From the Gospel of John:
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 11:20-21 – September 13, 2012)
Today, my wife and I are traveling to her home town to bury her father who died last week. I hope beyond hope that no one will say to her, “I wish you had been here.”
My mother died thirteen years ago just before Christmas and those very words were said to me by my stepfather. Can you say, “Guilt trip”? I know that wasn’t his intent, but that’s sure how it felt. I had visited her a few weeks before the end, and my wife and daughter had been there just a few days before she passed away, but none of us were able to be there the week she died. The week before Christmas parish clergy and their families just don’t leave home! (Especially those of us who have no assistants, no staff to pick up the slack!) So I wasn’t there; I couldn’t be there; I regretted not being there; and the last thing I needed to hear was someone drive that point home! (A few years later when my stepfather died, I was en route to visit him when he died just a couple of hours before I arrived. My stepsister said, “I wish you could have been here” . . . . Déjà vu all over again!)
I’m pretty confident Martha wasn’t guilt-tripping Jesus (nor is her sister Mary a few verses later when she says exactly the same thing), but it sure sounds like it. Maybe she was. In fact, I cannot read her words without a tone of anger; try as I might, when this lesson comes up in the lectionary to be read at public worship, that’s how I read it. Parishioners have remarked on that, that they hear it even when I try for some other tone of voice.
Maybe she was angry. Anger, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross taught us, is the second of the five stages of grief, right after denial. So it’s entirely possible that she was angry with Jesus. After all, she knew him well. She may have witnessed one or more of his acts of healing; she probably had expected him to come before her brother Lazarus’ death and make him well. But he didn’t and Lazarus died. That would be enough to piss you off! So maybe she was angry at Jesus.
And that’s OK. Jesus can take it. He does take it. He takes people’s anger all the time. As a parish priest I see it again and again. Angry people pissed off at God about whatever is wrong in their lives. They’re ticked at the Almighty and, somewhat contradictorily, they feel guilty about it. I tell them it’s OK, that there’s nothing to feel guilty about. “God’s a big boy,” I tell them, “he can take it.” (Hey! Don’t get all feminist and inclusivist on me. I know God’s not a boy. It’s a metaphor! OK?) And I tell them the story of Martha and Mary and how they got angry at Jesus and how Jesus accepted that and dealt with it lovingly. Go ahead, be angry. The best people to be angry with are the ones who love us. Like God.
But please, don’t guilt trip people who are also grieving and angry. Don’t say, “I wish you could have been here” (even though it’s true and even though you don’t mean it as a criticism). Mary and Martha had some reason to say it to Jesus; they knew he could have done something! None of the rest of us have his gifts.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Commentaries insist that all John is doing in identifying Thomas as having been “called the Twin” is translating his Semitic name into its Greek equivalent, Didumos meaning “two-fold, twain, or twin”. But I wonder why he does this? A strain of Christian gnosticism insisted that Thomas was Jesus’ twin brother! Wouldn’t that have been interesting? How would we explain the Incarnation if the “power of the Holy Spirit” which came over Mary and produced a child with no earthly father had actually resulted in twins? Only one of them would be the Incarnation? Would that even make sense? No, I don’t think the gnostics got that one right, at all. But still, I find it intriguing that John throws in this little tidbit that Thomas was called “the Twin.” (He does it three times! He must have thought it important! See also John 20:24 and 21:1.)
I love this Psalm – it’s about liturgy and worship, something dear to my heart! 
“Average Sunday Attendance” – also known as “ASA” – has become a hot topic in church circles. It’s how we gauge the health of congregations, not that it’s a very good measure of that, but what other easily accessed metric to governing boards and denominational judicatories have? If the parish priest, pastor, senior minister, whatever he/she may be called is doing a good job, the assumption is, the pews are going to be full. So if we count the number of seats in the seats, voila! we know if things are good.
If you are a political junkie like me, you’ve been following the campaigns, watching the conventions, reading the editorials, and generally getting angry with one side or the other or both and the whole process. You may have noticed, as I have, that candidates are never alone. They are surrounded by a whole corps, an entire gaggle of handlers, some of whom have the responsibility to make sure the candidate stays “on message”, that he or she makes no “gaffs”. Jesus was surrounded by a gaggle, as well, but these were not handlers and there was no one to keep him “on message” except himself. In fact, the gospel witness is pretty clear that even right up to the end the gaggle that followed him around really didn’t understand the message!
From time to time, people tell me that they have appreciated something I’ve said or done and I try to remember to say, “Thank you.” But inside, I really don’t think about compliments very much. It’s not that I don’t appreciated them, but I don’t do what I do to be complimented, and I really don’t think that I have much to do with it when whatever I do has gone well or had a positive impact on someone. I sort of take Paul’s attitude from the Letters to the Romans and the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 20:2) and “I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me” (Rom. 15:18). So I do think, generally, that the answer to Eliphaz’s question is, “Yes.” Mortals can be of use to God. But there are times I would answer otherwise. 
This was today’s morning psalm, about which I am writing late in the evening. Today’s meditation was delayed by sad news in our family: my wife’s father passed away early this morning. She was unable to be with him since we live far away from her original home where he had continued to reside. We are comforted that his wife (my spouse’s stepmother) and two of his sons were with him.
As I look at life, crooked lines abound. It’s what human beings do. Bar-Jesus (as the magician Elymas is also named in the Book of Acts) may have been making the straight crooked with evil intent, but I suspect that most human beings just do it out of habit, out of an inability to do anything else, out of (maybe) some sort of primate instinct to make a mess. My mother used to admonish me, in a lot of circumstances, “Don’t get bent out of shape!” At sixty years of age, I have come to suspect that there is no way to avoid life getting bent out of shape! Crooked lines abound.
I’ve been sort of mulling this over all day. It’s one of those interesting mixed-tense things; Jesus uses the past tense for Abraham (“Abraham was”), but the present tense for himself (“I am”), while placing his presence before Abraham’s past. I think what he’s trying to do here his describe eternity. That’s not easy to do!
This morning I was struck by the absolutely opposite attitudes displayed in these two readings. The morning psalm invites God to try the worshipper; the first reading of the day demands the right to try God. I think these poles really do represent the spiritual pendulum on which most humans swing; they circumscribe our ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with the Almighty. 
