The day my grandmother died, a friend of ours found out his brother had been in a terrible accident. And two days later, the brother was gone, leaving behind a wife and children, three brothers, parents. Everyone. The depth of their grief is something I have never experienced and cannot imagine, and for the past week I’ve carried around my tiny piece of it, somewhere in my stomach, a sick feeling, something heavy. I don’t know what to do in the face of such grief.
I know the intellectual answers, the theology of grief. I know those things, but still I balk at this tragedy. I feel thrown back, or pushed down, some kind of physical no, we can rewind this, we should be able to rewind this. And I’ve been mad. These people are good people. These people are good, sincere people. That man was a good man. None of the answers are helpful in the face of something like this. None of the answers mean anything to me right now.
What I cling to is the story of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. Lazarus died, and Jesus brought him back. A metaphor. But it’s not the resurrection that comforts me, it’s that before the resurrection, when Jesus saw Lazarus’ sisters crying, Jesus wept. He knew all the answers. He knew what was about to happen. He had the big picture. And still he broke down and wept. I don’t need to know all the interpretations, what exactly the weeping was in response to, and so on. All I need to know is that when Jesus saw Mary and Martha and their grief over their brother’s death, Jesus wept.
