John 11:28-37

01/17/10
John 11:28-37
Hudson UMC

The title for this week’s sermon comes from verse 35, which just says, “Jesus began to weep.” Some other translations read simply, “Jesus wept.” At two words, it is the shortest verse in the entire Bible. It seems small and insignificant, and if we aren’t paying attention as we read the passage, we might even miss it. And yet, that tiny verse is extremely important.

You see, Christian faith has always declared that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than the fullness of God in human flesh; as the beginning of the Gospel of John tells us, He is the Word of God become flesh. Over and over again, we read extravagant statements throughout the Gospels and the Epistles where we are both told and shown that Jesus is not simply a great human teacher, not simply a moral guru, not merely someone who teaches us the same kinds of things as a Ghandi or a Dalai Lama or any other kind of leader, but the One God of the universe living in our midst.

And yet, every once in a while, we read something that seems like it throws a wrench into our picture of Jesus. Earlier in John, we read about Jesus at the side of a well in Samaria who sat down because He was tired out because of His travels. On the cross, we see Him bleeding and asking for a drink because He is thirsty. Here, we see the God of the universe standing by the grave of Lazarus weeping tears of grief.

What are we to make of these things? What are we supposed to do with this person who is supposed to be the fullness of God when He is weak, tired, thirsty, and crying? It certainly seems that these kinds of things are utterly beneath God, doesn’t it? After all, how often do we think about God getting tired or thirsty? And yet, here it is in the Gospel. If we say we believe in Jesus, we need to come to some kind of conclusion about things like this, because they show up all over the place. In fact, the Gospel of John shows more clearly than any other document just how divine Jesus is, saying more explicitly than the other Gospels that Jesus is indeed a true divine Incarnation of God; and yet, it is in this very same book that we get the clearest picture of the humanity of Christ.

So, how can we deal with this tension? One way of dealing with it is to say that these displays of human weakness prove that Jesus is not really God. If this is the case, Jesus is just another human being who follows God, just like us. Maybe He has some kind of special relationship to the Father, but it isn’t because He is God, but because God has chosen to bless Him in some way or another. If this is the case, we have to ask the question, “Then why make such a big deal about Him? What makes Him so special? If He is finally just like us, why do we need to listen to Him and not the other religious and spiritual leaders in the world?” If Jesus really is nothing more than a creature, then He finally teaches us nothing about God and we are thrown back upon ourselves for meaning and truth. If we take this approach, we end up emptying the Gospel of all its saving significance, because what we see being done in Jesus is not being done by God. We also can make no sense out of things that He says like, “I am the way, the truth and the life, nobody comes to the Father except through me.” In that case, Jesus is nothing more than a pompous jerk, who we had better not follow.

Another way to think about it is this way. Christian faith has always declared that, in the single person of Christ there are two natures, a human nature and a divine nature. What if we were just to say that the human nature in Jesus wept but the divine nature remained above emotion? What if we were to say that, every time we see Jesus weak or tired or thirsty or sad, He is only weeping as a human, but not as God. This way, Jesus can still be God, but we don’t have to get bent out of shape when we see something like in our passage for today where we see Jesus weeping. Ah, but we run into a problem here, too. Now we have Jesus weeping, but God is not weeping. If Jesus is God, how can that be? Now, we have a big divide between the humanity of Christ and His divinity. Now we have a Jesus with a kind of a split personality. His humanity weeps with grief but His divinity doesn’t seem to care.

But what does this mean for God? It means that, even though God is willing to take on our limitations, to take on our brokenness, to take on our language, our bodies, and everything else about us, He is not willing to weep with us, is not willing to thirst with us. It would be as if God were to say, “I will come to you and stand with you and join with you in your plight…but I won’t weep with you.”

What does this kind of Jesus have to say to people who are hurting? What does this kind of Jesus have to say to the people who are facing tragedy in Haiti? What if this kind of Jesus were walking around the earthquake devastated island; what kind of comfort could He bring? The answer is, none at all, because if He is just a man, then He cannot even back up His own words. If His human nature and His divine nature can be separated from one another, how could we ever know whether His words of comfort, His kind actions, are actually from God and not just human words and actions? We never could. This kind of Jesus has nothing to offer humanity.

If God only comes this far, if God will enter into our bodies, but will not really enter into our condition of weakness, it means that there is something about us that is so bad that God is not willing to touch it. When we lose loved ones we cry. If God cannot cry because tears are weakness or because emotions are beneath Him, we are in a lot of trouble because we cannot escape our emotions, they make up part of who we are. Even if we are redeemed from our sins and empowered to live a life of holiness, we can never be free of our emotions. If God is not willing to take even our tears of grief upon Himself, then our emotions remain finally unredeemed.

But this is not, thanks be to God, what the Lord has done. Our God has done something so much more amazing, so radically different than we could ever think, that it makes the angels laugh. Our God has not only sent a prophet who could give us some kind of directions and tell us what to do. Our God has not only taken on the shape of a human being, He has not only taken on the body of a human being, but has actually become human. The Creator has become a creature. This is a crazy idea that we would never believe that we were worthy to even think, let alone actually participate in, and yet this is precisely what God has done.

