Weeping for Love

 On this Wednesday of Holy Week, I took a jog in my neighborhood.   The last time I had taken a run outside was a few weeks ago, and many of the trees were blossoming.  Now, I trample over those blossoms as I run along the path. There work done for yet another season, they give way to budding leaves a d scatter almost wastefully on the ground.  Allergy sufferers loathe this time of year, but I love the palette of spring.   The colors are much more varied than the darker green that tends to dominate in late spring and summer . Spring colors cover nearly the full spectrum, ranging from white, to pink, to red, and even some purples, oranges and yellows.  As the blossoms start to wane, pale green leaves begin to emerge in their place and the landscape becomes more verdant with each passing day.

When the wind blows, the ubiquitous Bradford pear trees in our neighborhood produce a veritable blossom blizzard as they cast off their fine white blooms with delicate red and green blossoms in the middle.  The blossoms fall over my head in windswept squalls as I run.  They coat the ground and anything or anyone else who happens to pass by during the height of the tempest. 

Bradford Pear blossoms pile up like snow.

Red and white magnolia blossoms fall like tears, often gathering around the base of the tree as if they encircle the tree in a protective layer of love before they are inevitably scattered to the four winds, ending up in nearby drainage ditches, ponds, and ground into my shoes as I run along the blossom-coated path.   Dogwoods add their distinctive pink blossoms, while oaks, maples, and other trees each add their unique hues to the spring biomass bonanza.    

Dogwood

I trample over some of this discarded beauty as I run.  And as I do  I think of a song lyric about another discarded beauty….

Like a rose trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought of me above all.

This lyric is from the chorus of the praise song “Above All,” which we often sing during Holy Week as we reflect upon Jesus’s crucifixion and burial.  Although can I be honest? While this line makes for great poetry, I don’t think it’s the best theology.  Jesus wasn’t just thinking of me or just thinking of you; he wasn’t even thinking of just human beings.  No, when Jesus “took the fall” and allowed himself to be trampled upon like tender rose petals under a Roman soldier’s boot,  I believe he had all creation in mind.   That’s why when I sing this I will often say:

Like a rose trampled on the ground, you took the fall and thought of love above all.

It’s a subtle shift, but an important one.  It takes the focus off me and puts it on all Creation—which still includes you and  me, by the way, but now God is the focus, not us.  Also, I think changing this single word acknowledges that the true source of Jesus’s power was God’s overwhelming love for that which God created.  Indeed, it is true that God so loved the world that he sent Jesus (God in human flesh) to live among us and die as one of us.  Through that one act, God saved Creation in every way it needed to be saved.  Somehow in this ultimate act of self-giving love, by emptying himself completely (which theologians call kenosis), God’s love triumphs over every other power in the universe.  Even death itself will ultimately be defeated—but that is getting ahead of ourselves.

Magnolia

For now, return with me to the magnolia, dropping her blossoms like tears.  Think of the weeping willows with their leaves emerging now in Maryland.  Think of soaking rain, like that which has replenished the water level in the ponds in my neighborhood recently after a prolonged drought. Think of how our human eyes function. Again and again, nature shows us the necessity of tears.  

The path to rejoicing in the morning must pass through the weeping in the night. 

In Gethsemane, Jesus weeps.  In his passion narrative, Luke goes so far as to imagine that so great was the stress Jesus felt in that moment, that tears of blood fell from his cheeks—Luke 22:44.  Jesus doesn’t just weep for what will happen to him, though;  I think he weeps for all Creation, and how it has fallen short of what God intended it to be: Our violence.  Our exploitation the Other, both human and nonhuman. Our struggle to follow Jesus’s example of foot-washing and self-giving love for all of humanity—John 13:1–20.  The shedding of Jesus’ tears, which will soon give way to the violent shedding of his blood, are somehow required to bring about the redemption of Creation that God desires.  

Weeping Willow

All this makes me think of another song I like called “After the Last Tear Falls.”  I like it because it’s so brutally honest about how life is here on this Third Rock from the Sun.  The verses frankly acknowledge that there are many things in this life that give us cause to lament, to cry out to God, to shed honest tears over situations we wish were different.  But at the end of each verse, the songwriter loops back an even deeper reality of life: that even after all this world does its worse and despite all that’s clearly wrong in this world, God’s love is still here—and in the end that’s what will help us prevail against all odds against “evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves.”  Liten to the promise offered in the song’s bridge:

And in the end, the end is oceans and oceans of love and love again
We'll see how the tears that have fallen
Were caught in the palms of the Giver of love and the Lover of all
And we'll look back on these tears as old tales

'Cause after the last tear falls there is love

But again, that’s a privileged view from the perspective of Sunday morning.  First, we must sit with the bitter tears of Wednesday through Friday.  We must endure the betrayal by Judas, the arrest by the Romans, the mockery of a trial before the Sanhedrin, the humiliation before the local figureheads of the dominant power (Pilate and Herod), the denial and bitter weeping of Peter,  the abandonment by all the male disciples that followed him to the garden and the High Priest’s home, the crucifixion at Golgotha for treason against Rome, the grieving tears of Mary his mother and the other women disciples as they watch him die powerless to stop it and then lay him to rest in a borrowed tomb.  

Like those first followers of Jesus, we too must weep before we can rejoice.  We dare not rush to “the end” of the story lest we miss the chapters in the middle and thus lose the power of the whole tale.  That is our challenge for this Holy Week, to see the story through all its chapters to (what appears to be) the bitter end…