Our Tears as Glasses

Reading the Bible through the lens of our painful stories

The Preamble

I’m jazzed to share this week’s devotional (just below) on learning to read the Bible through the lens of life’s pain and difficulty. I share this post after a delightful trip to the Netherlands to speak at the New Wine Summer Conference with the family. The time was splendid—and God was moving among the people! Aside from getting some sort of nasty virus upon our return to the States, we remain so grateful for all the new friends we made along the way. Also, a big 👋👋👋 to the hundreds of new readers from the Netherlands. Welcome to the Low-Level Theologian!

On the public-facing side of things, these past two weeks, Nijay and I released two new episodes of Slow Theology: one on learning how to emotionally navigate seeing evil in the church and an introductory episode to our series on the Ten Commandments. As well, my friend Russell Joyce and I have released the second season of the Same Jesus podcast for the denomination we serve. The recent episodes on formation and sexuality garnered good engagement. So, that should be a fun listen. Also, Russell’s new book on the theology of scars just came out—and it is really good.

Lastly, the Instagram reel below that I posted this week with my friend Andrew Demazio about the first healing in the Bible seemed to spur some good conversation and even hit a nerve with some. I always welcome your thoughts. I’m thinking about writing more about wounds in Scripture. And God’s relationship with them.

Okay, now on to this week’s devotional. Thanks for letting me into your life. May God’s abundant grace shine on you this week. You are in my prayers.

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The Devotional

There’s a short line in John’s vision of the apocalypse that simply reads, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 21.4) Read that line again, if you can. Maybe once again. For any reader of this passing description of heaven, there is a slight problem to note. John observes that in that place of glory, there will be no more crying for those who will enter its gates. But, he further notes, Christ will wipe the tears that come from their eyes. How could this be? No more crying; and he will wipe the tears from their eyes? This seems impossible, doesn’t it? Can you have both? 

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

In reality, this single line of apocalyptic imagery would have been a source of unimaginable comfort to those who would have needed it. Christ, John sees, will wipe the tears from the eyes of those who find themselves restored at the new creation. This line of comfort clearly exposes the experience of the first-century reader who would be taking it in. As almost every New Testament scholar would suggest, Revelation was written to a church that had been experiencing great pain and tribulation. The world didn’t want them because they wanted Jesus. And so Revelation served as a timely word of comfort to those who deeply needed hope in that early church. The message seems to be—for a suffering church—that they would enter heaven with tears in their eyes from a life of pain and tribulation. But those tears would not be there forever. They would enter crying. 

But their crying wouldn’t be endless. 

The connection between the need for God’s Word in the context of human suffering is well established. When an individual encounters an imminent threat of death or disaster, such an experience uniquely intensifies the potential for deep and lasting spiritual transformation. We tend to open ourselves up to God in these moments in ways that we don’t at other times. This is particularly the case in our receptiveness to God’s word to us in the sacred pages of Scripture. In uniquely difficult moments of crisis, we can often become more inclined to listen with heightened attentiveness and intensified motivation to what God is speaking to us. Crisis has the power to open up our ears and soften our hearts to God’s Word. Few would disagree: we all likely receive a flight attendant’s routine safety instructions with diminished receptivity as compared to those same directions being delivered during a plane’s emergency landing due to an engine fire.

Years ago, a hospital chaplain with whom I’d attended seminary observed this firsthand. He told me that patients who are nearing death can find themselves approaching Scripture in a whole new way—the power and impact of the words of God would take on an entirely new level of meaning for the reader. The social sciences have long observed that people who are enduring trauma, pain, and personal upheaval often hold their sacred Scriptures differently in times of torrent. In what has been called “positive religious coping,” individuals will report deepened intimacy with God through their sacred texts in daunting seasons and moments. One such study has shown that survivors of breast cancer and or natural disasters will turn more readily to reading their sacred Scriptures—and experience more comfort and clarity by those doing the reading.¹

Facing our mortality offers us this strange gift. It speeds up our decisions. It provokes clarity. It makes kicking the cans down the road an impossibility. I’ve found this to be the case in my own life. Reading the Bible while on a cruise or on a sabbath day or in times of peace and tranquility, for example, is a fundamentally different experience than reading the Bible while experiencing a personal crisis, pastoral emergency, or societal tragedy. It is not that God’s word has changed. Rather, I have changed as the reader. The plow of experience has softened the soil of my heart. It is that the crisis is changing me to bear a deeper sense of urgency to do what God has said. 

Tears can be the best lens through which to read the Bible. 

When I’m teaching my Introduction to the Bible course at the University—a course taken mostly by students who have never read the Bible—this is a key insight that I seek to shape their learning experience around. Many of these students do not come to the class with an in-built desire to read the Bible. This is usually the biggest challenge. But the biggest opportunity. I don’t want my students to read the Bible. I want them to want to read the Bible. The whole class is largely about arousing a desire that they have never had. The best way for me to do this is to invite the students to identify the one place in their lives where they are experiencing the greatest pain, mortality, or frustration. And in that place—the hardest place of their existence—to bring that very thing to the Bible. I let them in on the painful places in my own life that I’ve been bringing to the Bible for decades. 

This can revolutionize their limited experience with the Bible. Before long, they begin to see that the Bible is not (and has never been) a grab bag of lift-me-ups and devotional fluff. The Bible is God’s word to real people in real life who are facing real death. The big book ceases to be a dusty, dead, and antiquated book from the past. It becomes a word of love and to the very present of our lives. 

