Elie Weisel died last July. He was an award-winning author who survived the Holocaust and spent the rest of his life reflecting on and writing about the experience. When he was just 15 years old, everyone he loved died in Nazi death camps or were murdered by soldiers in their neighborhoods. Over the next few years he barely survived in a Nazi labor camp. It took him more than ten years even to begin to process those experiences but eventually he wrote a book entitled “Night”, which became a classic and earned him a Nobel Prize for literature. Like many people in his situation after the war, he questioned how a just and loving God could have allowed such an atrocity to occur? He never offered any easy answer to that question, as there is none.
It is fair to say that most of the adults among us have suffered the loss of someone near and dear or have been scandalized by some tragedy, either natural or man-made, and have raised the same question to heaven as did Weisel. It is a question that comes from the pain in our hearts.
In the Gospel reading a few weeks ago we saw a similar situation. Jesus is a close friend to Lazarus, Martha and Mary of Bethany. Lazarus becomes sick and very quickly grows worse and dies. When Jesus receives word of Lazarus, his disciples didn’t think the illness was that serious because Jesus delayed two days before setting off for Bethany. When he arrived at the home of his friends, just about everyone complained to Jesus that if only he had been there Lazarus would have lived. Jesus was a famous miracle worker; surely, he would have saved Lazarus. The unspoken question from everyone was “How could you allow this tragedy to happen?” Verse 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible and it shows us Jesus response to the death of Lazarus and to the question asked of him again and again. The verse says, “Jesus wept.”
This story is from the Gospel of John. The evangelist knows how the story ends and keeps reminding us that all will be well. However, for those amid the tragedy, there is only grief and pain. God is not some distant power remote from the suffering of Martha and Mary. In the person of Jesus, God is present with them in their suffering. God shares in that suffering…Jesus wept!
The Lenten Sunday Gospel readings set us up to better grasp the reality of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. The reading on the Transfiguration allows us a glimpse of the transcendent reality of Jesus as the Christ. We see his glory for a moment, which gives us hope as we move closer and closer to the crucifixion. The reading about the woman at the well reminds us that God knows us. We are not strangers but beloved and God desires to give us the living waters of his own divine spirit. The story of Lazarus tells us that God’s love for us is not some abstract and distant benign attitude toward humanity. Rather, God’s love for us is personal and passionate. In the face of our tragedy, not only do we weep but God weeps with us. God’s love for us is so total, personal and passionate that in Jesus God enters our suffering so completely that he gives his life for us. He experiences our worst pain and suffering.
It is difficult to look beyond the immediate experience of suffering but everything doesn’t end with the crucifixion. We move beyond Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Christ’s suffering and death is transformed into new life. Jesus is resurrected from death. St. Paul reminds us that this is not just some miracle effecting only Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, Christ’s resurrection is the promise that all of us who have drunk of the living waters of Christ’s divine spirit will experience the same resurrection.
The story of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection is a love story. It tells us that we are loved passionately and personally by God, who is reckless in his passion, even to the point of suffering death. It also gives us hope that God’s love is so passionate and total that God will not allow us to be obliterated by any tragedy that comes into our lives; we will experience resurrection. God will not abandon us in our suffering and pain. God will not give up on his beloved. God will not give up on you or I.
Realizing this about God can be frightening. Why? How do you respond to such a passionate and total lover? If we keep God at a distance and as an abstract theological concept, little is demanded of us. If we allow ourselves to enter a relationship with a passionate and loving God, then the relationship makes demands on us. Our relationship with God needs to be personal, emotionally engaged (that is, passionate), our actions and life choices need to reflect the divine spirit that is within us.
The relationship with a loving and passionate God transforms us into new people living with the Easter promise of resurrection. However, being transformed is just another way of saying that we need to change. We need to live our lives according to the Gospel.
Experiencing change in our lives is difficult and unsettling; though any passionate and loving relationship demands the same. If we are willing to enter such a passionate and loving relationship, transformation is possible. Ask any couple that has been married for a few decades and find themselves more deeply in love with one another than the day they married. The challenge of Easter is how are we going to respond to our passionate and divine Lover?
A blessed and happy Easter to everyone!