Psallam​​ TIBI​

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PLORANTES FREMUIT SPIRITU

 

HE CRIED GRIEVOUSLY IN THE SPIRIT – In only two other contexts in the whole of Sacred Scripture are such anguished sentiments expressed of God: one we will encounter next week as Jesus looks over the city of Jerusalem, the other can be found in the book of Genesis when God looked upon sinful man “and he was grieved in his heart” (Genesis 6:6). We know of the great love that Our Lord had for Lazarus and for his sisters, Martha and Mary, and yet the depth of grief related by the evangelist appears disproportionate given that Jesus knew that Lazarus would die and that he would raise him from death “so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it” (John 11:4). If not, then, for Lazarus then for whom did the Saviour mourn so bitterly?

 

In the days of Noah, man’s great wickedness moved the divine heart of God to such grief that he felt sorry for having created man and thought to destroy his creation. Yet it was not anger that would have moved the hand of God to wipe the crowning glory of his creation from the face of the earth; it was not a vengeful desire to punish man for his sins; but rather, profound sorrow for the loss of those he had created out of love, and for life. Our fall had been precipitous: untempered concupiscence made manifest in egregious sin; the irrepressible proliferation of evil bringing with it unspeakable suffering and the reign of death for man in time and in eternity. Yet true love, once given, cannot be revoked, and God loved his creation even as they spurned that love and chose death over the life he offered. And it was in this grieving love of God for man that the divine mercy was born – a mercy that would see God do the unthinkable to halt death in its tracks and illumine a path in the darkness of sin for man to return to the light of love and life eternal for which he had been made.

 

Mercy is the love of God made manifest in the tears of his heart, and it is a grief so inconsolable that the suffering of the Cross pales by comparison. Yes, Jesus loved Lazarus dearly and mourned for the death of the man that had left Martha and Mary so distraught with grief. Yet it was not just for this one man that the Saviour’s heart was so acutely stricken, but for all mankind, whose burden of sin was the origin of a suffering and death never designed nor desired by God for his most loved creature. The heart of God weeps here in Christ, in a renewal of the mercy of his grieving love before the flood, now stronger still as his promise of salvation reaches its climax where love turned grief become mercy in the Incarnate Word is poised to lift upon his shoulders all suffering, and be lifted up himself: the sacrifice of living love that conquers death by paying once and for all the price of sin.

 

It could not be more fitting that we reflect upon this Gospel passage as we enter Passiontide, remembering that it is a singular love that has brought us here, where the light of Christ pours into our own tombs of our sinfulness, and we hear him calling us out of death with the words, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live,” (John 11:25). For it was God’s love, which could not bear that we should suffer and die, though we deserved not life, that took on our suffering as his own and our death in our stead so that the grief of loss might be turned into the joy of our return to the heart of God, to the love for which he made us and in which we are now made free to live all the days of our lives and for eternity in his presence.

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