Passion Sunday 2026
In the summer of 2021 (just before I arrived in your midst), a line from the BBC police drama Line of Duty began to spread all over the Internet and popular culture. I don’t know if this expression of surprise and exasperation—“Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the wee donkey”—is in fact an established member of the Northern Irish vernacular, but a related one certainly is: “Jesus wept”. There is something lovely about this, as a bit mild cursing. It is, in any case, how John 11.35 is usually—and I think, rightly—translated, the NEw Revised Standard Versions’ departure being quite baffling.
Among the virtues of the traditional translation, besides semantic and grammatical accuracy, is brevity. In English, John 11.35 is well known for being the shortest verse in the Bible. But this morning’s Ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς (edakrusen ho iesous; 16) is 2 letters longer than the Πάντοτε χαίρετε (pantote chairete; 14) of 1 Thessalonians 5.16, “pray unceasingly”; and another 2 longer than Luke 20.30’s καὶ ὁ δεύτερος (“and the second”—you can ask me about that one later…). We ought not read too much into this. The verse divisions we have in modern Bibles is a recent affair, from the year 1551, owed to the French printer and publisher and convert to Protestantism, Robertus Stephanus. We don’t really know why he put the verses where he did, except to say that he was optimising for searchability: chapter and verse numbers are a referencing tool. There is also an anecdote told by his son, that Robertus did this work on horseback from Paris to Lyons. The joke is that some of the verse divisions came about whenever the horse tripped over something and Stephanus’s pen accidentally made a scribble.
Stephanus clearly wanted to make this line easy to find; perhaps this reflects pre-existing interests among avid readers and students of the Bible. Perhaps it was already important to be able to point to Jesus weeping; perhaps Stephanus wanted to make it so. In any case, mission accomplished. Jesus wept. It’s so well-known that it’s part of our earthiest grassroots, our vernacular of mild cussing, at least in Norn Iron.
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The horse should be given a medal if he was indeed inadvertently responsible for this little bit of referencing technology. This verse deserves the attention it enjoys from being its own verse of the Bible. It gives us this most profound and poignant scene in the life of Jesus before his passion, and also a glimpse into his inner life. Nothing at all is being said here: Jesus is not in his famous teaching mode, full of parables and aphorisms. Nor is anything being accomplished: the renowned miracle worker isn’t, in this moment, healing anyone of their ailments, exorcising them of their demons. The miracle will come later on, as we well know, the story of Lazarus being among the better known in the Bible. But not yet. It’s not time for all that.
Jesus weeps. He feels his grief, his sorrow, the loss of his friend from this world. There is, here, no attempt to deny the awfulness of death. There is no desire to sublimate pain and heartbreak, to push it aside, to paper on a smile, to parrot some line about celebrating Lazarus’s life with cherished memories. Memories are great; but they are no substitute for the real thing, our loved ones actually, physically, being with us, body and soul together. Jesus does not permit himself the delusion of thinking death some benign thing, some nothing at all, which leaves all things bright and beautiful still. No: his friend is dead, and that is worth some tears, if anything is at all.
It must seem peculiar to modern minds, the way Christians still enact and inhabit the drama of Holy Week: this annual practice of mental time travel in which we wilfully, as best we can, forget that Easter is coming, in order to sit in the gravity and solemnity of all that precedes it. Today, we hide from ourselves the church’s opulence, itself a material sign of the glory of the resurrection, so that we may prepare to dwell in the poverty of Christ’s passion and death. Next Sunday, we begin to journey with Christ, at first triumphant and then betrayed and then humiliated and tortured and killed. And through all that, our cognitive task is to allow ourselves space and time to feel the fullness of the sorrow and shock of his earliest disciples who loved him, and perhaps even of himself. To the extent that we manage to do this, will Easter Day be ever more glorious.
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But also, what is true of Holy Week is true, writ large, into our own every day dealings with grief and death. The weeping of Jesus himself permits us to weep; more than that, it reminds that it is right and proper sometimes to weep.
I am surprised—unpleasantly surprised—at how often families insist on asserting the impermissibility of grief at funerals. It even happens here, in our parishes; and amongst my own personal failures is that I have not managed to stamp it out. So often still, families choose as one of their readings—almost always a poem, if that’s the right word—that insists that we are not to weep, not to shed tears, but to remember our dead with joy and move on. As if sorrowful mourning and joyful remembrance are somehow mutually contradictory, and not in fact both essential parts of healthy bereavement.
But Jesus himself—he who has the power to raise to life those who have died—[Jesus himself] found it meet and right to honour his friend with tears. Because the Christian doctrine of death is that it is bad. And this is the Christian doctrine of death because our doctrine of life is that it is good: and death is its cessation—and even if we believe that this cessation is temporary, which we do, even the briefest pause to life, the most perfunctory interruption to being alive, is a tragedy and travesty against the will of God to loves life and loves life into all being, into all living things, each one precious in the heart of God. Your loved ones who have died, and mine too; each one of them is Lazarus too, to the who God weeps with us when we grieve, and even for us, when we find ourselves unable to.