A Homily given at Holy Communion on Sunday 4 August 2024

The Olympics, this week, has seen competitors and spectators alike in floods of tears. Rower, Emily Craig, who won a UK gold, was weeping throughout her medal ceremony.

What about you? Think back. When did you last have a good cry? When were you last in tears and what were those tears all about: exhilaration? More likely pain, distress or vulnerability? Were you in company? What effect did your tears have on those around you? Did it gain you sympathy or were you left feeling embarrassed?

When Jesus was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it.[1]

Weeping speaks volumes, a language all of its own, expressing a range of emotions from joy to pain, relief to bewilderment, sadness to anger. Tears are a language but a surprisingly complex language. Crying presents us with an opportunity for intimacy, change, and insight. Crying can be healing and restorative. It can also be manipulative and self-destructive.

In the Hebrew Bible, we hear a psalmist laments his lot, ‘people trample on me; all day long foes oppress me.’  Despite this, he is convinced that God cares: ‘You have kept account of my misery [and] put my tears in your bottle’[2]. What incredible imagery: God collecting our tears and keeping a record of the stories of our pain. Nothing is wasted.

In which case it should not come as a surprise that tears have their place In the Christian spiritual tradition. Tears have been interpreted as indicative of the presence of the Holy Spirit, a renewal of baptism and a gift, as the result of prayer and worship much like the gift of tongues in the charismatic tradition. In Victorian times tear bottles were popular not only as an expression of mourning for those who had died but for loved ones away fighting wars, at sea or embarking on other dangerous journeys. Those bottles of tears symbolised the pain of separation. Gathered tears were a way of remembering and honouring, craving a closeness to one who was absent.

Today, our relationship with tears is more uncertain whether in society generally or in church. They can be seen as a sign of weakness to be kept hidden rather than gathered.

Whether the crowd knew it or not, as Jesus approaches Jerusalem, he is acting out a prophecy from the Hebrew Bible, from Zechariah[3], that one day a king would enter the holy city riding on a donkey, demonstrating God’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. It was a prophecy commending peace to the nations. The day of that royal visit had come but, as events were to prove, Jerusalem was not ready for it. Within days, a braying crowd would demand that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, be crucified. Pointless violence. Yet God is the God of surprises and what seems meaningless becomes charged with meaning, the cross becoming the instrument by which our fractured relationship with God is healed.

Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. It is ironic, that the very word itself, salem, speaks of peace. Yet then, as today, peace eludes that city. After a turbulent history spanning 3,500 years, Jerusalem is called “the most contested piece of real estate on earth” or, as Gershon Baskin wrote in an article for the Jerusalem Post “a city of more hatred and pain than a city of love and compassion.”  Instead of being a city of peace, Jerusalem is a city of weeping.

This past week, those braying crowds have re-emerged in Southport, Sunderland, Whitehall and other places in these lands. We weep with the parents and families of six year old Bebe King, seven year old Elsie Dot Stancombe, and nine year old Alice Dasilva Aguiar. We weep for a community where such an appalling atrocity has caused pain, distress and vulnerability. We weep because the tragic events of this past week have become a justification for hatred and pain overshadowing an outpouring of love and compassion by right-minded people.  

Jesus wept and, today, weeps again whether it is over Southport, Ukraine, Gaza, Somalia or the seemingly countless other places where those braying crowds or braying terrorists or braying nations are not ready to welcome God’s sovereignty. Which leaves me asking whether I can truly say that God is sovereign in my life. For that matter, is God sovereign in your life?