Two words

"Jesus wept." — John 11:35

Every few years some boy in my Sunday school class discovers that the shortest verse in the Bible is two words long, and he recites it for his memory verse with enormous satisfaction, as if he has found a loophole. I let him have it. He has found something better than a loophole, though he will not know it for fifty years.

I have been sitting with those two words since All Saints.

The story is in John. Lazarus is sick, and his sisters, Martha and Mary, send for Jesus, and Jesus does not come right away. By the time he gets there Lazarus has been in the tomb four days. Martha meets him on the road and tells him plainly that if he had been there her brother would not have died. Mary says the same thing, weeping. And Jesus, who has already told his disciples what he is about to do, who knows that in a few minutes he will stand at that tomb and call his friend out of it, goes to the grave and weeps.

If I had been writing the story, I would have left that part out. A man who is about to raise his friend from the dead has no need to cry at the grave. But John put it in, and he put it in two words, as if he knew a reader would try to hurry past it and wanted it too short to skip.

I believe that death will be no more. I said amen to it on Sunday when the names were read. I believe it the way I believe the sun will come up over the pasture tomorrow. And I still miss Earl at this table every morning. The believing has never once made the missing smaller. For years I thought that meant my faith was small. A woman with real faith, I thought, would not still be missing him after seven years. Then I read this verse properly.

Jesus knew the end of the story better than anyone has ever known it, and he wept anyway. The tears were not a lapse in what he knew. They were what love does at a grave, even love that knows how it all comes out. Hope does not hurry grief along. It stands beside it.

I have come to think that is one of the kindest verses in the whole Bible, and it is the shortest, and that is probably not an accident.

Lord, you wept at the grave of your friend. I am in good company.