At the foot of the cross we come and uncover our griefs. And there at the cross we meet a Savior who understands our sorrow and who offers us to one another as the tangible redemption of our grief: "Woman, behold your son; [son], behold your mother."
I
As a youngster growing up in Baptist churches, I spent Sunday afternoons in what Southern Baptists called then "Memory Work" and "Sword Drill." They have since changed the name of "Sword Drill" to "Bible Drill" to lessen the militaristic overtones.
In addition to learning hundreds of Bible verses and how to find them in a split second, we acquired a treasure chest, or should I say "war chest," of biblical trivia. Mrs. Harris drilled us: "What is the shortest verse in the Bible?" "I know, I know," we said, our hands shooting up in the air. John 11:35, "Jesus wept." With that bit of information we were armed for a lifetime of Sunday School mischief. The unsuspecting Sunday School teacher would ask, "What is your favorite Bible verse?" We were ready: "Jesus wept, John 11:35," we’d cry out, to the amusement of the class.
"Jesus wept." Later I’d learn why he wept. He had just learned that his best friend Lazarus had died. And when he heard he wept, no polite dabbing at the eyes, but a great sobbing, shuddering weeping, like the heart of the world itself breaking.
In the art exhibition currently at Spirit Square, "Like a
Prayer," a collection of contemporary art based on Jewish and Christian
themes, there is one collection of photographs of roadside religious signs: the
familiar "Repent" or "Jesus Saves." But there was one I’d
never seen: at a lonely bend in a rural road a sign, "Jesus Wept." Had
someone died there? (I think I remember some flowers beside it.) It was
strangely compelling, much more so than the more predictable "Repent"
and "Jesus Saves." In stark letters, black on white: Jesus Wept.
II
To live is to suffer loss, all kinds of loss: The loss of your lifelong companion, your husband, your wife; the unimaginable loss of a child; the loss of your parent, your closest friend, the love of your life. The loss of career, reputation, wealth, the loss of your health.
Annie Dillard learned from her mother that loss "was the kicker": She writes in her memoir:
May Sarton’s poem "Of Grief" goes:
Jesus knew them all. He wept when his earthly father Joseph died. He wept, as we all do over lost loves; he wept over Lazarus, he wept over Jerusalem. And in Gethsemane’s garden he wept his own life he’d never get to live out, with tears that were like drops of his own blood.
Now Jesus hangs on a Roman gallows, and John’s gospel paints a scene which captures our sorrowing hearts.
There to one side of the cross is Mary, the mother of Jesus. There to the other side is John, the beloved disciple.
There Mary is grieving as only a parent can grieve for a child. One has said to raise a child is to lose a child. Mary bore him in her womb; she sang lullabies and Magnificats to him in her arms. She nursed him and bathed him, bandaged his scrapes and combed his hair with her hand. She watched him grow, and as she watched him grow she began to lose him.
Literally she lost him on their trip back to Nazareth from Jerusalem. Jesus at twelve stayed behind to spend time in the temple. When they frantically returned and found him there, he said to them: "Why were you worried? Do you not know I must be about my Father’s business?"
Now she suffers the ultimate horror, watching her son dying on the cross.
To the other side of the cross is John, the one the text describes as "the one Jesus loved," perhaps the only one of the twelve who did not forsake him and flee, the only one at the cross.
In John 13 he is identified as lying "close to the breast of Jesus," a phrase that speaks not only to his physical proximity that night but also to the spiritual closeness he shared with Jesus. Jesus is described in John as being close to the breast of God. So Jesus and John share a spiritual intimacy, a deep knowing of one another.
There is a spirituality associated with John, a Celtic spirituality described as "listening for the heartbeat of God,"4 listening for it in creation and in scripture and in one another. The beloved disciple epitomizes this spirituality. He is the one standing to the other side of the cross. How deep his grief must be.
Three figures: Jesus, Mary, John, a sea of sorrow.
What does Jesus do? With his next to last breath, as John records the scene, Jesus does something. He does something with words, two phrases, seven words: "Woman, behold your son," he says to Mary. And then to John, "Behold your mother."
In that moment he gave them to one another. The black spiritual captures the moment:
"From that hour," the text says, "the disciple took her to live in his home."
III
With those words Jesus not only ministers to Mary and John in their grief, giving Mary to John and John to Mary. He at that moment forms the church, the new community of grace, and gives us to one another.
At the cross Jesus inaugurates the new people of God called "church," male and female, young and old, mother, father, daughter, son, brother, sister, grandparent and child. Mary and John are the beginning of the new family of God, a family born in sorrow but headed toward joy. For there is in God’s providence and God’s redemption not only the Common Weeping but also the Common Rejoicing.
In Wendell Berry’s short novel Remembering, Andy Catlett has lost his right hand in a farming accident, a loss which forces him to come to terms with all life’s losses. Barry writes:
Who could fathom all the losses in this room, a son killed in the war, a child’s tragic death, a career lost, all life’s earnings gone, the shipwreck of divorce, the death of a parent, of your closest friend, the loss of your health.
And all these losses are like a right hand, the way we attach ourselves to the world, hold it and know it. With the loss we find that we lose our hold and are descending, falling, unable to catch hold and hold on.
For Andy Catlett there is in the novel an epiphany which I think is the epiphany of grace. He is given this sudden insight:
When we lose our hold we are held, held in the everlasting arms and held by one another.
Woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother. People of God, behold your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, across the aisles, by your side; behold your family.
Can we acknowledge our loss, our common weeping, and receive one another as God’s gift to us? I’ve seen churches broken apart in anger, in frustration over their common weakness and humanness, and I’ve thought, "If we could only just weep together, we’d find one another."
Those saving words of Christ on the cross lead us to a table, this table. The grapes and wheat speak to God’s daily providence, the gift of what we need to eat and drink. But they also speak to a greater providence, for we do not live by bread alone but by love, the tangible love of a community, of family who are friends and friends who are family.
But this is not all. At this table we are joined by the living Christ. "Where two or three are gathered," he said, "I am there in your midst."
At this table we are also joined here by the community of faith, the company of Christians all over the globe, time and space transcended: from Camden, N.J., Ecuador, Kenya and Coventry, Beijing and Baghdad.
And here we are joined by all the company of heaven, those whom we have loved, some who have shared these pews, who have preceded us to the great banquet table of the kingdom of heaven, that vast common room of the love of God.
This table can become a "thin place," as the Scottish say, where the membrane between this world and the world to come, between the natural and the spiritual, grows paper thin, thinner.
Behold, your family.
1 (New York: Dover Publishers, 1954), p.17
2 An American Childhood (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
p.171.
3 Collected Poems, pp. 77-78.
4 J. Phillip Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic
Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1997).
5 Wendell Berry, Remembering (San Francisco: North Point
Press).