Posted on: 19th June 2025

How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange country (Psalm 137)? How can a cheerful, or at least a cheering blog, be written in this world as it is, as we make it, as we let it go on being, as it looks like becoming?

Jesus drew crowds to festivals of teaching, healing and food. So they wanted to make him king (John 6.14,15). Instead, he set his face like a flint towards Jerusalem (Luke 9.51), and was not deterred by ‘that fox, Herod’. (Luke 13.31-35). When he saw the city, he wept, because it ignored what made for peace (Luke 19.41-44). Weeping, he went into the city, all the way pointing to the near coming of the kingdom of God, while being crushed and rejected. 

Women wept for him as he carried the cross, but he said: Don’t weep for me, but weep for yourselves and your children: if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry? (Luke 23.27-31)

Church in Holy Week tends to make the dying of Jesus even less than a green wood experience. But when we leave the shell of worship, go back into 'unprotected living' of today’s News, we sense the wood is dry enough for wildfire. Is it not inescapably a time for weeping? 

But who wants to read a blog of tears?

Weeping is a complex of feelings and actions. One tear is fear for our children’s future – we may even decide not to have children. Anger at the world’s arsonists, the war-makers, who play with the world’s dry wood, is another tear, and a fourth is the frustration of crying for peace.

In and beyond such tears, there are tears of love, which find ways through fear, frustration, deaf-heartedness, into generous self-giving, faithful sometimes even into and through death. We see such love in Jesus. But does the cross and the complacently sealed tomb invalidate love in this world now? So the final tear of despair and God-abandonment drops?

But Jesus, crucified, comes again, calling people to live his life in the world now.

In being raised to the glory of the Father, Jesus gives up nothing of his past. He comes showing and sharing all he lived amongst us (haddonwillmer.me.uk). So his earthly human living of love is for us to share in our living now. God gives me nothing to consume privately (goodreads.com).

There is hope, but God in heaven, or ‘God wherever God shows up in people’, does not wipe our tears away as though they never were. God, in the course of loving, creating and rescuing the world, suffers. So God mixes his tears, like his groans (Rom 8.26) with ours, putting the lived and living life of Jesus into our tears. Where the wood is dry, tears will be without hope. Where Jesus lives, the wood is yet green, and tears, like those which Jesus shed, sparkle with the life and light of God in him (grahamkendrick.co.uk).

By Haddon Willmer