Love: Grief

I love the idea of love. The mentioning of love brings a rush of thoughts, memories, and ideas to the surface: meals and conversations with good friends, a deep and emotionally moving sexual encounter with one's spouse, caring for or being cared for in the midst of illness or tragedy, the gentle chaos of joy squealing, barking, and laughing through the halls of home. Love is both spiritual and earthy.

But there is a downside - real love always involves pain. Whether it is disappointment, betrayal, or death, there is no escaping it. And that pain is experienced as anger or maybe depression, which eventually give way to grief. Love, at some point, must resolve with grief. And I hate the pain of grieving. It is raw and unbridled and unpredictable. It is the reason that I fear intimacy, because in relationship, I will hurt and I will be hurt. And both bring real wrenching grief.
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Jesus wept.

The second person of the Trinity grieved, deeply. This has recently been revealed as a mystery to me. Lazarus' sisters, Mary and Martha, engage Jesus as he arrived at Bethany. In the midst of their grief, they came to him full of sadness and anger and faith. They were not shy about reminding him that Lazarus would have lived if he had only come sooner. And as they grieve, he is invited by the sisters to see where Lazarus is laid. And John records that Jesus was deeply troubled or disturbed. And he wept.

Why did he weep? Why did the one who prophesied that Lazarus would be raised up again, sob? The only thing that makes sense to me is that what will happen does not change what has happened: the experience of pain. Despite knowing that Lazarus would be brought back to life, Jesus grieves the loss. He could have downplayed or dismissed it - "Why are you crying? Don't you know that I am going to raise up? See, all better!" He could have chided them for weeping as a lack of faith. But he didn't. He grieved the loss, felt it fully. Even in the face of impending resurrection. It was still worth grieving.
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I have not grieved enough. Not for the big things. Not for the little things. As I have been engaging this process in therapy, I feel weird, stupid even, for some of things that I am only now attending to. But I am learning that it doesn't matter. The experience has occurred and the pain is real. And I need to honor the experience and myself and Jesus by weeping. And he will take care of bringing things back to life.