Being sad in the world, Pt. 4
John 11; Resurrection as a metaphor for that Something beyond the horizon of our darkness; Inhabiting that place beyond the horizon: true faith, philosophy, spirituality.
“When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.
“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.
Jesus wept.
Then 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?”
Jesus Raises Lazarus From the Dead
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.
“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”
Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”
So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”
When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”
Think now of Jesus when he’s at the tomb of his friend. Imagine you’re there when Jesus shows up. Notice how the scene slows way down when he gets there, like the air gets thick in his presence. That is, everything is slow and deliberate because Jesus is slow and deliberate. He walks through the crowd of mourners now, walking as though he were holding a video camera, panning the scene, beholding every expression and word, awake to every strand of sorrow. And when he kneels down into the dust and begins to weep, he weeps not his own tears merely, but the tears of many.
Tell me about despair yours.
He weeps the tears of Martha’s disappointed faith and of Mary’s broken love. He weeps the tears of the no-joke loss and chilling absence that is the death of every human life. He weeps the tears of those who never knew a brother like those sisters knew Lazarus, and the tears of those for whom death always digs down into old wounds of lost parents, friends, or neighbors. Jesus weeps for Lazarus because he loved him, and he weeps the tears of loss Lazarus could not.
And this is the point. Imagine it. Knees still planted in the dust, the tears of many still in his eyes, he says, “roll away the stone.” This is an image of being sad in God’s world; not sad and stuck in our heads. Jesus is carefully aware of the world’s pain, all the while waiting and watching for resurrection. Leaning into the darkness, but alert and keen-eyed to what’s possible just beyond the dark’s seemingly endless horizon.
This posture is a mind aware of the jutting edges of suffering and evil, and attuned to the reality of the God who sets the sun on its course and gives breath to the living and receives back the dead. Job was called to step inside that Reality (God’s, that is) by paying attention to the world around him, for our world’s is, strictly speaking, God’s. God’s poem left for us in Job 38-41 is harsh and exciting, like wild geese, like a freight train in full momentum, like a smelly corpse waking and walking out the tomb, grave linens and all. Its force is meant to outmatch the grip of our illusions and set us free into the real world where much sorrow is presided over by an unrelenting Life and Peace. Job falls into the dust and Jesus waits in the dark, and only there do they find traces of God’s life soaring by. God beckons us, “be sad in the world where I do my work. Watch and wait for it.”
It’s far easier to become acquainted with the dark and simply twist the idea of hope as necessarily naïve. But naivete is not true hope, for hope is only hope when it’s bound to the brokenness that waits to be healed. And pessimism is hardly realism, for to ignore the beauty and liveliness all around us is nothing but a tragic illusion. These illusions are not easy to set ourselves free from. But that doesn’t make the illusion of fated tragedy any less illusory. It only means it is something like our default response to the penetration of anxiety. And anything default is, at bottom, an instance of inauthenticity. A response conjured up from the ‘they-self’, the crowd. The therapy of being-sad-in-the-world is a construction of one’s existence that allows for authentic recognition of the darkness of our experience tethered to a kind of solemn march toward life, beauty, movement; some spiritual or social quickening on the horizon.
John 11 is the story of authentic humanity taking hold of its own fate. Not the fate of an ultimate future, but the fate of NOW. The fate of how we face the dance of dark reality and the potentiality of light and life. Like Jesus’ solemn march to Lazarus’s tomb, perhaps we too might be called to attend to a certain darkness, to make clear-eyed marches toward tombs that need watching over, tombs which we may have peculiarly good sight of. This call of authenticity is the call of what Nietzsche dubbed the challenge of every great philosophy: “to learn the meaning of your life” and thus “gain power to help nature correct a little its follies and blunders.”
I prefer to say: to calibrate our capacity for attention toward particular wounds of the world, gain confidence to reach all the way to the bottom of those sites of darkness, becoming familiar with its griefs and illusions; all the while watching for those soaring traces of divine life, or if your prefer, the vigor of newness that ever-vivifies the world’s life and the human spirit.
Perhaps to become awake to the possibility of life looks like being told “go find something entombed. Sit and watch and weep in that darkness with whomever is there. Look and see if some stones don’t start rolling away.”