COVID19: March 29, 2020 - Compassion: the way to new life

Sermon for March 29, 2020. The text is John 11:1-44.

Jesus wept. It’s often said that this is the shortest verse in the Bible. But those two little words may tell us more about Jesus than any other two words we read in the Scriptures. Jesus wept. Or, in the translation we read today, Jesus began to weep.

When he arrived on the scene and looked around him, he began to weep. Why? Many of those who saw him weeping assumed it was because he loved Lazarus so much. But I don’t think that’s it.

If we read the verses just before this, we read that when Jesus saw Mary and the Jews who came with her weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He asked where he could find the body of Lazarus, and he wept.

It was the grief of others that led to his tears. Jesus’ cried out of compassion for those he loved. Their grief became his grief.

I think about when I’m at a funeral for someone I never knew. I’m there for those who are mourning. I may be presiding as a pastor, or I may be a person sitting in the pews. But often in those situations, I shed tears. Why? I didn’t even know the person who died. But I’m sharing in the pain of those who are grieving so deeply. Has that ever happened to you?

Grieving is communal. It calls upon the very best part of us, our compassion. When you see cars parked around a house in the morning hours during the middle of the week, it has become a place of compassion. When you see bouquets of flowers piled at an accident site on the side of the highway, it is a place of compassion. Whenever we gather together on Sunday mornings, whether in person, or online, our community becomes a place of compassion.

This is an important part of what it means for us to be the resurrected Body of Christ. We’re a community that holds one another in our deepest losses and sorrows and carries us to a place of new life. There is resurrection on this side of the grave. The power of resurrection works through us whenever we grieve compassionately with those who mourn.

We hold the grieving person in our midst, perhaps literally, perhaps through cards and prayers and flowers and a casserole at the door. We give them the space they need. We free them to grieve in whatever way works for them, apart from any expectations of our own. We hold them in community. And, in time, they become community for others who grieve.

Consider the way today’s gospel passage ends. After Jesus shouts, “Lazarus, come out!” Notice what it says, “The dead man came out.” The dead man. When Lazarus emerges from the tomb, he is still a dead man. He’s bound up in bands of cloth like a mummy. It sounds terrifying, doesn’t it?

His face and his hands and feet are all wrapped up. Jesus says to the people gathered around, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

It wasn’t until the community unbound him that he was given new life.

  

Perhaps that’s what it means to have eternal life in our earthly existence. We’re so bound by death: the grief it brings us when it takes someone we love away, the fear of our own impending death that snatches away our joy in experiencing the beauty of this life, the crazy things we do to deny the fact that our lives on this earth have a beginning and an end. To receive eternal life, to experience resurrection in this life, we must be unbound in the face of our mortality. We don’t unbind ourselves. That takes a community. In the face of death, we unbind one another so we can live as resurrected people.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, I think we all have thoughts of death while we’re going through this pandemic. Perhaps our own death, or the death of someone we love. It’s so painful that we’d rather look away, and I get that. I try not to think about it, too.

And then God gives us this story for this Sunday. I didn’t choose this passage. It was chosen for me by the Revised Common Lectionary that repeats every three years.

So here we are, reading about the death of Lazarus. Ugh. There’s so much pain in these words. But there’s also resurrection. It’s a preview of what’s to come for Jesus.

And for us, it’s a story about the life-giving power of compassion in community. It’s a reminder to us that compassion is the way to new life.

Hang onto that. Compassion is the way to new life. When we practice compassion in community, we are the resurrected Body of Christ. That’s who we’re called to be… always. But certainly in a time like this. Compassion will get us through, and more than that… compassion is the way to new life.