He Wept Before He Raised Him

The last dish came back washed, with a note on top of it, and after that the kitchen went quiet.

That is how it ends, and nobody warns you. For about three weeks the house is full. There is food she did not cook and did not want, stacked in a fridge she cannot open without crying, and people in the hallway, and somebody's aunt washing up in her kitchen and putting the spoons in the wrong drawer, and it is unbearable and it is also the only thing holding the roof on. Then the funeral is over. The people have their own lives, which is right, and they go back to them, which is also right. And by the second month the phone has stopped ringing in the evenings, and the messages have become a fortnightly thinking of you, and by the fourth month even that has thinned out.

Everyone has decided she is doing well. She hears it at the shops. You look well. You are doing so well. She has learned that this is not really a question, and that the honest answer, which is that she still says good morning out loud in an empty room and has not changed the sheets on that side, is a thing that would frighten people. So she says she is doing well, and she goes home, and she sits in the car for a while before she goes in, because there is nobody in the house to explain her face to any more.

And somewhere in that fourth month, in the silence, she does the thing that grief does to faith. She does not lose it in a dramatic way. She simply arrives, quietly and without argument, at a conclusion: God watched this happen and it did not move Him. He was not indifferent exactly. He was above it. Serene about it. Sovereign in a way that meant her whole world could come apart and it registered on Him about the way weather registers on a mountain.

You may have arrived at that conclusion too. Not in words, maybe. But it is why you have stopped praying about it, and it is why the worship songs land wrong now, and it is why a certain kind of Bible verse feels like it is being said at you across a distance by somebody who has not lost anyone. You are not in rebellion. You have simply concluded that He was not moved.

Two words at a grave, and He did not need to say them

I am not going to lift you yet. I want to stay down here where you actually are, and I am not going to reach for the hallelujah over the top of your head, because I think that has been done to you already and it is part of why you are so alone.

Grief in the fourth month is a different animal from grief in the first week, and almost nobody is prepared for the second one. The first week has adrenaline in it and people in the hall. The fourth month has neither. It has ordinary Tuesdays. It has the moment in the supermarket when you reach for the thing they liked. It has the eighteen small administrative cruelties, letters addressed to them, an account you cannot close without a document you cannot bear to request. It has the friends who have stopped mentioning the name because they are frightened of upsetting you, so now the person you love most has become unspeakable in your own kitchen, and their absence is doubled: gone, and now not even named. Say the name out loud here if you want to. The Holy Spirit is not frightened of it, and the word God gave to people in exactly this month was comfort, spoken twice over, before anything at all was explained to anybody.

And under all of it, the loneliest thing. You are tired of being the sad one. You can feel people bracing. You have started performing recovery to make the room easier, which means you now do your grieving alone, in the car, at half past ten, in short bursts you can hide.

Now come and stand at a grave with me, because there is something there that I want you to see with your own eyes.

Jesus arrives at Bethany four days too late by everyone's reckoning. Two sisters meet Him, and both of them say the same sentence, which is the sentence you have said: if you had been here. He knows exactly what He is about to do. He is minutes away from calling a dead man out of a tomb by name. There is no suspense for Him.

And He does not manage the room. He does not open with the theology. He asks where they laid him, and He looks at the sisters crying, and the word the Gospel uses for what happened in Him is not a gentle word. It carries something closer to indignation, the sound a person makes when they are furious at what has been done. He was angry. Not at them. At death, at the whole ruin of it, at the fact that this is what the world does to people He loves. John 11 keeps that word in the text on purpose. The Spirit saw to it that it survived every hand that ever copied the page, so that it would be there for you in the fourth month, when a serene God had almost become settled fact in your kitchen.

And then, the shortest verse in the book.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

He cried. Standing there, God in a body, holding the outcome in His hand, He cried anyway. If tears were only an admission that nothing can be done, His would make no sense at all, because everything was about to be done. So the tears were never about helplessness. They were about love. He was moved because He is moved. That is what He is like when somebody He loves is destroyed by death.

Which means the thing you concluded in the fourth month is not true. He was not above your loss. He is not serene about what happened to you. Whatever else is unexplained, and much of it is, and I am not going to hand you a tidy reason because I do not have one and the people who claim to have one are guessing, this much is not in doubt: it moved Him. The One who cried at His friend's grave did not watch yours with a level face.

And He keeps what you have cried. There is a line in the Psalms that has held a great many people upright, and it asks God to put the writer's tears in His bottle, and then asks, are they not in Your book. Somebody thought to say that three thousand years ago, and it was true then. Your weeping is not spilled. It is collected. Psalm 56:8 is where it sits, and His Spirit does the keeping, bottle and book both, including the crying done in a parked car at half past ten that nobody else ever counted.