As we begin our observance of Holy Week, let us pause with Jesus as he stands weeping just outside of Jerusalem. I have diverted from the lectionary, which would have us read Luke’s Passion narrative today, so that we could take this moment with Jesus in his grief. You see, Holy Week isn’t only about Jesus’ passion. It is about the suffering of all the victims of injustice for whom Jesus weeps. Let us pause and take all the time we need to acknowledge our collective failure to recognize the things that make for peace; our failure to recognize God’s presence with us. We must mourn for Jesus this week, but not for him alone.
Palm Sunday is often described as the celebration of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, hailed as the long awaited king of Israel. But Jesus didn’t see it that way. He rode into the city with tears streaming down his cheeks. “In the world of feeling, tears are the criterion of truth.”[1] Only Luke’s Gospel has the courage to show us the truth of Palm Sunday and it is a bitter truth; there is no way to sugar-coat it. Jesus’ tears break through every attempt to deny, minimize, or avoid the suffering of God’s people.[2]
Jesus refuses to act as if everything is just fine. Neither is he naïve about the prospects for change around the edges of the system. He knows that things are about to fall apart. Indeed, they need to fall apart, so that something genuinely new and live-giving can break through our indifference, conformity, and complicity with the way things are. We cannot solve the problems we have created from within the level of consciousness that created them. We must undergo metanoia, the transfiguration of our consciousness and awakening of our conscience generated by the breaking-open of our hearts.
This is why lament is one of the central tools in the prophet’s toolkit. Grief acknowledges the reality that things are not as they should be. This isn’t easy. Amma Syncletica said “We must kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work.” Acknowledging reality is hard work. We can become so inured to the suffering within us and around us that it requires effort to break through our numbness.
Jesus was anything but numb. He wept over Jerusalem, acknowledging that the failure to pursue peace would have devastating consequences for his people. He wept over the broken bodies, broken lives, and broken hearts that he encountered wherever he travelled; the crowds of suffering people clamoring for food, for healing, for justice, for life. He knew their stories. He knew their names. His love for them drove him to Jerusalem to plead their cause and share their plight.
Prophets, like Jesus, name names and grieve the losses that others refuse to acknowledge. This is the root of the veneration of the martyrs. “Saying their names” is an ancient prophetic practice that roots our energy for healing and reconciliation in compassion. The Black Lives Matter movement has powerfully reminded us of this truth: prophetic criticism is energized, not merely by anger, but overwhelmingly by love: Love for Trayvon Martin, for Ahmaud Arbery, for George Floyd, for Breonna Taylor, for Tamir Rice, for Addie Mae Collins, for Cynthia Wesley, for Carole Robinson, for Carol Denise McNair, for Martin Luther King Jr., for Medgar Evers, for Emmett Till and a litany of other victims of racist violence in the United States. So many names. So many tears. So much love.
We cannot change what we do not grieve.
Grief is a form of criticism. Tears are the criterion of truth. In the prayers of the people, we have been naming names: of loved ones suffering and grieving, of neighbors who have no home to retreat to at night, of refugees fleeing terror and hunger. All is not well. The system isn’t working. All this is obvious to the awakened heart.
“Weep. Truly, there is no other way but this” said Abba Poemen, echoing the example of Jesus on the threshold of Holy Week. Why is grief so important to our collective spiritual evolution? Because, as Margarete Mitscherlich-Neilson observes,
the defense against shame, guilt, and mourning leads to emotional emptiness in the individual and, in consequence, to psychological and political immobility, to a lack of ideas and imagination in society.[3]
Tears cleanse the lens of perception so that we can acknowledge reality and begin to imagine new possibilities. Things don’t have to be this way. Jesus weeps as he rides into Jerusalem. Then he goes to the Temple and drives out those who were using it as a pretext to exploit the poor, quoting the prophets before him, “It is written: ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’ but you have made it a den of robbers.” The people are spellbound by Jesus’ teaching and his action, because he imagines and enacts a future different from the way things are.
Walter Brueggemann, reflecting on Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, argues that
The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings . . . Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come.[4]
During Holy Week, we pause to weep with Jesus. We rekindle the divine fire of love within ourselves through tears and hard work. On Holy Saturday, we will symbolize the renewal of our imagination, the love that inspires new possibilities for life together, as we kindle the new fire and carry the Light of Christ back into the world. But for now, let us pray for the gift of tears and for the courage to remember the names of those for whom, for too long, we have failed to weep. Only then, will we be able to perceive the new thing that God is doing, the things that make for peace. Amen.
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