Jesus wept.

Death does that to you.

It doesn’t matter how prepared we might claim to be, nor does it matter how confident our faith is, there is still that moment when our throats tighten and our eyes glisten and death reaches deep within us with cold hands.

Jesus wept.

Debi and I went to a funeral this week for the mother of someone whom she worked with. I knew the daughter and her husband, but had never met the deceased, so I attended with a certain detachment that I don’t have at most funerals.

Yet, before I left the funeral home, as I spoke with those who were mourning someone they loved, as I watched their tears fill and flow, in that back closet of my soul where I keep so many things in private, my tears were wept. Not tears of grief, but tears of sympathy for the grief of others and I remembered all of my own tears of grief

Death does that to you and I believe it did it to Jesus that day.

To even speak of death, with compassion and a reverence for the holiness of life, or to watch the sorrow of others, will force you to tears, either public and in your private places.

And in today’s scripture lessons we find death taken seriously, even by those who are closest to the heart of the God: the great prophet Ezekiel and the very presence and essence of God in human form: Jesus.

First there is that bizarre scene in the valley of dry bones that suddenly come to life with Ezekiel’s preaching.

How bizarre was it? Imagine how bizarre you would think it was, if, when you came from your cars this morning, you looked out across the cemetery and saw me, standing on a ladder, alone, preaching, prophesying, to the graves.

“Oh, poor Jack, he’s finally lost it” you would think, “see what being a Mets fan can do to people?”

And the second story could also be set right outside of these windows, but it would seem like a far more familiar picture: we would be standing, together, as we have, at the newly covered grave of a person with strong claims upon our hearts, and we would weep just as Jesus did.

Lazarus and his two sisters were the closest people to Jesus outside of the disciples, John tells us that Jesus loved the three of them. Word comes that Lazarus is sick and, by the time Jesus and the 12 arrive, the funeral is over.

Martha is perhaps annoyed at, or disappointed in, Jesus.

You know how we get when someone lets us down, when we think they could have done something but they didn’t. “If you had come sooner, if you had been here . . .”. The implication is: Jesus didn’t do his job. But Jesus wouldn’t let the key question be about his actions or lack of actions, he never does, he made the key question her faith, just as he does with each of us.

“Your brother will rise again” he says.

And Martha nods politely and says, “Yes, I know, in the final resurrection.”

And Jesus says, essentially this: “I am not talking about someday in the future, Martha, I’m talking about the present, I’m talking about the right now. I am – not I will be – “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Here we are, 2000 years down the road but have we any better sense than Martha about what that means?

In two weeks when we gather for Easter, my bet would be that most of us will think back to the morning when the stone was rolled away from the tomb, or forward to the day of reunion in our Father’s house of many rooms, but will we think about the present? However the present is exactly where Jesus placed it.

And then he cried.

And in his tears I find the first of three essential gifts from God: he is with us in our sorrows, no let me put it better: he actually shares our sorrows with us!

Jesus wept.

I heard a sermon, years ago, that said that Jesus’ tears and his distress at Lazarus’ tomb was a reaction to lack of faith in the people around him.

I guess that is possible.

But I prefer to think that what happened to him that day is what happens when we are with those who are in sorrow, what happened to me at that funeral this week. We catch the tears and feel the pain and share the sorrow, we dilute it with our own tears. I don’t think that I am alone in this, but when I have faced the 3 or 4 legitimate tragedies of my life, I didn’t need people to give me little pep talks, I didn’t need people to tell me about worse things that they went through, I needed and I had people to be sad with me.

I needed and I had a God who cried with me.

That’s what Jesus was doing and that’s what he continues to do.

Eric Clapton, after the death of his son, wrote a beautiful, haunting song with the words: “I know there will be no more tears in heaven”, and there is a lot in that song that Eric got right concerning the individuality of the life to come, but I’m not sure Eric got that line right. For I am sure that God has cried with me and you, and I am sure that in each of the inhuman genocides of just the last 100 years God has cried, and in each of the disasters that have taken life and brought pain God has cried, and those tears diluted the oil in the gulf and now dissipates the radiation in the waters off the coast of Japan.

“For God so loved the world” is an ongoing and eternal truth.

And as we cry, here and in heaven, but never alone, the prophecy is fulfilled “And God will dry the tears from their eyes.”

Jesus wept.

God is with us in our sorrow.

And the second great gift is that God restores life in the middle of death.

This is what ties the gospel to that vision of Ezekiel’s.

Jesus came to bring life to a world that had died, like Ezekiel he saw dry dead bones all around him. You see it wasn’t that people died and went to a grave that bothered Jesus, it was that people died and went right on with their lives!

Oh, they still existed, just as they do all around us.

I see them all of the time, people who eat and sleep and play and work, yet they are so insensitive to goodness, oblivious to love, unconscious of hope and unaware of God’s presence in their lives that they are as good as dead. For, in everything that makes them human, in everything that makes them children of God – not just dry bones – they are dead.

And what does is take to bring the world back to life?

Ezekiel, in his vision, spoke the word of God, and the bones came back to life. And I will tell you, that is a more common occurrence that you might think!

Recall a time when you were bottomed out, with grief and sorrow and loneliness and failure, and God sent a friend or family member to lift you up and carry you with the words of love and forgiveness. The bones of your soul were reunited and life returned to you.

Recall a time when you, inspired by God, made a phone call or wrote a note to someone who was passing through a time of stress and anxiety and the next time you saw them, you saw a spark in their eyes that wasn’t there before, a glimmer of gratitude for your concern for them. You were Ezekiel!

Jesus wept.

He shares in our sorrow and he restores life to us when all hope is gone.

And finally there is the third gift: He unbinds us.

He frees us up from all the things of death.

He cuts us loose from the things that are holding us back and preventing us from living.

He unbinds us.

That’s what he did for Lazarus, isn’t it?

And that’s what he will do for each of us, isn’t it?

He unbinds us!

Listen again to that passage:

(Jesus) cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 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.”

Oh.

Wait a minute.

Jesus didn’t unbind him.

I was wrong, God doesn’t unbind us.

Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The people unbound him.

So much of life is God’s work, God’s activity, God’s responsibility: creation, redemption, all of that.

And yet, at crucial moments, God turns the keys over to us.

I don’t know why, I can’t explain it and sometimes I don’t like it, but there it is.

God makes us partners, teammates and there are words that only we can speak, words that will unbind people: words of forgiveness, sought and given, words of compassion and of encouragement and of affection and of sympathy. These are the words that unbind others from the death clothes of guilt and sin and selfishness that hold them back.

And there are actions that only we can take: gifts of generosity, hugs of affection, pennies for SHIP, food for the community pantries. These are the things that unbind others from the death clothes of poverty and insecurity and ignorance that hold them back.

Unbind him.

What can we do to let people go free from what they used to be?

What can we do to let them grow from things that once were true about them, to the greater reality that God has in store for them?

What difference would it make in our lives if we begin to see ourselves as the ones whom Christ has called to unbind, set free and renew the lives of others?

Jesus said to us, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Oh, and one last thought, what if the person that we are most like in the story is really Lazarus?

What if we are being called out of the tombs that contain us, into the life of life, full and abundant?

Who is speaking to us?

Who will unbind us?

Who has God sent to share our sorrow, to cry with us, to restore life to those dead dreams and relationships, to unbind us?

Here is what I will prophesy to you, for it is God’s word, God’s truth: there are no dreams that are too dead, no bones that are too dry, no hearts that are too empty, no lives that are too old or too young, for God’s redeeming and resurrecting love, there are no tears that God won’t share, and then dry.

Jesus wept.