“Jesus wept.” This always seemed like a risqué verse to me growing up. When you’re a fairly “good living” kid with too much fear to do any real sinning, a bible verse that, said with the right intonation, sounds like an angst filled swear, is about as good as it gets. Rock n roll it is not. It, being the shortest verse in the bible, also made it a gimme for memory verse recitation but the significance of these two words have probably eluded me for most of my life. Here, in John’s account of the life of Jesus, we encounter this deeply personal, deeply intimate story of the death of Lazarus. John often gets some stick for calling himself the disciple Jesus loved, and on the surface maybe so, it does seem a tad arrogant but in chapter 11 we get a glimpse into something of who Jesus was that John had grasped and I hope to truly get someday. In verse 3 John tells us that the sisters, Mary and Martha, send a message to Jesus to tell him that “the one he loves is sick.” They’re referring to their brother Lazarus who subsequently dies before Jesus arrives but I love that they have clearly grasped what John had already known. They are loved by Jesus. Not in a “Big deal, God loves everybody. That don’t make me special, that just means God has no taste!” type way as Rich Mullins once put it but in a deeply personal, deeply intimate way.

John, and these three siblings, knew something of the personal nature of the love of Jesus. They knew something beyond the divine love for all of his creation. They knew a heart connection. They had sensed his personal delight and attention just for them. And just in case they were in any doubt Jesus goes on to demonstrate this as three or four times in the passage we read of Jesus being grieved, being heartbroken, weeping with his friends. Is he grieving the death of Lazarus? I think not. He’s already declared his intentions to raise him from the dead. Instead we get a glimpse into the heart of God almighty for these grieving sisters. He empathises, he enters into their pain. He demonstrates his love for them, his care about their agony, in a moment of divine solidarity. He knows he can fix it, he knows he’s about to fix it but he refuses to trample over their pain to get there. He first engages, he first honours and affirms their agency in their own lives. He weeps with the weeping. It is truly remarkable. It is, in my experience, infinitely harder to empathise than to fix. Harder to sit with the suffering in grief and allow my heart to feel than to rush to cheap distractions and easy, off the shelf platitudinal solutions.

In her brilliant work on hospitality Christine Pohl wrote

“A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action.”

I find this to be unbearably true. When my social media and news feeds are bombarded with global pain and suffering on a scale that I can barely comprehend my heart has no chance of honest engagement. Screenshot by news article by painful story my empathy is eradicated. The chances of me making any meaningful action or response are directly linked to my heart’s engagement, my level of empathy, and with every passing day, if left unchecked, those levels will tend towards atrophy. The cost of being the most informed, most knowledge exposed generation to have ever lived is the slow slide away from actual engagement with anything outside of ourselves. The slow “[inoculation]…against particular action.”

The beautiful message at the core of the gospel is a God who refuses to be distant, who refuses to reside solely in the global or the eternal. We see in Jesus a divine intention to be local, to get personal and proximate, to make the pain and suffering of the one as important and painful to him as it is to them. I find comfort right there for my isolated soul. I find assurance that his love for me personally is a “big deal”. I feel a gentle nudge to pick up John’s self-given title of the one Jesus loves. I also feel stirred to take my eyes off the global pain and fear and uncertainty swirling around me and ask can I focus in. Can I see the one? Whose pain can I actually allow my heart to feel today? How can I actually connect with another today, not a concept, not a crisis or pandemic but a person? How can I allow my heart to beat, for a moment, in unison with theirs and what action of comfort, what words of hope might come spilling out of a heart that is actually, honestly engaged?

Photo by Emma Trevisan on Unsplash