Martha and Mary were right, in their accusations against Jesus. If he had been there, their brother would not have died.
The author, in recording these events, goes out of his way to make sure the audience understands that Jesus intentionally stayed away from the place until Lazarus was certainly dead. Jesus knew of the illness; he had the opportunity to go, but he didn’t. He refused to intervene.
I’m not sure what to make of God if Jesus, even in this moment, embodies the character of God. A God who waits to act when someone is in need seems cruel — perhaps even sadistic. I want to shout at Jesus: Your friend is suffering! The one you love is in agony! Go help him! I don’t even need Jesus to travel there to be with him; Jesus healed others from a distance — why not heal Lazarus from right where he is?
But he doesn’t intervene. He allows Lazarus to die. It feels like he makes Lazarus go through death. And not just Lazarus — Martha, Mary, the disciples — in their grief, they all go through death. Thomas the Twin even names this, saying “let’s go, to die with him.” So they go. They weep. Through their grief, they experience death, feel the weight and the realness of it. The finality. The very present absence.
Recently, an artist named Phil Elverum released a new album under his stage name, Mount Eerie. He wrote the songs in the wake of his wife’s recent death. The lyrics read like heartbreaking prose poetry. A few times he uses this line, almost like a grounding mantra: Death is real. In one song he sing-speaks:
Death is real
Someone’s there and then they’re not
And it’s not for singing about
It’s not for making into art
When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb
When I walk into the room where you were
And look into the emptiness instead
All fails
And in another song:
You had cancer and you were killed
And I’m left living like this
Crying on the logging roads with your ashes in a jar
Thinking about the things I’ll tell you
When you get back from wherever it is that you’ve gone
But then I remember death is real
It’s easy, when we know the end of the story, to want to jump to the end. It’s easy to remind ourselves that resurrection is around the corner for Lazarus, so all the present pain is tolerable, even acceptable. It’s easy to think that it’s okay that Jesus let his friend die because eventually he raises him from the dead, and Lazarus should be glad to have been used for God’s glory. Next Friday, it would be easy to think that it’s okay that God let Christ die, naked, publicly executed on one of the most brutal torture devices known to human history, because God eventually resurrects him.
Maybe. I don’t find much satisfaction in that narrative. It has a tone of “ends justifying the means” that I never see Jesus enact in his life — the means are always important to him.
So. There must be something important about going through death — not just approaching death but actually going through it. Grief seems to be important: for Jesus, for Lazarus, for Martha and Mary. For Phil Elverum, in his songs. For us.
Death is real. And death is real in more ways than only when a physical life ends. Addiction is another name of death; any number of substances can put someone in a tomb even while they’re still alive.
The end of a relationship is a death, and one that must be grieved. Even — perhaps especially — when that relationship is abusive, codependent, or otherwise bad, if the experience is to be learned from, there’s an additional death of certain patterns of behavior and ways of being that were learned in that relationship.
Church splits, too, are a face of death and a cause for grief, as some here know all too intimately.
Jesus wept. God cries. There must be something meaningful about going through death, about grieving, about ….. being heartbroken — that is, allowing our hearts to break open. Perhaps, grief breaks open our heart to let in something new.
Phil Elverum, the musician I cited earlier, released this statement:
Why share this much? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? We carefully held our family life behind a curtain of privacy. Then Genevieve died and I belonged to nobody anymore.
My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd idea // left over from a more self-indulgent time before I was a griever. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her.
DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album [which is actually named “A crow looked at me”]. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why [I share this much].
I think he’s touching on the transformative nature of shared grief. That when grief breaks my heart open, “the love and infinity” is what is allowed to flow out from my heart and into others … and the love and infinity is what is allowed to flow back into me.
Grief breaks open our hearts, and in doing so, delivers us great gifts. Theologian Roberta Bondi wrote in the wake of her mother’s death that “In grief, she found herself in a state of heightened awareness [a sharpening of the senses in wonder over the world]…all that she saw spoke messages to her of goodness, gratitude, hope, longing, love…the encounter was with reality itself, which reflects God, at a deeper level than we customarily meet it.”
Another theologian, Serene Jones, writes, “Grief is hard, actually the hardest of all emotions and perhaps most intolerable because its demands are so excruciating. It requires a willingness to bear the unbearable. It requires turning private agony into public, shared loss. If you can learn to truly mourn, then there is at least the possibility of moving on — not because the wound is mending or traumatic scars suddenly vanish… The gift of mourning is that fully awakening to the depth of loss that enables you to learn, perhaps for the first time, that you can hold the loss.”
A much more succinct theologian put it this way: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
And Jesus does comfort, though not by preventing death. Rather, he invites our grief, and joins us in our grief. He allows his heart to be broken open alongside ours, so that we might have the possibility of moving on.
It’s when we are in a tomb, bound in a place of death, it’s there in the midst of grief that the possibility of transformation is somehow strongest. When we feel overwhelmed and alienated by the cold mechanics of sickness and loss, Christ calls to us: Come out! When we want to stay in the dark, Christ invites us: Come out! When we feel the impulse to lock ourselves away until the brokenness of our hearts is put back together, Christ implores: Come out!
Death is a part of life, sure. It can occur at any time, often with no warning. In her wisdom, the Church made death a part of her liturgical year. The church is a place of community that first gathered around an event of trauma and of grace. We first gathered because of the suffering of a man from Nazareth.
And we continue to gather around those events, and their echoes, in our own lives. In the Eucharist, we hear Jesus joining in suffering with those facing death: the grieving, the addict, the rape survivor, the brokenhearted. His body, too, is broken at the beckoning of abusers. And the church not only remembers this, it enacts it. The church refuses to turn away from systemic abuse, exploited power, a humiliated victim, a broken body, blood prematurely poured. We don’t shield our eyes to the violence, we don’t skip the happy end of the story. We continue to observe it, to expose it, to name evil for what it is.
By tolerating the remembrance of this one act of death, we teach ourselves to see, hear, and hold all acts of death. By seeing the glory of one victim, we can narrate the glory we see in one another’s grief. And, yes, by remembering the resurrection of one man, we can hold the hope that new life is available after loss.
Next Friday, Good Friday, we’ll witness to the suffering of Christ on the cross. We’ll acknowledge that death is real. Through Holy Saturday, we’ll grieve, and we’ll wait, and we’ll sit vigil — with crusted tears, catatonic and raw, to see what light might enter our shattered hearts.