Think about what this means for us today. It means that the immortal God of the universe has not held Himself back from completely identifying Himself with us with all our pains, and with all our suffering and with all our weakness. It means that when it seems that Jesus was grieving over the loss of a friend, He really is. It means that, when we say that God knows what it is like to suffer, it is not just because God knows everything, but because He has actually suffered our pain in the fullness of His humanity. It means that, when we look into the face of Christ, we look into the very face of God. We know that Jesus loves us, but sometimes we wonder if God is really like Jesus. According to the New Testament, there is no God behind the back of Jesus that we have to be afraid of. The only God there is is the one that is fully revealed to us in Christ.

This means that, despite what the great Greek philosophers and their countless followers have told us, God does feel emotion, He does not run away from our pain, but rather enters into it. The fact that God has entered into our humanity without holding back in any way shows us that, when tragedy strikes, God is moved. It means that when you are weeping over your loss or when you are crying out to God because you feel like every day is a chore, God is there by your side. God cares about your pain; He cares about it so much, He has felt it, too. When He became a human, God entered into the range of human emotion, the depths of human sorrow, and He took that pain, plumbed it to its depths, and took it to the cross. After He dealt with all of our issues in His own person, He was resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven, where the one who loves us and gave Himself for us prays for us that we might have the strength to endure. Now this Jesus has something to say to us and to the people in Haiti, because this Jesus, the only one there is, is both fully God and fully human and we can trust that, even when we see things like tears and thirst, it is because God has entered into solidarity with us completely. No part of our humanity is untouched by God’s becoming human.

In fact, Christ has not only given Himself for us in the objective sense that He died on the cross for us. He also did something else. Fifty days after Jesus was raised from the dead, the disciples were all gathered together in one place. At that time, the Holy Spirit was given to them. What, or rather, who is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is the one that Jesus calls the comforter, the one who goes along side us, the one who takes what is Christ’s and makes it ours. Christian faith has said that God is a Trinity of Persons in absolutely perfect unity and that, just as Christ is the second Person of that Trinity, the Holy Spirit is the third Person.

As the church thought about what the New Testament had to say about Christ, as they indwelled the Scripture in their daily lives and as they participated fully in the worshipping life of the church, they felt compelled to assert that Jesus was absolutely God and absolutely human. This conviction was felt so strongly that they believed that any other explanation completely undermined the integrity of the Gospel and reduced it to nothing. Very quickly after they came to that conclusion, they realized that they had to say some of the same things about the Holy Spirit. Of course, the Holy Spirit is not fully human, but the Holy Spirit is not any less God. The Scriptures speak of the Holy Spirit as both the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ. This means that, just as, when we look into the face of Christ, we see the face of God and just like when we hear the words of Christ or see His actions, we hear and see God, when the Holy Spirit is inside of us, this same God who Jesus called Father and became incarnate in Christ Himself enters into us as well.

This means that God has not just entered into humanity in general, but has entered into our humanity, your humanity and mine. We have been promised, not just what God has done on our behalf and in our place two thousand years ago, but what God wants to do in our hearts and lives now, even today; and what God wants to do in our lives is bind us to the perfect humanity of Christ, so that we, too, might live the kind of life Christ lived. When we step back for a moment and think about all that God has done for us, not because we can repay Him for it, not because we are worthy of it, but simply out of the sheer love that God has for you and for me, it is hard to not get excited.

After we read that Jesus began to weep, we continue on and read, “So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him.’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’” There were some who were touched by Jesus’ compassion, who were willing to stand with Him, as well as with Mary and Martha, and grieve together. A funeral is not the time to nitpick, not the time to find fault, but this is exactly what some of the people were doing. “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” They are essentially saying, “Yeah, it’s great that He’s crying with us, but, if He had just gotten here a little sooner, we wouldn’t be crying here at all.” And yet, there is more to the story than they realize. Jesus could have stopped Lazarus from dying, there is no question about that. He had healed many other people, He had done what no doctors in the world could do. But what the people did not know is that Jesus was going to do an even greater thing than stop Lazarus from dying. He was going to raise him from the dead.

This Jesus, who cries with us, who mourns with us, who enters into our brokenness and suffering, is still the Lord of the universe. He is still the resurrection and the life. He is still the light of the world who has life in Himself. This Jesus is the one who is still Lord over death. He is the one who not only had the power to prevent Lazarus from dying, but had the power to raise him back to life again. What is even more amazing is that this same Jesus has the power to save us from death. I don’t mean that He is going to save us from physical death because, as we have seen, this comes, even for the greatest saints. I mean that He has the amazing power to overcome all the pressures from our society, all the evil influence of the world around us, even all of our own perverse desires to be at the center of our own lives. Could Jesus have prevented Lazarus from dying? Of course He could. But even more incredible is that He can prevent us from dying the spiritual death that would separate us from God for all eternity.

So let us go into the world and face the trials of life as people who, though we weep from time to time, are people who are unafraid. Why are we unafraid? It is not because we can solve the world’s problems, because we can’t. It is not because we can work together and strive to make the world a better place because, simply on our own strength, we can’t. We go into the world with joy and no fear because we follow a God who has loved us so very much that He has been willing to enter into the deepest, darkest corners of our lives and shine His eternal light. We go forth without fear because our God has not been afraid of our evil, but takes that evil and uses it as the means by which we are forever bound to Him. We follow a God who has done the unthinkable, who endures even the terrors of death for us. Let us go and make a difference in the world because the Holy Spirit is taking the ministry of Christ and making it our own. Let us pray.

AMEN