Jesus began to weep

We went down a lot of different paths in our Lectionary group this morning. There are many obvious sermons available in this text. There are also subtle lines which could be preached alone; the Mary and Martha connection or doubting Thomas' blind faith unto death to name a few. But what struck me in our conversation was the depth of Jesus' emotion in this story.

Most of the time, and our translations help us with this, we read this portion of the raising of Lazarus with a very human Jesus in mind. He is so upset by the grief of Mary and Martha, as well as dealing with his own grief that he has nothing left in him but tears. This interpretation has a rich past, and has a lot to teach us about Jesus as fully God (that he could bring Lazarus back from the dead) and fully man (that he wept at his grave), though there is another avenue that I'd like to pursue.

We talked today about the commentators who read in the Greek a level of anger and frustration in Jesus' troubled spirit. From there we spring-boarded off into a great discussion of what is going on in the mind of Jesus in that moment. I go back and forth in my thinking about how much Jesus knew about the trajectory of his life on this earth. Did he know the day and the hour of his death? Or was he perhaps only able to know the signposts as he arrived at them, sorta like de ja vu moments? If we assume the latter, it seems to me that in this moment, as Jesus' spirit becomes greatly troubled, as he is deeply moved; he has figured out the signpost. In this climactic sign and wonder in John's gospel it is seems to become clear to Jesus that the end is near. He now knows that the next stop is Jerusalem - the cross - the grave - and the resurrection.

Jesus began to weep. Not over the loss of a friend, he's about to bring him back to life, but over the realization that it is going to have to come to what he had long feared. Over and over and over again, through individuals, the nation of Israel, the prophets, elders, kings, and other nations God had tried to call his people back to him. And time and time again they would not listen. Even in the course of Jesus' life he tried over and over to show people the Kingdom life while he was still with them, but they too could not understand. And so in this moment it becomes clear to Jesus, he must die at the hands of Rome. He has to be the one to rise from the dead for it to make sense to God's people. And he begins to weep.

The heartache, the raw emotion, the frustration. It is all right on his sleeve. This is, in John's Gospel, is one of the highest moments. In the raising of Lazarus from the dead the last straw has been broken. It is, as they say, all downhill from here until the final raising of Jesus in glory upon the cross. All tied up in the tears that flow.