A lot of people are uncomfortable reading the book of psalms. Not all of the psalms, but a lot of them. For example, everyone likes the 23rd psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” It is comforting to think of God that way, as a shepherd, and a good number of the psalms are psalms of comfort, or of quiet confidence, or of happiness, even occasionally some good advice.
But many of the psalms are desperate. The largest group of them, in fact, are lamentations. They are songs about things that have been lost, about an empire that seems to have gone to pieces, of enemies that are on every side laughing at our plans and ambitions, sniggering at the way things have turned out, and most of all, about a God who seems to have become absent just when he was needed the most. The people who wrote these psalms were in dire straits, they felt cheated, and they were angry: angry at the triumph of evil over good, sometimes angry that a God who said he would always be there wasn’t there. “Lord, how long will you look on?” they say. “Remember your promises. I am sorely in need, my heart is pierced within me.” Sometimes the people in the psalms sound so angry that their emotions seem almost primitive; and we think maybe we should have outgrown that kind of anger the same way we no longer sacrifice pigeons and goats, that it’s somehow not even Christian. And yet, these psalms were Jesus’s prayers, the prayers he prayed, and today we hear one of the reasons why.
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” This is what’s said to Jesus by both Mary and Martha as soon as they see him, and it is a line that could have come right out of one of these psalms. Sometimes it’s interpreted as if they are telling Jesus something in quiet confidence, professing their faith in him, in what he could have done. I have always heard it differently, heard it more as if they are angry, resentful, knowing that this close friend of the family didn’t make much of an effort to get there. It is as if they knew that Jesus deliberately stayed away until Lazarus had been dead four days, as he comes right out and says to the disciples, and he stays away for all that time, with Lazarus dead, just to prove a point. What point? Why did you put us through this misery, just so you could heal us afterwards? What kind of a God does that?
Prayer is an intensely personal thing. You don’t need to pray the book of psalms to pray, or even any kind of a book at all. But the gospel today does tell us something about whatever it is we say to God, and also about all those psalms that are filled with complaint and frustration and anger. It is that God expects, even demands, that all that be part of our prayer, too. We sometimes feel as if all our prayers have to be acceptable, cleaned up, telling God that surely God knows best. It’s true; God does. But we can also confront God head-on with all the contradictions that we feel deep down inside us. Telling God what we need God to do, right now, what we need, what God has to do to keep his promises, is just as much a part of prayer as praising and giving thanks. “If you had been here, if you were real, my brother would not have died.” God can take hearing it; people have been saying it for thousands of years. In this gospel, we also find out something about how he answers.
Before Jesus calls Lazarus out of that tomb, the gospel says that he was deeply moved by the suffering he saw in Lazarus’s family, some translations say that a loud groaning and wailing came from within him, as if all of a sudden, the pain they felt became clear to him, he saw it, felt it, and it became his pain. When we suffer and complain to God, when God sees the suffering that we undergo, the confusion, the depression, when God sees people and countries figuring out how to destroy one another, God groans out loud out of intense love for us, whether we know it or not. We never know how or when or how many days after we most hoped to see God the answer will show up, or why God insists on death before rebirth. But the answer is always to take something that has been given up for dead and bring it out, in a new life that is not at all what anyone expected.