Fifth Sunday in Lent
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Long before the invitation hymn that we will sing at the close of worship this morning was called a “spiritual,” it was a slave song: “Mary, Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Mourn.” It was a song of resistance and hope authored anonymously and sung religiously by persons whose bodies were owned and exploited by others, but whose spirits kept their eyes on the prize of freedom, and whose souls were never enslaved. “Pharaoh’s army got drownded; O, Mary, don’t you weep.”
The Mary of “Mary Don’t You Weep” is the Mary of this morning’s gospel lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary. You know Mary and Martha from another story, a story that the gospel of John doesn’t tell but the gospel of Luke does. In that story, Martha expresses frustration over the fact that while she is busy with the work of the household, Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet reveling in his teachings instead of helping Martha. Martha says, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” To which Jesus famously replies, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42). Poor Martha has taken a beating from preachers ever since: “Martha just doesn’t get it,” they say.
But in John’s gospel, Martha does get it. When she says in John 11:27, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she makes one of the greatest confessions of faith in the four gospels, right up there with Simon Peter and Thomas Didymus and the centurion at the cross and Mary Magdalene in the garden. Mary, her sister, in contrast, she who sat at Jesus’ feet, throws herself down at Jesus’ feet and weeps. Mary is undone in her grief and her pain. She does not “kneel” at all, as the New Revised Standard Version mistranslates the Greek verb piptō, “to fall.” She collapses in tears at the feet of Jesus. At which point the old slave song steps into the story as though it were a Greek chorus in an ancient tragedy and responds, “O, Mary, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drownded. O, Mary, don’t you weep.”
It’s one of the most influential and important of all the slave songs and spirituals that have survived into the twenty-first century. But it hasn’t been a popular cross-over song, by which I mean it hasn’t made the inroads into white religious culture and personal piety that so many spirituals have, like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Battle of Jericho” and “Wade in the Water” and “Deep River,” among so many others. We sing “Mary Don’t You Weep” almost every time we go to Springfield Baptist Church for our annual joint Communion service, but we don’t ever bring Mary back with us to First Baptist. This one doesn’t cross over very often.
And when it does a curious thing happens, as in the version we’ll sing this morning from the United Methodist hymnal. The only stanzas that get included are the “when I get to heaven” stanzas. White hymnals don’t typically include the stanza that sings, “If I could, I surely would stand on the rock where Moses stood.” In other words, I’d drown that Pharaoh if I had a chance. Or “One of these nights about 12 o’clock, This old world’s gonna reel and rock.” I wonder what that expresses in a song of resistance and hope among persons who are owned and exploited or among persons who are systematically denied access to economic opportunity and education and self-determination. “God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, but fire next time.” Judgment’s coming, don’t you think? “Mary wore three links of chain; every link was freedom’s name.” That’s a marvelous image of resistance and hope: every link of the chain by which you are bound has freedom’s name on it.
The problem, you see, is that when we whitewash those old slave-song spirituals and only sing the emancipation-hope stanzas without singing the slavery-resistance stanzas, we risk preaching only half the gospel. In the message of the gospel, there is no hope without resistance. The moral and spiritual power of hope is always found in the active refusal of the human spirit to give in to the way things are as the way they must be, the active refusal to accept what is wrong as right as a legitimate structure of society and the universe, the active rejection of what is demeaning and destructive to others and to one’s self. Hope is grounded in never giving in and never giving up cause “Pharaoh’s army got drownded, O, Mary, don’t you weep.”
“Take away the stone,” Jesus says in John 11:39. The voice of accommodation and acquiescence immediately repsonds, “Jesus, you can’t do that; it’s too far gone.” But Jesus refuses to accept the way things are in place of the way things can be, and so he calls to the one who is already in death, “Lazarus, come out!” And as Lazarus stumbles out of the darkness of the tomb into the light of day, Jesus says to those around, “Unbind him, and let him go.” That’s the gospel voice of resistance: “Take away the stone.” “Come out!” “Unbind her, and let her go.”
When Mary falls in tears at Jesus’ feet, she does not yet know how the story ends. None of us ever does when we get to a point like that in our life. But the story of the resurrection of Lazarus is also the story of the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of Mary and the resurrection of Martha and the resurrection of all of us who refuse to accept the way things are as they way they must be, who refuse to accept what is wrong as right, and who reject what is demeaning and destructive to others and to ourselves. Yesterday’s venture in Operation Inasmuch in which more than 300 of us participated was an act of resistance and hope that things will not always be as they are now. Sending a mission team to Haiti—and going to Haiti this week—is an act of resistance and hope that things will not always be as they are now.
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26). That question, “Do you believe this?” is not just about eternal life as “in heaven.” Remember, now, in those old slave songs and spirituals “heaven” and “home” and “over Jordan” are codes for freedom, for emancipation in the here and now, not just in some life to come. Jesus refuses to accept Martha’s answer in v 24 that she believes in a resurrection of the dead at the end of time as what he means when he tells her that her brother will rise again (John 11:23-24). When Jesus asks, “Do you believe this?” it is a question about the character and quality of life here and now that we are all are called to live: a life of resistance and hope for others and for ourselves.
So when we come this morning to sing those “heaven” stanzas of “Mary Don’t You Weep”—“gonna run about and spread the news”—we are not just singing hope; we are singing resistance also in the name of the one who is the resurrection and life, in whom we never give up or give in cause Pharaoh’s army got drownded. O, brother, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. O, sister, don’t you weep, don’t you mourn. Pharaoh’s army got drownded. Take away the stone! Come out! Unbind him, and let her go!
This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.
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