“The Empty Grave, a Sea of Tears”

A Johannine Vision for Religious Trauma Healing, Part 2

This is part two of a three-part series on healing religious trauma. If you missed it, I encourage you to start with part one, Speaking the Unspeakable.

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Photo by Nicola Anderson on Unsplash

“Only a while ago you still knelt at the empty grave, a sea of tears. And all you knew was that the Lord was dead, that the life of quiet joy you shared was dead. You only stare into the void of the cave.” These words are spoken to Mary Magdalene by the narrator in Heart of the World by Hans Urs von Balthasar.¹ Mary’s story will show us the second component of healing religious trauma: tears.

When Diane Langberg explains the role of tears in healing trauma, she means more than just sadness:

“Feelings tell the story as much as words tell the story. Feelings express what the trauma did to the victim just like blood shows what a cut did to the skin. It is like seeing and acknowledging the physical wounds on the body after an accident. Feelings are the expressions of the wounds of the heart, and they too need to be seen and heard.”²

John 9 tells a story that combines a survivor talking in the midst of Jesus’ absence. In ch. 20 John tells a story of a survivor crying because of Jesus’ absence. Mary Magdalene’s weeping is just one of many features unique to John’s resurrection accounts. The tears of Mary combine with a few additional details that make her story relevant for religious trauma healing.

A Traumatic Witness

As I’ve explored before, John has Mary repeat the unknown location of the Lord’s body three times (20:2, 13, 15). This threefold repetition highlights the absence of Jesus. As

Aimee Byrd

puts it, “absence from the Bridegroom is darkness.”³ Mary was about to be found by the Good Shepherd, calling her by name (10:3; 20:16). But before that, she was in darkness—the dark night of the soul, calling to mind not only the individual but also the corporate dark night.

Make no mistake, Mary knew trauma and spiritual abuse. It isn’t narrated as directly as, say, the healed blind man being thrown out (9:34), or the disciples locking the doors “because they feared the Jews” (20:19). But Mary watched Jesus on the cross. She watched as they drove the nails into his hands and feet; she watched as he breathed his last living breath; she watched the soldier thrust a spear into his side and watched blood and water pour out. She witnessed the wounds of her rabbi—not in the words of a text decades later, not in cinematic video millennia later, but right there, “standing by the cross” (19:25).

In today’s understanding of trauma, witnessing torture can be just as psychologically damaging as direct physical torture.⁴ By John’s telling, this is not just generic trauma, it is religious trauma. In the upper room discourse Jesus repeatedly connected his coming death with predictions of similar suffering for the disciples:

• “If the world hates you, understand that it hated me before it hated you...Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” (15:18, 20)

• “I have told you these things to keep you from stumbling. They will ban you from the synagogues. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God.” (16:1-2)

These texts led Paul Minear to call John “The Martyr’s Gospel.” There is no martyrdom that is free of trauma. And there is no religious martyrdom that is free of religious trauma—especially when the persecution is perpetrated by those who appear to be of the same religion.

Mary’s story was the Johannine community’s story. They knew what it was like to be in the dark. They knew what it was like to look for the body of Christ—that is, corporate belonging—and come up empty. They knew what it was like to struggle with fear of religious oppression, fear of the same fate as their master. And surely they knew what it was like to cry.

Why Cry?

Notice how Mary’s tears come up again and again in the story, four times in three verses (20:11, 13, 15). At first glance, our tendency might be to downplay her tears. The questions from the angels and Jesus can sound rhetorical. “Why cry indeed?” we ask, knowing the ending of the story. What use are tears when the risen Jesus is standing right in front of you!

But that’s just it. Mary’s tears brought her to Jesus. If she hadn’t gone to the tomb to mourn, she would not have seen the Lord. I think we can go even further and say, if she had not shed tears, and had not experienced compassionate witnesses to her tears, she would not have seen the Lord. Observing that weeping Mary saw the angels inside the tomb, while dry-eyed Peter and the Beloved Disciple did not, Tom Wright wonders, “Maybe sometimes you can only see angels through tears.”⁵ Maybe sometimes you can only see the risen Jesus through tears. In a powerful phrase, Adrienne von Speyr writes, “Mary has trust, and pours it into the incomprehensible emptiness.”⁶ She poured her traumatized tears into the empty tomb, and they carried her to Jesus. And he bore witness to her tears: “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it that you’re seeking?” He could have rushed her through her grief: “Don’t cry, Mary! I’m here! I’m alive!” But Jesus knew better.

Truly feeling feelings is essential for spiritual abuse survivors. But not tears in isolation; that just keeps the wounds open without healing them. Mary’s tears became a river leading back to Jesus because she was not alone: she was accompanied by curious witnesses, willing to take the time to listen to her tears. Jesus did for her what the psalmist testified of God in Psalm 56:8.

Quote from Diane Langberg

Commenting on this verse, Langberg writes,

“Psalm 56:8 says, ‘You [meaning God] have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?’ This is important because often we are uncomfortable with strong emotions...This verse says that the God who created us considers our pain. He pays attention to it, and he collects our tears in a bottle and writes them in his book because we matter. What happened matters and our feelings about it matter to him also. He is recording our story and our tears for us. We will help others in their recovery if we learn to be like him in the way we treat feelings. We honor others and help them record the story of their trauma by listening to their words and their tears.”⁷

Question

What do you do with your tears? Do you find them uncontainable, constantly erupting? Or are they like a dormant well, covered up and forgotten? Are you willing to believe that those tears are already in God’s bottle? How about finding a safe witness for your feelings? If you would like help asking and answering those questions, I would love to speak with you. You can reach me via my counseling website, www.aaronjhann.com.

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Heart of the World, trans. Erasmo Leiva (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979), 158, quoted in Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 112.

2. Langberg, Suffering, 149.

3. Aimee Byrd, The Sexual Reformation, 143.

4. See Mental Health of Refugees and Torture Survivors: A Critical Review of Prevalence, Predictors, and Integrated Care; Interviewing Survivors of Torture and Other Severe Trauma.

5. Tom Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2 (London: SPCK, 2002), 146.

6. Adrienne von Speyr, The Birth of the Church: Meditations on John 18-21, translated by David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 180.

7. Langberg, Suffering, 150.