Silence is a concept that we understand only because we understand what it is not. Silence, at its most fundamental level, is an absence of sound. It is the recognition of a lack in noise. We can only understand silence because of its relation to sound. We know silence because we know noise, and we understand when that noise is missing. We can understand the void left when there is no sound.
Perhaps it is because of the recent passing of my Papaw, but when I think of silence and ponder this point of "lacking" and of being "void," I think of death. Death is, for those of us still living, an experience of complete silence. Perhaps we, like the poet Dylan Thomas, desire for those we love put up a fight and to "rage against the dying of the light." But so often those who die, especially those who die of old age, simply pass "gentle into that good night." There is a stillness to death. A finality in it that is void of movement and sound. There is a final exhalation, and with the passing of the breath - nothing. Everything goes still and quiet.
This was the silence I experienced as I stood next to my Papaw as he lay in a casket. And, I imagine, this is the silence that Martha and Mary experienced when their brother, Lazarus, died (John 11). It may not be hard for you to imagine what that stillness was like for Martha and Mary. Perhaps you have also experienced the deafening silence that accompanies death.
I think of Martha, in particular. I imagine what it was like for her. She was an active person. She got stuff done. She is known as a servant-hearted woman who gave her all to all she did. So perhaps you can imagine the immense feeling of helplessness she may have felt when she could do nothing in the wake of her brother's illness. His dying days must have been absolute torture for this woman of action.
I imagine Martha waiting by Lazarus' bedside. Watching his chest rise and fall with each increasingly more labored breath. Dabbing a cool, damp cloth on his brow. Trying so hard to be of use. Listening for the hoped for words of assurance that never came from his lips. Then, gently and quietly, Lazarus' chest stops moving. His face relaxes. Stillness and quietness seep into the room, settling on everything like morning dew. As the breath left Lazarus' lungs, Martha entered a void of silence unlike any she'd experienced before. But it wouldn't be the last time she would experience this deadly silence.
This story of Martha and Mary and Lazarus, found in the Gospel of John, takes place in the town of Bethany. It's in the very next chapter that Jesus makes his way from Bethany to Jerusalem in what would come to be known as his Triumphal Entry. This entry to Jerusalem would be the beginning to a week full of events that eventually led to Jesus being pierced with nails, hung upon a cross, and left to die.
In Luke's account of the crucifixion of Jesus, there was a group of women who had followed Jesus at the foot of his cross. They did not abandon Jesus in his last moments, but stayed with him and wept with him until the very end.
I don't know if Martha was at the foot of the cross, but I like to think that she was there among those unnamed women. I like to think she was there watching, in much the same way that she had watched at Lazarus' bedside. I think of the silent, steady tears streaming down her face as she realized all over again that she was powerless to stop what was taking place before her eyes. I imagine her gaze transfixed on Jesus' face, contorted in pain. I imagine her listening carefully to the ragged sound of his breathing. Each inhalation brought with it hope - hope that he would somehow come down from this cross and live alongside them once again. Each exhalation brought with it agonizing anxiety. Would he be able to drag in another breath? Can he hang on to life even as he hangs on this cross?
And then, quietly, Jesus utters his last words. "It is finished." And it was. John's Gospel tells us simply that Jesus "gave up his spirit." I imagine Martha standing there. Watching. Listening. Straining with all her senses to try and know that Jesus was still alive. But it all came back to her as silence. Her eyes saw a face no longer contorted in pain. Instead she saw that Jesus, where his limbs had been straining, now hung limp - held in place only by the nails in his hands and feet. Her ears strained to hear his breathing and to hear his agonized moans and to hear his struggle for continued life. But, instead, she heard nothing from him. I imagine that she went deaf momentarily. For a split second, there was absolutely no sound at all, as if the truth of what just happened couldn't register in her ears. And then everything that wasn't Jesus flooded her ears. The sobbing of his mother. The soldiers shifting nervously. The low rumble of thunder as even the sky mourned Jesus' dying. Then she realizes that the wailing in her ears is coming from her own throat.
There is an unspeakable sorrow that comes in the silence of watching someone you love die. As their spirit silently passes from one reality to another, we are left in our reality without them. Martha knew very intimately that there is a kind of grief that can't fully be named in the silence of death.
Centuries after the murder of Jesus, we call the day he gave up his spirit "Good Friday." But for Martha, that day was anything but good. It was trauma. We call the day following Jesus' death "Holy Saturday." But I don't think Martha would have considered the holiness of the day at all. Only the silence. She knew the realness of what silence in death means because she knew the fullness that had been present in the life of Jesus. I imagine that his easy laugh still rang in her ears even as she watched his silenced body being removed from the cross. His eyes, crinkled at the edges in his most tender smile, showed themselves behind her eyelids when she tried to sleep that night. He had been so vibrantly alive only days before, and now - silent nothingness. A vacuum in place of presence.
Part of me wants to resolve the tension of this silence. Part of me wants to tell you the end of the story and remind you that Martha would hear joyous sounds of resurrection in the very near future. But, in all honesty, I don't think that would be most helpful. Sometimes you just have to recognize that there is a hard truth at work. And sometimes you have to sit in ambiguity and hold within yourself the tension that is present. That's what Holy Saturday looked like for Martha. And, I suspect, that's what life looks like for some of us. Maybe even most of us.
Silence can often feel oppressive. And for Martha, both at Lazarus' bedside and at the foot of Jesus' cross, I sense that it was just that. It was heavy and charged with emotion. For us, walking in Martha's footsteps, we experience the weight of silence as well. We feel it in our bones when we experience the lack of something, whether the lack of sound or light or life. When that void is there, we are left grappling for anything to give us a foothold.
Martha felt the full weight of silence. She felt despair, and she felt alone. But the fact is that she wasn't. Those emotions, though very real to her, were only real on the plane of earthly reality. The Divine reality was that there was a Holy One present and active and whispering truth even in the midst of the silence.
In this new light, even our silence is transformed. Even the darkest, emptiest, and seemingly most void places of our hearts and minds and souls can be transformed into places that hold space for the Divine. I want to remind you, dear one, that God is present even in voids. Even on Holy Saturday, when all is deathly silent, God is there. God, in Divine fullness, enters into even the spaces of our lives that feel most empty. God goes even into tombs.
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