you’re speaking, but on the other hand I think it shows how much we come to love and care about our communities too. We are not outside of the communal grief. And, it is an honor to be included in the process of stewarding that grief.
So what does the gospel tell us for today? Yes, it’s about the power of Jesus to resurrect Lazarus, to prove to the world that he really is the Son of God. In doing so, we get another “I am” speech from Jesus, something that is common in the Gospel of John because the Greek translates to “I, I am,” which is language only used by God. And, yes, we are given the promise of the resurrection which we confess in the Creeds. But, Lazarus is still going to die again. That’s a part of the story that often we forget. That Lazarus isn’t resurrected for eternity, but that those who love him will have to grieve him again; that this raising by Jesus only delays the inevitable until the time when Jesus comes again.
Yet, even with all of that, we are still reminded of the promise of the resurrection and eternal life. Jesus says, “I am the Resurrection, and I am the Life: those who believe in me will live, even if they die; and those who are alive and believe in me will never die” (John 11: 25-26). These are powerful promises that we confess together whenever we say the words of the Creed, and they are foundational to Christian hope. The hope that we have in what God will do in the future grounded in what God has already done in the past and what God is doing for us in the present. This is a promise not just for after we die, but is a promise for how we live too.
It is a promise that I think invites us into the grieving process together. This Gospel is a guide for how we care for one another in the time of loss and grief, but also gives us permission for how to be too. I think we get to be frustrated and angry with God because life is full of such incredible pain sometimes and we want God to step in and do something about it. It’s okay to feel relieved too; to know that someone is able to rest after so much time suffering. We have permission to let the tears flow, even if in the case of Jesus they aren’t always expected. There is no one specific way we need to grieve, and even the people who study the field have been talking about how understanding grief as five stages isn’t always helpful anymore. There isn’t an easy guide or steps to follow; we just have to be present with it.
So today, on this Sunday in Lent, as we prepare to hear the Passion story next week, may we give ourselves the permission to feel the grief how we need to. To know that we don’t need to put our grief in a box and set it aside, but that we can learn from the people in today’s Gospel about what it means to grieve as a community. And, as I told my students in class next week, may we be reminded that we can talk about hope and resurrection and eternal life outside of just funerals too because they are promises for all of life as well. And, we remember that Jesus wept too.
[1] Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath, (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2007).