In the cult classic blockbuster movie from last year, Napoleon Dynamite, there is one particularly sad character, Uncle Rico.  Rico’s problem is that, though he’s been out of high school for some twenty years, he keeps obsessing over how much different and better his life would have been if the football coach had just put him in during the fourth quarter, twenty years ago!  Those words, “If only the coach had put me in,” find their way into nearly sentence he speaks and no matter what’s going on around him those words send him drifting back to another day and time that never can be again.  From the way he dresses to the way he behaves, it’s obvious that he is still an eighteen-year-old high school senior masquerading as a thirty-something adult.  He is truly stuck, living in 1984, because his mantra is, “If only.”

Mary was stuck in her grief and hopelessness because she was using those words to express her grief after Lazarus died.  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Just a little different version of the same sad song.  “If Only.”  If only you had been here Jesus.

All the people in this story are very close and love each other deeply.  But, as we all know, when a family member dies, the best and worst of all families come out.  Usually, even in the closest families, grief needs someone to blame.  Anytime we lose something, even a pet, or a special tradition, or we lose a place we called home because we have to move, whether it’s a physical home, or an emotional or spiritual home, grief almost always looks for someone to blame.  The theme words of the song named “Blame” are “If Only.”

Jesus, if only you had been here, things would have turned out differently!  Do you see it?  If we are angry and hurt enough, our grief will even allow us to blame God.  If God had just done this or just done that.  If he’d given me a better body or a better mind or gotten me into the better school I really wanted or if God had given me a better husband or a better wife.  That kind of if only blaming can be lethal to even the best relationships.

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A friend of mine was a pastor years ago.  Not anymore.  Over twenty-five years ago, he was backing out of the driveway one morning, unaware that his toddler son had followed him out to the car.  He backed over his son, killing him instantly.  For over twenty years, as so often happens in marriages when a child dies prematurely, the blame free-floated, never quite finding a resting place, until it finally killed his marriage and his career, too.

“If only,” the refrain of the sad song of blame, are two of the saddest, even lethal, words in the human language.  That’s because they are powerless words.  They keep taking us back to a past that cannot be changed and causing us to try and relive what we really can’t relive.  “If only” are words of impossibility.  They are focused exclusively on the past.  If only I hadn’t done this or that or God had done this or that . . . my life would be so much different.  The words “If only” are a spiritual, emotional, psychological, relational and even financial dead end.

Note however, how Jesus doesn’t respond to Mary’s blame by trying to justify himself.  He knows that we tend to blame others in our grief because we feel powerless to do anything but live with our misery and our loss.  But, what if there is an alternative?

This all takes us back to the earliest part of this chapter.  In the first verses of John 11, Jesus learns that Lazarus is sick unto death.  He chooses to wait on going to be with him, promising that Lazarus’ death will not be his end and will actually serve a greater and more glorious purpose.  In the text we have read this morning, Jesus has finally arrived a couple of days after getting the news about Lazarus.  He gets there just in time to take the heat from Mary.

What do most of us do when someone blames us for something that wasn’t our fault?  We respond defensively, angrily.  We toss the blame back.  Not Jesus.  Let’s look again.  Jesus listens beyond Mary’s words to Mary’s heart.  He sees her weeping.  It breaks his heart.  Then, Jesus does the only thing he seems to be able to do. 

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He starts crying, too.

This is an unbelievably candid look at Jesus’ human side.  His capacity to weep.  Why can’t we see that more often?  It’s in scripture, more than once.  We just don’t tend to see it.  Is it possible we don’t want to see it?  It’s hard for us to allow for the humanity of those we count on to lead us.  This is like Lyndon Johnson showing off his gall bladder surgery scar.  A friend of mine who was a pastor in a rural community got in trouble once for wearing shorts while mowing his lawn.  We don’t want to see our President’s human belly or our pastor’s bare legs.  We have a hard time with Jesus’ humanity, too.

We don’t want to know just how human our leaders are.  For sure, we don’t want to see them scarred, broken or crying.  It’s kind of threatening that those we count on for strength can show such humanity themselves.

Yet, here Jesus is, weeping.  This is God in the flesh.  God in the flesh taking the very next step by getting into our grief and crying with us.  We may want to always see Jesus high and lifted up, the glorious king on his throne.  But here he is, not high and lifted up, but kneeling and weeping.  Jesus didn’t rush to the scene to fix Mary’s “If only” dream world.  He walked slowly, instead, into her broken world, knelt down and wept with her.

