Comfort and Confidence
The Feast of All Saints
Sunday, November 23, 2024
Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44
Not long ago, I was introduced to the term “emotional lability.” I was meeting with someone who started to tear up unexpectedly. As she reached for a tissue, she acknowledged that those tears had been a little closer to the surface of late, and she attributed it to being “emotionally labile.”
Since I didn’t know anything about the clinical nature of that term, I initially heard it as something positive. The word “labile” means flexible, elastic, and malleable, which to me sounded like a good thing—as if it were a healthy way of being in touch with your emotions. Of course, the word “labile” also means unsteady and unstable, and it turns out that, in the clinical sense, that term is applied to people whose wild emotional swings have taken control of their lives. I don’t think the person I was with meant it in the clinical sense, but I wonder whether we might find a different way of talking about the nearness of emotional experience as a positive thing—maybe “emotional flexibility” or “accessibility.”
Standing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. As a child, I learned that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the bible, but it wasn’t until much later that I started to realize how profound and deep is the truth contained in those two little words: Jesus wept. We believe in a God who loves us and comes among us not as an invincible warrior who vanquishes our enemies but as tender companion who cries with us, suffers with us, and dies with us so that we might be raised with him to new life. That is the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Still, we wonder why Jesus wept. Lazarus, his friend, was dead. There’s no doubt about that. But, even from the beginning, there also seemed to be little doubt about how this story would end. From the opening verses of John 11, when Jesus first heard that his friend was sick, Jesus made it clear that Lazarus’ death would not have the final word. In his telling of the story, John stresses that, even though Jesus knew that Lazarus’ life was in danger, he stayed put for two more days in order to make sure that Lazarus had died before Jesus could get there to heal him. “For your sake I am glad I was not there,” Jesus told the disciples, “so that you may believe.” At every step, Jesus remained in control, as if he knew all along that his friend’s tragic death would be an opportunity to show his followers that he had the power to raise him from the dead.
And, still, Jesus wept. He knew that he had the power to bring his friend back. He knew exactly what he would do. He knew that he would stand at that grave and cry out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” But, when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and when he saw the people who were with her also weeping, and when he came to the place where his friend had been buried, Jesus was overcome with emotion, and he joined them in their tears.
God knows exactly how everything will work out. God knows that he will raise us from the dead and bring us to new and everlasting life. God knows that, because of Jesus Christ, death itself has been defeated and its sting has been robbed of all its power. And still God comes among us as one who weeps. Jesus loved Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Even though he had the power to overcome death and bring his friend back from the grave, he was not immune to the grief of his friends. He was not insulated from his own sense of loss. He felt it deeply, and he wept with his friends, real tears of pain and loss—the same tears we weep when our loved ones die.
I am comforted by Jesus’ tears—not only because his gesture of compassion provides me pastoral consolation but also because he shows us that, even though we know our loved ones will rise again, our grief is not a sign of faithlessness or defeat. Like Jesus, we are filled with sadness when someone we love dies, even though we know that God will bring them back, and that sadness does not displace our confidence in the power of God’s love. Like Jesus, we can experience both.
I am comforted by Jesus’ tears, but my confidence comes from something else. It has become fashionable in Christian preaching and teaching to talk about God as the one who suffers with us, who cries with us, who dies for us. And, while our faith is built upon the fact that God’s plan of salvation is accomplished through the death of God’s incarnate Son, who did suffer just as we do, it is God’s power that has triumphed over death once and for all. More than the mere companionship of a sympathetic friend, it is God’s victory over death that gives us hope, and we see that play out in Jesus’ exchange with Mary and Martha.
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary said to Jesus, repeating words that her sister Martha had said only a few verses before our reading picks up. Kneeling at his feet, she offered these words as a confession of faith. We might instinctively hear them as an expression of angst and defeat, but her posture suggests that she was attributing to Jesus a profound confidence in his ability to heal the sick. Similarly, some in the crowd asked whether the one who had the power to give sight to the blind would not also have been able to keep Lazarus from dying. With this repeated theme, John, the gospel writer, wants us to see that the people around Jesus were ready to believe in him, but they didn’t realize how far that belief could go.
When Jesus told them to roll away the stone that sealed shut Lazarus’ tomb, Martha objected, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” But Jesus replied, drawing from her and the crowd a faith not only in a Jesus who had the power to cure the sick but in one who had the power to raise the dead: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” John finishes this episode with a triumphant description worthy of a Halloween script: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”
Do we believe in a savior who can heal the sick or one who can raise the dead? Do we believe in a God who comforts us in our sorrow or one who defeats the forces of evil, which are the source of that sorrow? In Jesus Christ, we see that the answer is both. We are comforted by the one who is with us in our struggles, who experiences our pain and suffering, and who loves us from a place of vulnerability and weakness. And we are emboldened by the one whose suffering and death are the means by which death itself is defeated—the one who, although immune to the power of death, endured death in order to defeat it once and for all. We are moved by Jesus’ tears, and we are saved by his death and resurrection—saved by a God whose love is vulnerable yet whose power is triumphant.
Today is the feast of all the saints—all the people of God who have been buried with Christ in his death and who have been raised with him to new life. That’s you and me and the children of God who are being baptized today. And what does it mean to be a saint of God except to be able to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ? Sometimes those eyes are filled with tears because we are moved deeply by the pain and hurt that are all around us. But through those tears we also see the new life that awaits us and the whole world. We may need to be emotionally and spiritually flexible to experience the joy and the pain of life all at once, but Jesus has shown us that that is possible, and it is by following him that we learn how.© 2024 Evan D. Garner
