On Not Needing To Be Right

On Not Needing to Be Right--September 14, 2018

"When Mary came and saw where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.' When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Lord, come and see.' Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, 'See how he loved him!'" [John 11:32-36]

Sometimes, when you love someone very much, you let them be mad at you.

Sometimes, in fact, you realize that you value the other person even more than you value being "right" or being declared the "winner" of an argument. And when that happens, you stop looking for ways to squirm out of responsibility, you stop looking for ways to pass the buck or make excuses, and you stop yelling back at the other person.  Maybe, in fact, the love is great enough--and your courage is great enough as well--that you don't ever start up with yelling or excuse-making or buck-passing in the first place.  You just let the other person be mad at you, whether you truly deserve it or not, and you never even try to argue your "rightness" in the first place.

It takes great love and great bravery to dare not to insist on "rightness," and honestly, most of the time we are not up for the task.  I know I am too much of a coward most days, and I have to fight off that impulse to argue back all the reasons I am "right" rather than simply letting someone I care about be mad because they need to be mad.

But I am learning from Jesus, because here in this scene from John's Gospel, mere minutes before Jesus actually raises Mary and Martha's brother Lazarus from the dead, Jesus shows me that it is possible to value other people even more than "being right."  And that is hard for me, at least at first, to bear hearing.  It is hard because so much of me wants to shout sometimes, or to argue, or to post that scathing and damning comment on social media, or to lash out with vitriol and righteous indignation.  It is hard because we are increasingly living in a time when our gut reaction is to making ourselves look good, to find ways to shrug off responsibility when things go wrong, to throw someone else under the bus in order to protect our own illusions of competence, and to find scapegoats when we know we really have messed up but don't want to face it.  We live in a time surrounded by loud and insecure voices who never model for us the grace, the humility, and the courage, to say, "I was wrong," or even to be strong enough to bear criticism and anger.  And that means we are lacking in good contemporary role models for how to bear the anger of others in love.

But there is still the compelling--and convicting--presence of Jesus.  Here is this Jesus--Jesus who knows two powerful facts: first, that it is true he could have prevented Lazarus' death if he had acted more quickly and raced back to Mary and Martha's house when he first got the news; and second, that he is mere moments away from raising Lazarus from the dead.  He could have avoided this whole scene in the first place with a quicker response to the danger, and he could have silenced the angry and disappointed words from both Mary and Martha, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died," by just cutting them off mid-sentence with a divine, "Abracadabra" and a wave of a messianic finger.  

Instead, Jesus bears their anger.  He is courageous enough to let Mary unleash her fury, her outrage, her grief, and her brokenheartedness on him, and Jesus does not defend himself or blame someone else.  He doesn't deny the fact, the undisputable fact, that their brother is dead because of Jesus' slow response.  He does not protest that it is an unfair accusation, or that those Pharisees must be up to some sort of smear campaign.  Jesus simply absorbs all of Mary's righteous, furious anger, weeping with her and bearing her sorrow as she lobs it at him, and loves her enough not to argue about why he is right.  Instead, he lets her be angry, tacitly conceding her point that if he had left right away he could have prevented Lazarus' death.  And then... after bearing all the weight of that anger and sorrow, only then does Jesus call Lazarus back to life.

It is telling, I believe, that John the narrator doesn't skip this part of the story.  We all know that sometimes the biblical writers give the Readers' Digest version of the episodes they recount, but here John gives us this story in painfully slow real-time.  And I am convinced that is an intentional choice on the Gospel-writer's part.  He wants us to see the love and the courage of Jesus, which allows him to bear such angry words without protesting his own innocence or shouting his own rightness, because Jesus loves these people more than he values looking "right" in the eyes of strangers.

Could we dare such love ourselves?  Seriously--we need to ask this question as we face this day.  Despite the fact that so many public voices around us seem incapable of just shutting their mouths long enough to allow the sorrows and cries of others to be heard, Jesus compels us to ask of ourselves, too, whether we dare to value other people more than our own reputations and "rightness."  

And if we think we dare to love others so fiercely, well, it will mean that sometimes we don't yell back even when we want to... it will mean we refrain from the biting remark or the withering comeback... it will mean we sometimes let others be mad at us, even if they don't really have a good reason to be mad.   And we will be done once and for all with scapegoating and bus-throwing to keep our own track records clean.  

Yes, Jesus has the power to raise the dead.  Christian hope is indeed grounded in our conviction that the living God in Christ is victorious even over death and has promised us life beyond its grip.  Yes, yes, indeed.

But even before we get to the miracle, there is a wonder to behold in the strength of Jesus' love, and the clarity of Jesus' values, that he knows that loving us--us angry, ugly-crying Marys and Marthas, is more important than the immediate recognition of his "rightness." He loves us--he loves you--more than winning an argument.  He loves a whole world full of us hot messes, all of us righteously angry about the terrible things that happen in this world, and he doesn't deny that they happen or that he could wave them all away with a snap of a messianic finger, either.  He lets us be mad at him when that is what we need to be... and then, after we have said all our worst, angriest, things and shaken our fists at the sky, and even moved him to tears, this same Jesus rolls up his sleeves, wipes away the tears from his own face, and calls Lazarus back to life.

And if Jesus has such clarity about what (and who) matters most that he can put the love of us before the need to appear "right", then maybe we may just dare the same kind of courageous love, too, in this day.

Because, it's true: sometimes when you love people very much, you let them be mad at you for a while.

Lord Jesus, you who have borne our angriest accusations and our most despairing cries, thank you for loving us enough to let us be mad at you when we feel we have no other choice.  Thank you for valuing us more than rightness... and thank you for inviting us into such love for the world as well.