We were talking this past week in staff meeting about how important it is to get a hug, about how important our physical contact is with one another in what can be a very lonely world.  A lady came through that door just this last week saying to me, “I came to get my pastor’s hug.”  One woman years ago told me, “I come to church because the hug you give me at the door is the only hug I get all day.”  It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?  But, there are people here this morning primarily because this is the only place in their world where someone touches them, enters their world for just a few seconds.

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There is one particular orphan in Latvia I cannot get out of my mind. 

He was about three, maybe.  We found him lying in a crib, on his back.  He was unable to walk; nothing below his waist works.  His little arms are about half as long as they should be.  He had learned to reach up with his little hand and blow kisses to people.  We stood there, staring over into his crib, blowing kisses back and forth.  Then, one of the ladies on the trip with us reached over into the crib and stroked his little arm.  He almost hyperventilated.  It was immediately obvious that he was craving a human touch, not just someone staring into his crib, but someone reaching into it and touching him where he lay.

If only Jesus had been there and fixed everything before Lazarus bought the farm, this is a side of God we might not have known.  This is the weeping, kneeling, touching, hugging Jesus.  This is Jesus, like the one of which Josh Groban sings, When I am down and o my soul so weary, when troubles come and my heart burdened be.  Then I am still and wait here in the silence until you come and sit a while with me.

Next time you are broken and hurting, crying and blaming, wishing someone could hurt just as badly as you do, be still and wait in the silence, asking only that Jesus come and sit down beside you.  Then wait, and see what happens next.  You might be surprised.

Mary doesn’t know it yet.  But, Jesus is about to help her transform her grief-blaming by helping her change her vocabulary.  Until now, she’s only said, “If only.”  Then, Jesus asks, “‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’"  Jesus was asking Mary, and he asks us, too, to look even at death, not just in terms of what might have been but in terms of what, through faith in him, will yet be.  Jesus is asking us to remove the words “if only” from our vocabulary and replace them with “next time.”

Faith is defined for us as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, NIV).  Faith, our faith

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in the “if only” times, is the confident assurance of what Jesus wanted Mary to trust, that his heavenly Father was the God of all next times.  God himself cannot change the past.  But, his resurrection power can walk right up to the darkest, “stenchiest” tomb, move the boulder back and call out to Lazarus.  If only was changed to next time and there was a dead man walking.

Jesus had done all of this, he confessed in his prayer to his father, so that they might believe.  Lazarus’ “if only” death had become the stage on which God would perform his “next time” power.  Lazarus died, and Jesus raised him from the dead so that people who are stuck in the death of the past and crying out day and night, “If Only,” might know that God is the God of next times.

“Next time” are words of hope and faith and future life.  My very first time on skis, I slid up to the edge of a black diamond.  After all, even though it was my first time, I’d already mastered the green slopes, why not try the black diamonds?  As I peered over the edge, it was so steep all I could see was air.  Nonetheless, I tipped the edge of my skis over and soon lived to regret it.  Somewhere in the tumbling and falling, I’m sure that many times I said something like “If only” in one form or another.  But, it was too late for “if only.”  The only words that served me then, and since, were “next time.”  As far as I’m concerned, there will never be another “next time” with black diamonds.  But, next time I’m faced with a challenge that may overwhelm my skills or knowledge, the black diamonds of my life will give me pause to reconsider another course. 

What if, in our day to day life, we bore witness of that to those we encounter?  What if we stopped blaming and crying “If only” and celebrated in every crisis with people, “Let’s see what God does with this next time?”

I remember doing that once.  It was with beautiful young sixteen-year-old Jeannie, who was dying of cancer.  I’d gone to see her at home after the doctors told her there was nothing more they could

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do for her.  She’d gone home to die.  Her father was standing there with us in the room.  I sat there with Jeannie and listened to her talk about how unfair it was.  She wasn’t ever going to fall in love or know what it was like for her father to walk her down the aisle or have children of her own.  Jeannie started crying.  I reached over and got the Kleenex box and handed it to her.  Then, I took her hand and I didn’t know what to say.  So, I just started crying with her.  Then, only later, did I get her to talk her about her faith in the God of “next times.”  Death would come.  Jeannie knew she would also see the glory of God because God’s “next times” always trump our miserable “if only” times.

There is an automobile dealership in town whose sales pitch is that

“The Best Never Rest.”  That’s not true.  The best, the very best, not only rested on the seventh day, he came into our world, knelt with us, and sat down to cry.  He didn’t come to fix everything.  He came to give us hope in “next time.”

What the world sometimes needs is not someone to fix everything, just someone to weep with them.  And, someone to tell them that there can be a next time.  Indeed, in Christ’s resurrection power, when he calls all dead people from their tombs, has their grave clothes torn away and announces “let them go!” there will be a next time!  There will be a next time. 

Can we share that with this weeping world, so that they might believe?