When I took part in the service for Eternity Sunday on 24 November 2019 held by Pfrn. Sibylle Forrer in the Reformed church of Kilchberg, I was privileged to experience one of the most beautiful sermons. It touched me most deeply and has accompanied me ever since on my path as a physician.
When did you last cry? And what was the occasion? Grief for a beloved person? Anger at an injustice suffered? Joy at a kind gesture? Crying is not tied to one particular emotion and can be the expression of quite different stirrings of feeling; from abysmal despair to the soaring flight of happiness. Crying is - like laughing - an archetypal form of human expression which can be controlled only to a limited extent and is understood at once by all people. Even if people do not speak the same language and have a quite different cultural background, crying - and laughing too - is understood at once. It is an international language. Crying is, moreover, the first means of communication that we human beings have. An infant cries to make sure of attention and to signal its needs. Even before a human being laughs, he cries.
Why we human beings cry has been studied in depth by many researchers, and yet no clear result has been reached. Does a person cry because he wants to draw the attention of those around him to his emotional state and is calling for social interaction; look, I am crying, please take me in your arms. Or does a person cry because it brings him relief, crying as a protective reaction of the body and the psyche; I cry in order to release tension and to be able to process emotional impressions better. Small children show us that both are probably true: a person cries in order to draw the attention of others to his needs and equally in order to be able to process the world, life and all impressions.
The physical ability to cry is common to all people. The way crying is dealt with, however, very different. Depending on the cultural context, different customs apply. While in certain cultures public lamentation is socially anchored and in part also ritualised, in our latitudes crying is regarded as a private matter. Anyone who cries in public at times causes irritation. Roger Federer’s tears after victory and defeats at major tournaments gave rise to all kinds of discussions, about him as a sportsman, as a human being, as a man, indeed even as a father, in that a journalist had written in an article what image his children might have of him if they saw him crying on the tennis court. Politicians are at most permitted to cry at their resignation, earned after years of hard work; otherwise it is quickly regarded as a sign of weakness. In the case of women politicians, crying is judged differently again: they are then regarded as - typically female - excessively emotional, or as manipulative, but if they do not cry at all - like Angela Merkel, for example - then somehow that is not right either and they are quickly described as cold-hearted and emotionless. The sexes are granted a different measure of crying and it is also judged differently. While crying was long regarded as “unmanly”, we know today that people - entirely independently of their sex - are built at different distances from the water, as the popular saying goes.
There are people with whom it takes little and the water runs from their eyes. And there are others who do not shed a tear even in the deepest pain. So it is by no means only the person who also cries who is sad. Crying is only ONE possible expression of emotions.
What is certain: crying, or rather being able to cry, is part of being human. More than that: crying is part of life. A dead person no longer cries. It is one of the first things to happen after death that the tear ducts no longer produce any fluid. Crying is a sign of life.
The Bible knows many tearful stories and tells of people who weep. Abraham weeps for his wife Sarah, Jacob mourns for his favourite son Joseph, whom the brothers have sold, and will not let himself be comforted. David almost goes mad in his grief for his son Absalom and no longer finds his way back into an ordered life. The biblical stories know of the break in life that grief can bring with it. Everything falls apart. Everything has to be put in order anew. Organised anew. That is painful, strenuous, at times protracted - and it does not always succeed.
Jesus too weeps. The evangelist John describes Jesus’ reaction to the death of his friend Lazarus briefly and without flourish: “Jesus wept.” Jesus weeps in the face of the dead Lazarus, although he had only just preached of his resurrection. The trust that death does not have the last word did not console him for the loss of his friend. Jesus’ “eyes” - as Luther translated it - “overflowed” with grief. He gave free rein to his emotions, to his grief. What Jesus experienced, many who mourn experience too: there is indeed the trust and the hope that with death not everything is over, that the person who has died is now “well off” or even “better off”, and Jesus’ promise holds for us unconditionally, that in life and in death we are sheltered with God. This trust is comforting and gives a sense of shelter. But it cannot erase the loss. The pain that the beloved person is no longer alive, no longer in life, remains and it makes us sad. This pain usually heals at some point, bit by bit, with time. Where at first there is a gaping wound, at some point there remains a quietly throbbing scar. This healing process is individual, sometimes tearful, sometimes silent, and every person should be able to go through it in his own way.
