Sometimes things can get really bad.
I should know. I mean, I died.
Twice.
And you know, when I was reclining in my own waste and breathing my last (well…first last) breaths, I kept fighting the urge to cry. I pressed it down inside my stomach, held a fist against my belly, told my gut to be silent. I didn’t want to show it. I grinned so hard my teeth hurt. My sisters floated nearby, always floating, like ghosts of themselves. They didn’t want to show it either. Martha had this pinched smile when she spoke with me, and I didn’t realize until about two weeks in that she was trying not to inhale through her nose because…well, like I said…
That was when she told me she’d sent for Jesus. Even on that last (again…first last) day we were anticipating a miracle.
Mary sat beside my bed for hours. Hours and hours. She told stories, usually funny ones, and she worked at mending dresses, and she fed me, and we said nothing about my impending demise.
Here’s the thing: we all knew I was dying, and we hoped I would be healed, and we thought we had to bury the tears to hurry up the hope. To manifest, you know? Other people would visit too, and they kept saying, “Everything has a reason,” and, “Time heals all.” I nodded and tried to keep my escalating cough from diminishing the aura of their manic encouragement. I grinned harder. I gritted harder.
At some point, I died.
Jesus showed up four days later, and the first thing I heard was him crying.
I think it was his tears that brought me back.
And that’s when it hit me. Like totally and fully in the face: you can still be sad. It’s okay to be deeply, deeply moved by the bad things. It’s normal to feel it churning in your gut, and you don’t have to clench your fist against the suck.
I realized this in my burial wrappings, hidden from the living in the darkness of my tomb. I stayed flat on my back, stunned. Well, to tell the truth, I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. My body was still mostly dead, and I was trapped in something I imagined to be like the sleep paralysis that used to plague Martha when she was a kid. Come to think of it, I never got a chance to ask her what it was like. For me, anyway, being mostly dead was mostly horrible. I could feel the disintegration of most of my body, in a dull and disgusting sort of ache, but I couldn’t move or speak or open my eyes.
And yet, I could hear him crying, sprinkling the ground outside my tomb with living water. That’s what I mean when I say I think his tears brought me back. What I mean is, the thing revealed in his tears is what did it. His love.
And it wasn’t just his love for me. No, it was his Love, capital L, the Love that compelled him to later face death himself. It was his perpetual affirmation that true things are lovely, and ugly things are lies, and the Truth is Love, and death is a distortion. A lie.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s pretend.
No way.
Death is as real as it gets.
But it isn’t true.
Where was I? I was stone-still within the tomb, and then he stopped crying. Not like abruptly. He aimed his sorrow with the recognition that it mattered (because the lie is really persuasive, and it matters, and people need to get that) and then he said a few things that were true:
Father. Thank you. I know.
And finally, “Lazarus, come out!”
A creeping, tingling sensation spread beneath my skin. I opened my eyes. I walked out.
Fast forward to yesterday.
In the past year, I spent a lot of time trying to grit my teeth, but I spent even more time remembering his tears. A few things rocked my world. Martha also nearly died. She got better. A friend of mine refused to believe I had been raised at all. He refused my invitation into conversation. Our friendship shriveled.
Jesus died…I let my tears speak true.
And then yesterday. The men who gathered outside my home were strangers. They came toward evening, in the darker part of the day, and I couldn’t see their faces. I didn’t recognize their voices. Still, I knew. I’d heard the rumors of the chief priests’ schemes. So, before I opened the door, I brought Mary and Martha into the back room. I held them so tight. Man, I held them. And I felt their fingers, their cheeks, their shoulders in new ways. We shook with the reality of the lie that was about to smother us.
When I walked through the door into the hands of the men come to kill me, I said, “Father. Thank you. I know,” with tears streaming down my cheeks.
I told my sisters this right before I left. I said, “No matter what happens, we can trust Jesus. Bad things happen. This is about to be a bad thing. We trust Jesus will make it good. Death is real, but it isn’t true. Death is a lie that has been exposed. Remember Jesus. Remember his hands.
But…
…you can still be sad.”
John 12:10