Saturday July 29, 2017
A little beyond the end of today’s reading there is the shortest verse in the Bible. It is Jn 11:35, and it says simply, “Jesus wept.” It shows sensitivity in the people who first divided the Scriptures into chapters and verses. They could easily have put these words with the following verse; it would even have been logical: the following verse is, “So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’” When someone weeps you just have to give them time to weep. Weeping may be saying a lot, but it is not language, and it doesn’t require an answer or an explanation. There are two occasions in the gospel when Jesus told people not to weep (Lk 7:13; 8:52). On both occasions, there was an error of fact: the persons being mourned were not dead. But in today’s story there is no doubt about Lazarus being dead. So, Jesus wept; he did not take death lightly. He is sometimes made to seem a sort of magician who “leaped up on the third day.” If we make little of death, we make little of the resurrection. Nor can we to make little of Martha. She is not playing second fiddle to Mary (especially not in this passage). With Peter’s, hers is the most explicit confession of Jesus as Messiah—which is the whole purpose for which the gospel was written (Jn 20:30,31). A scholar says that this points to the prominent women like Martha played in the early Church