“Exegesis,” Eugene Peterson once wrote, “is loving God to hear what he has to say.” It is the energy we give of our lives to the art and practice of reading and receiving the biblical text. And there is a massive difference in our lives between leisure exegesis and crisis exegesis. Engaging with the biblical text, when one leisurely enjoys life without end, there is no urgency to turn, repent, and change. But knowing that today might be all one has can reframe everything about biblical reading. I would imagine, having never been in them, that one’s exegesis takes on a whole new form in a death camp, on death row, or in hospice. 

There has, from time to time, emerged interesting research on the relationship between mortality and spiritual decisions. In 2015, some research was published on how prisoners—especially those on death row—relate to their religious beliefs. While it may be easy to believe that facing death can cause people to turn to religion, it turns out that this is not universally the case. Research shows that looking down at death’s door can (and often does) cause one to turn to faith. But it can also cause individuals to entirely run away from religious faith. What was found in researching the religious beliefs of those behind bars in one particular prison is that reports of people turning to Judaism were almost never reported (because of its general lack of proselytism) or Islam (because of its heavy emphasis on community and culture). Christianity, however, was commonly turned to because it could be embraced in isolation, and it was spread amongst prisoners.² 

This may be one of the reasons the Christian gospel about Jesus Christ spreads and grows in the darkest of environments. It is a message for people who are suffering. And it is a message about a God who suffered. And may help have some explanatory power as to why the Christian gospel at the present moment is spreading fastest in places where Christianity is most oppressed or marginalized. The gospel spreads as it is suppressed. Resurrection is only possible in these kinds of environments—environments of death. “The blood of the martyrs,” the ancient wisdom of Tertullian goes, “is the seed of the church.” 

This brings us to the minor Hebrew prophet Jonah. In the first chapter of our minor prophet, God comes to the young man and commands him to go to Nineveh to preach. He is to tell the people of Assyria of God’s love and God’s judgment. A tough job, indeed—given that the Assyrians had years previously ravaged Jonah’s own homeland. Naturally, as many of us would do, Jonah runs from God and his command. It is then, on the ship to Tarshish, that Jonah is thrown into the sea. But God is not done with Jonah. And so a big fish is sent to swallow him. 

Jonah will eventually be (pardon the literal imagery) vomited up to the dry land of God’s mission above in Jonah chapters 3 and 4. But Jonah 2—the time Jonah inhabits the dark waters below—mustn’t be ignored. There, in the belly of the fish, Jonah sings a song. At his most painful moment of life—when death seems to be his only future—Jonah sings to the Lord. But something odd is discovered in Jonah’s watery worship. Little, if any, seems to be his own words. Nearly cut and paste, scholars have shown that the song of Jonah in his worst moment is cut-and-paste from the Psalms. He isn’t being original. He is singing the Bible in the belly of the fish. The intertextual connections between Jonah’s song and the Psalms are unmistakably difficult to ignore: 

Jonah 2:2 - “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.”

• Psalm 18:6 - “In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.”

• Psalm 120:1 - “In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me.”

Jonah 2:3 - “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.”

• Psalm 42:7 - “Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me.”

Jonah 2:4 - “Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’”

• Psalm 31:22 - “I had said in my alarm, ‘I am cut off from your sight.’ But you heard the voice of my pleas for mercy when I cried to you for help.”

Jonah 2:5 - “The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head.”

• Psalm 69:1-2 - “Save me, O God! For the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.”

Jonah 2:7 - “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.”

• Psalm 18:6 - “In my distress I called upon the LORD; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears.”

• Psalm 77:11 - “I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your wonders of old.”

All of this, of course, is only electrified by the fact that there is no way in the world Jonah had a scroll of the Psalms in the belly of the fish. He is singing the songs he learned in times of leisure—likely as a child under his mother’s care—to self-comfort in times of crisis. This is no doubt the lesson of the death of Christ. What is he doing in his final moments on the cross? He is quietly declaring (maybe even singing) the cherished words of Psalm 22. The tears that fell from the eyes of Jonah, Jesus, and so many others have shown us that the real pain of our lives can be the best glasses to read and live the life of Scripture. 

I think there are two lessons to be learned from all of this. First, we must take a long-term, long-suffering approach to the word of God. Never once in our life will, as the prophet says, “God’s word return void.” (Isa 55.11) That is to say that every single moment in our lives that we take the time to hide what God has said in the safety of our hearts and minds, we are giving God something to amen somewhere down the road. Every act of Scripture memorization is a subversive act against despair and hopelessness in what will, at some point, be the days ahead. To put God’s word on our hearts is to plant a seed of hope in times of goodness that will be the fruit of glory in times of despair. 

But second, God’s word must be approached by our real lives. As I tell my students, before reading the Bible, take the time to listen to your own heart and life. What is that place of death and despair that you face that is your greatest place of need? Pick that thing up—whatever it may be—and bring it with you to the Bible. This is the principle for all transformative Bible reading. Bring your real life to the Bible. All of it. Leave nothing behind. 

It is only by bearing our tears to heaven that we can be touched by the One who wants to wipe them away.

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The Farewell

As always, thanks for reading. You can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.

1. Harper, A. and Pargament, K., “Trauma, Religion, and Spirituality: Pathways to Healing,” in Traumatic Stress and Long-Term Recovery, ed. Cherry, T. (Switzerland: Springer, 2015), 349–67.

2. See the interesting article found in Alex Hannaford, “Letters from Death Row.”