"Generations and Cultures"

Tuesday, March 8, 2014

Sometimes, when I'm reading the reflection booklet, I start planning this reflection on the reflection in my head as I read.  I was all ready to talk about cultures and generations and defend the millenials with their relative lack of neuroses and impetus to impose their prejudices on the world.

Then the reflection booklet took aim at my Martha.  And that will not stand.

The reflection booklet was being playful, I think, rather than serious, but this is a topic where that excuse rings particularly hollow with me.  The reflection playfully calls the Israelites in the desert and in Jesus's own time the Culture of Complaint and lumps Martha's "Lord, if you had been there, my brother would not have died" in with the apostles jockeying for position at Jesus's kingdom.

First of all: whoa.  Are you serious?  You want to compare the petty squabblings of the apostles to the grief-stricken cry of a woman who just lost her brother to preventable illness?  You want to make light of that moment?

Even the Israelites isn't a fair comparison to the apostles jockeying for position (and even then, the Bible only says that it happened, not that it overrode everything else).  They are in the desert.  They are acutely aware that the manna could stop falling from the heavens every day.  They were promised salvation and a land flowing with milk and honey, but now they are wandering around lost in the desert until literally everyone the promise was made to has died (except Joshua?).  That is hard.  That is not a cheap complaint.

Because what I see in Martha's cry most of all is not a complaint or even an accusation.  It is a cry too many of us know all too well.  "Lord, here are the pieces of my broken heart.  Why did this happen?"  Daring to ask that question may be the bravest thing you can do in that moment.  And her sister Mary didn't.  I didn't, when my moment came.

I was afraid I wouldn't get an answer.

I was too afraid of silence -- or even worse, an answer -- that I never asked the question.  Why?  Why did this happen?  Why did this terrible thing happen?  Why did God set up the world with death woven in to the tapestry?  Why with evil and pain and suffering and sin?

All the answers I had ever heard in better days turned to ashes in my mouth or worse -- offensive bile my body was rejecting.

Martha must have felt much the same.  But she had the courage to go and ask.  How do I know that it wasn't an accusation?  Because she ran to Him and she asked the question at His feet.  That's where she was kneeling.  And when He told her she did not need to grief, she repeated in all sincerity that she knew Lazarus would rise again on the last day.

She was asking for help letting that be enough.  She was asking for help understanding.  She was calling out to God -- you could have stopped this, and you didn't.  Why?  I love you, but why?  I trust you, but please, give me something.  Please, if you can, tell me why.

Sometimes He can't answer, but asking the question is the bravest thing you can do in that moment and the truest sign of faith you can give at such a time.

It is not a complaint.  It is a testament.