God too weeps. The prophet Jeremiah describes how God has to weep over the fact that people do so much wrong. It is a desperate weeping in which grief and rage, despair and wrath resonate. Even if this image of a vengeful God is difficult in various respects, it nevertheless also has something very comforting about it: God is described here as a God who does not accept the injustice of this world. God, who fights passionately for the good of people and of the world. God, who feels with us, suffers with us, mourns with us. God, who weeps. The belief in God, who weeps over the misery and the injustice of this world, is often a comforting thought for me when the pain of the world threatens to overwhelm me in the face of all the terrible news.
And in the face of the many injustices in our world, in the face of all the dead who ought not to have been dead for a long time yet, of all the tears that are shed, one wishes at times for a new world.
“I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.” This vision stands at the end of the biblical scriptures. It is their comforting end. The concrete description of this new world with the royal city of Jerusalem is probably rather foreign to us and has its place in the cultural context of that time. The words that follow this description, however, come very close to us. It says there: God will dwell with the people “and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning, wailing and drudgery will be no more either”.
God will wipe away every tear. In my view there is hardly a text in the Bible that describes a more intimate relationship of God to human beings. To wipe away someone’s tears is a gesture of the most intimate closeness. We let hardly anyone come so near to us. Parents wipe the tears from their children’s eyes. Perhaps lovers from each other’s. “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” God comforts. Infinitely intimately. Every single tear, the big ones and the small ones, those sobbed out and the silent ones, those streaming and those run dry, all of them are wiped away by God, all of them seen by God.
“Beyond the door there’s peace I’m sure / and I know there’ll be no more / tears in heaven”, this line from the world-famous song by Eric Clapton is probably familiar to many of you. Clapton wrote it in order to come to terms with the death of his son, only four years old, who died in an accident. The song expresses the comforting hope that we all like to put into words with regard to death: death brings peace, it brings the end of suffering. The song expresses the same hope as the text from Revelation: being with God - heaven, as Clapton sings - is what awaits us all.
In contrast to Clapton, however, the text from Revelation says that there will be tears there. Both - the vision from Revelation and the lines by Clapton - describe peace, a state without suffering, without mourning, without pain. But in Revelation there are still tears. These are Tears in Heaven. There are still tears because these tears are also what makes us who we are. Because the story of our life is reflected in them. And because we are not lost through our death. Because our life story remains. Our crying and our laughing echo on. We are held safe with God with our whole life story. That is the promise that sounds in the vision from Revelation. None of our tears remains unseen, none is lost. And God will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
As a child I was given a handkerchief by my mother. A cloth handkerchief which has a girl in a meadow printed on it and is decorated with a red hem. She gave it to me when I was once crying bitterly; I no longer know the reason. From then on I often carried the handkerchief with me. In my trouser pocket, in my school satchel, later even in my handbag and today in the pocket of my gown. The handkerchief had become for me - quite unconsciously - a symbol that - whenever I need comfort - someone is there who sees my tears and wipes them away.
Dear congregation
We all need people who are there for us when we cry - be they tears of grief or tears of joy. The trust that we are not left alone with our feelings carries us through life. This trust is vital for us, and that is why we make sure of it as early as the first cry at our birth. Let us therefore be reliable companions to one another. Let us observe attentively and sensitively, and let us not shy away from showing emotions. It is they that make us human beings and in which we recognise one another, across all boundaries of communication. Let us hand one another handkerchiefs at weddings and funerals and then, when it is appropriate, let us wipe away one another’s tears.
“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” There are Tears in Heaven. Because we are held safe with God as a whole person. With our very own story. In life and in death.
Amen
Pfrn. Sibylle Forrer