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April 10, 2011, Passion Sunday, All Souls' Episcopal Church 

Jesus wept. 

The Gospel reading for this Fifth Sunday in Lent presents us with a sad, touching, and all too familiar scene. Martha and Mary are deeply grieving the death of their brother Lazarus. It is always well worth bearing in mind that of all the characters in all of his parables – kings, shepherds, prodigal sons, fathers, farmers, and wealthy merchants – Jesus gives only one of them a name, and he is a homeless person and a beggar, and he calls him Lazarus, the name of his own dear friend. Perhaps when we are willing or able to understand the full implications of this simple fact we also will grasp the depth of meaning contained in the simple phrase: “Jesus wept.”

It is called the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” It also is among the most powerful of verses for what it tells us. Scholars may debate why Jesus wept, but what is important for us is to know is that in Christ, our Lord enters fully into this incarnate life with all its pain, weariness, and struggle; its hunger, thirst, and hardship. Isaiah writes: “He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” “Day by day, like us, he grew; tears and smiles, like us, he knew.”  

Today is called Passion Sunday from the Latin: ‘passio,’ or ‘suffering.’ Mary and Martha clearly were suffering; they were suffering the death of their brother; they were grieving. I cannot speak for anyone but myself when I say that if there was a pill which would take away all pain and sorrow connected with the death of a loved one, it would be tempting to take it. However, if the pill also removed all memory of that loved one, I would never take such a thing. Neither would have Martha or Mary. You see, it is love that leaves us open and exposed to hurt and pain but the answer never is to give up on love or to try and build a hard, protective shell around yourself. Jesus wept. Somehow, in the divine economy, our pain and suffering is sanctified in and by Christ. 

Perhaps the best way to approach this is to consider another passage also associated with our Lord’s sacrificial death. This verse concerns the Temple in Jerusalem in which there were various divisions or barriers. For example, Gentiles were allowed only to enter the outer court called the Court of the Gentiles. Women were allowed only so far inside the Temple and were assigned their own place. Even the most sanctified of worshippers could not pass through the curtain which divided the rest of the Temple from the inner sanctum and the Holy of Holies. This is where God’s presence was said to dwell. God remained on one side of the veil and humanity remained on the other. We are told that when Jesus died upon the cross the veil of the Temple was torn in two. When the “full, perfect, and complete sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction” was once offered, the veil separating God and man was torn in two; torn from “top to bottom,” the implication being that it was torn by God himself. Ever since then we’ve been trying to sew that veil back up again.

Most of the heresies in the early church were attempts to sew the veil back up again. It was easier to believe that Christ either was God posing for a time as a man or else that he was a man who was “divinized” and transformed into a god. What many resisted believing was that Christ was both God and man, fully and completely God and fully and completely man. It just seemed like blasphemy or foolishness to have God too closely connected with all this messy human pain and suffering. However, “what God hath joined together let no man put asunder” 

We need to keep these words in mind. “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder.” We need to remember these words because we tend to place veils where no veils belong. For example, none of us has a “private life” when it comes to God. I have never yet heard a prayer begin: “Almighty God … guess what.” It’s not like he doesn’t already know. None of us has a private life when it comes to God, and there is no such a thing as a special part of our life where we get to rule and God doesn’t. That is just a mental veil placed there as a convenient fiction.

Sometimes we place veils between various spheres of activity so that we keep our family life, our business life, and our community involvement separate all the while claiming that we desire consistency and continuity so that we behave like the same person wherever we are and whatever we’re doing. However, as long as you insist upon being the one in charge of your own life, and not God; as long as you are the director of your own play, you are not really searching for integrity; your ego is just looking for a cheering section.

Sometimes we place veils in such a manner as to create dualities where none exist. For example, we may well treat ‘liberty’ and ‘law’ as if they are competing principles when they are not. As our recent guest preacher, Dr. Victor Lee Austin, would remind us, we ought not to make a dualism out of the concepts of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom.’ When we are young one of the first false dualisms we entertain is between ‘happiness’ and ‘virtue.’ We may also regard the concepts of God’s immanence and God’s transcendence as if they were opposing principle when they are not. There is something broken inside us and at war which insists upon treating ‘transcendence’ as if it means ‘distant’ or far away. But that is not what ‘transcendent’ means. God is never far way. He is never at a distance. In fact, it is precisely because God is transcendent that he is also ‘omni-present.’ God is never far away, and this is to be remembered especially in pain and weariness. He is with us. This is exactly what Passiontide tells us. No matter where we are; no matter what has happened; in all that pain and confusion involved in all this living and dying we call life, he is with us. He is with us in the midst of it all, above it all, beneath it all, before it all, and beyond it all. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas:

O Christ whom now beneath a veil we see / may what we thirst for soon our portion be.To gaze on thee unveiled and see thy face / the vision of thy glory and thy grace.

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