When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said “Don’t cry.” – Luke 7:13

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 23, 2014): Luke 7

There is a feeling of reality in the old pop song “It’s My Party.” The song, recorded in 1963 by Leslie Gore, describes perfectly the breaking of the teenage heart. Music Critic Jason Ankeny has been quoted as saying that “’It’s My Party’ remains one of the most vivid evocations of adolescent heartbreak ever waxed.’ But while the song does center on the breaking of a teenage girl’s heart, the emotion crosses generation gaps with the chorus’s emotional outburst “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to. You would cry too if it happened to you.” There is a point in our emotional depression where the only proper response seems to be to scream at the top of our lungs that no one has any right to tell us how to feel. I will cry if that’s what I want to do. And the reality of the song is that we have all, regardless of age or stage of life – and really (surprisingly) regardless of gender – been there. (Men just seem to have a little more difficulty in admitting that.)

So it would seem that Jesus steps into this emotional quicksand as he speaks to this mother and tells her not to cry. I can almost hear the emotional backlash. Her only son had just died (burials at this time were usually performed on the very day of the death) and there was so much that was truly not fair about this situation. This truly was “her party,” and “she would cry if she wanted to.”

But Jesus would also understand in a very real way that same kind of mourning. A little later in the gospel story Jesus would once again come upon another funeral time, this time it was a funeral mourning the passing of someone that Jesus had loved. And it is part of this story (told in John 11) that Jesus found himself weeping over the one who had died. The depth of emotion in both of these stories seemed to demand nothing less than tears.

And in both of these stories Jesus had no intention of just leaving the people gathered in mourning alone in their grief, not when he could do something about it. In both cases, and as a reaction to the tears of Jesus in the case of Lazarus and the tears of this woman, the impossible was about to become a reality – the dead were about to be raised.

Maybe it’s time for the church to stop crying over the way things have changed, and how the church is no longer at the epicenter of the world and started to attempt the impossible. In some way, and I am not really sure how, maybe it is time that we started to ask God to raise the dead.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 11