Jeremiah 31:10-17
John 11:1-14, 32-35

In a week full of words - analyzing tragedy and trying already to wring meaning from it, or seemingly as likely to assign blame - what we will most likely remember are not words at all, but images.

Images of perpetrator and victims - guns and scowls, fear and fleeing, teachers and the students they could not protect. Images of families and friends - thrust before television cameras and microphones so that we could look on at their shock and loss and deep suffering.

Images from across the worldwide family of humanity, looking on in horror, feeling yet another raw wound to the flesh of humankind, wondering why, and where next, and what has become of us that these should so regularly be the images before our eyes.

Images of makeshift memorials across our nation - right up to the flower bed by the angel in the St. Thomas park outside. As one person grieving at one of the informal memorials at Columbine High School in the wake of the awful events there wrote: "The saddest thing is that I know how to do this." Indeed even here in church, we have become so well practiced in the liturgy of greiving such senseless tragedy.

Grief itself, however, is such a measure of our humanity. There are times when the only appropriate response is one Jesus made in face of the death of his friend Lazarus: As the Gospel of John tells that story: "Jesus wept."

The Christian New Testament story centers on the powerful image of God who has come among us as an ordinary person; in Jesus, as the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, put it we see "the humanity of God". We see that the most extraordinary thing about God is this choice to be mixed up in every part of who we are. And in case we weren't quite sure God meant to be mixed up in everything there is to being human, Jesus took God to the cross with him to die there the painful death inflicted by a violent and vengeance-ravaged world. And on the journey towards his own death, Jesus took time to join the crowds around Lazarus, his friend - and he had to bear the hard news, "Lazarus isn't sleeping, but dead." And seeing the grief of his friends, Jesus did what we do: Jesus wept.