‘Jesus wept’
I don’t blog about religion much (I honestly can’t remember the last time I made a public comment online about it) for a lot of reasons. It’s a touchy subject and everyone generally has made up their mind where they stand about all things religious. In other words, it’s opening yourself up to a flame war — and we all know that EVERYONE loses in a flame war.
With that said, I randomly thought about this verse tonight. I can’t say why, exactly, I thought of that phrase. I don’t attend church (haven’t since college, despite being raised Seventh Day Adventist). I don’t have a Bible in my apartment. And I don’t regularly think about religion or discuss it with anyone — unless it’s in the context of politics, which is a whole keg of dynamite I’d rather not get into here.
So, I have no idea why this two-word phrase entered my head. Perhaps it’s because it’s the easiest memory verse for kids to learn in the entire Bible, which I remember being taught back in the day as a child.
Looking back at “Sabbath School” (this is what we called it rather than “Sunday School,” since the SDA denomination gathers on Saturday instead of Sunday), one thing that struck me was the regurgitation of such “memory verses” as a form of homework of sorts each week. Usually, they were kind of of phrases that you’d probably find placed into greeting cards or inserted onto whatever religious literature that required a touching blockquote of text.
What strikes me now is that these verses were never given a deep study, placed into context and opened for interpretation. This isn’t to say Sabbath School was void of religious discussion, or even debate (God knows that I probably drove some of my instructors on edge with my contrarian questioning), but these verses in particular were presented in a vacuum, which I think is kind of a waste of an intellectual exercise.
And here’s why. Whatever the reason of why the phrase “Jesus wept” entered my mind tonight, I googled it, stumbled upon the WikiPedia page I’ve linked above and learned something and it reframed my understanding of the verse.
I’m not saying that my initial perceptions of the verse was “wrong,” but rather narrow and uninformed of other possible meanings. Simply put, I had a certain amount of ignorance since I lacked the context and introduction to other possibilities of the phrase’s significance.
For reference, check the “interpretation” section of the WikiPedia entry. This list fascinates me, especially this particular one:
The views above interpret his weeping to mean that Jesus was sorrowful for the fact that Lazarus had died (which was the interpretation of the bystanders in verse 36). However, an alternate explanation considers this to be unreasonable, given his full knowledge that he was about to resurrect Lazarus. This view instead argues that every single person whom Jesus talked to was blinded by their misconceptions of Jesus and by their failure to recognize that he himself was “the resurrection and the life.” Thus, “he groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” This view holds that he wept because even those who were closest to him were still blinded by their concepts to the fact that he really was “the resurrection and the life” in spite of all his plain words to them. A striking point in this view is that the only person in the chapter who had no misconceptions was the dead man Lazarus, who promptly obeyed and received life when commanded to come forth. Finally, this view holds that the bystanders, just like most readers today, were blinded by their own misconceptions and so did not understand that Jesus was actually weeping for them, not for Lazarus.
If you’re familiar with the story and had originally thought that “Jesus wept” because a friend had died, then this is a mind-blowing concept! It shows the extremely different thinking behind Christ and what actually drove him to feel such a deep emotional sadness as the Son of God. Plus, it makes Jesus actually seem a whole lot more complex than crying over the death of Lazarus.
Reading this makes me realize another reason why I think I left my religion behind. Originally, I believed what caused a rift between the SDA religion and me came from the overbearing amount of rules that imposed limitations of what one could and couldn’t do and my dislike of those who saw fit to judge you for alleged “sins.” Naturally, I think it’s nearly instinctual for many young teenagers to rebel against authority (to varying degrees, personally I wasn’t off the deep end doing this, I just left the church), but there’s a greater reason why I just didn’t stick with religion — or at the very least never returned to it.
Fundamentally, I don’t have problems with authority or submitting myself to following rules — indeed, lots of the Ten Commandments are GREAT ideas (not killing and all that). But religious worship to me feels very instructional, as opposed to academic and philosophical.
Obviously, religious beliefs can be intellectual pursuits and a great deal of academic study does go into doctrine, etc., but that’s more-or-less on the end of those who wish to act as leaders within the church. On the congregational end, it’s mainly about accepting interpretations and falling into line. This fundamentally turned me off.
As with all things, religion is what you choose to make of it. A part of me does occasionally think about attending a service now and then, but then I shrug it off realizing that I’ve done it before and didn’t find it fulfills what I need from such a significant time commitment.
Part of me thinks this might be part of the explanation behind the Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey results from 2008:
The survey finds that the number of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith today (16.1%) is more than double the number who say they were not affiliated with any particular religion as children. Among Americans ages 18-29, one-in-four say they are not currently affiliated with any particular religion.
I wonder if as a generation we’ve come to demand a more intellectually curious and unstructured approach to religion, and when these faith-based institutions, which are stuck in their conservative and unchanging ways, don’t adapt, then we simply leave.
It makes you wonder if Jesus weeps over this.