When Venting Enhances Faith

Martha then said to Jesus, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. "Even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You." (John 11:21-22)

These words from Martha really stir me. They tell me some important things about her relationship with Jesus and her understanding of how He felt about her and about each one of us, especially when we are hurting and blinded by disappointment.

Too many times I have fallen for the false notion that God does not like me to be upset with Him and gets irritated when I express my real feelings to Him. Growing up in 'religion' I assumed that appearances were more important than people or their feelings and that God was more concerned with my behavior than with what was going on deep inside. But God is rich in mercy and has been slowly healing my heart of these lies and impressing me repeatedly that there is nothing I cannot bring to Him. When my emotions are raw, when I am angry from my perceptions of how I think He is handling my circumstances it is safe for me to unload on Him without fear of rejection or punishment. This has been a source of great relief for my heart over recent years as this truth has become more clear to me.

Martha was hurting deeply in more ways than one. Yes, she had just lost her brother to death and that produced the expected grief that any of us might experience upon losing a close loved one. But this death was much more complicated than the typical because Martha knew without a doubt that if Jesus had just made a little better effort that He could have arrived in time to heal Lazarus before death had claimed him. Her disappointment in the way Jesus had chosen to relate to her situation was a cause of potential deep irritation and a temptation to feel resentful on top of her grief. She was struggling not only with the normal pain of a death in her family but with the added pain of feeling that God had let her down when she needed Him the most without offering any good explanation.

When Jesus did finally show up it seemed that it was too little too late from her perspective. She was then faced with how to relate to Him when she did meet Him outside of town. Was she supposed to pretend that she was not upset with Him for ruining her life, her family, her faith? Was she supposed to submit to His decision without questioning His reasons? Was she supposed to keep her mouth shut and just blindly accept God's dealings in her life without comment?

I know that I can really resonate with Martha's likely feelings in this story as I perceive them. These feelings and urges have at times been overwhelming in my own experience and my confusion about how God expects me to relate to Him have too often prevented me from being as honest with Him as was Martha in this story. The strict expectations of religion to keep up external appearances and a supposed piety while ignoring the true conditions of the heart in an effort to appear 'correct' religiously can be suffocating. But evidently Martha and Mary had come to know Jesus sufficiently enough to know that He was not that way. They had come to the point that they were willing to vent the real truth about what was in their heart while at the same time giving Him the respect and opportunity to share with them why He was doing what He was doing.

One of the most important lessons I have been slowly learning over recent years is God's willingness to have me express anything that is going on inside my heart. God is not threatened by anything I might say to Him and is not intimidated or miffed by my expressions of frustration with Him. That is a big change from the intense fears I had of Him growing up: the fear that He would get angry with me if I said anything negative about Him, the fear that He would punish me severely if I inferred that He was not always fair, the fear that if I harbored even the slightest misgivings about Him that could be exposed into the open that He would become very angry and would treat me harshly.

Many of these fears about being open with God come from confused ideas about reverence. I still struggle to understand this issue correctly, but I do see that it is a source of many misconceptions about God for millions. Even today I feel agitated whenever I see people in authority putting excessive emphasis on keeping up appearances of reverence while suppressing opportunity for people to express what is truly inside. I believe that this issue of reverence is greatly misunderstood and has been exploited by the enemy to keep us far away from the heart of the Father.

I can distinctly remember in my early years being very afraid of God while spending much of my waking hours trying to keep Him appeased through repetitious pleas for forgiveness for every impure or inappropriate thought that might momentarily cross my mind. I spent much time all throughout the day trying to dredge up any possible mistake from my past that God might be using as an excuse to keep my out of heaven for eternity and begging Him to forgive me for that 'sin'. But all of the invented activities of my heart to find relief from the constant feelings of condemnation that I lived under 24/7 seemed to produce little relief. What it did produce over the years was a deeper resentment against this implacable God that seemed to always be raising the bar ever higher just out of my reach. In short, it produced and deeply embedded in me the heart of a rebel.

That is why I now have such intense reactions whenever I encounter teachings that remind me of those horrendous days of despair and depression. So much of typical religion as I knew it only served to make me feel more hopeless and resentful, not encouraged or attracted to want to know God. In those days my heart reacted in hidden rage whenever people would claim that the gospel meant good news and that we should be spreading it to the whole world. I could not (and still cannot) see any good news in the religion that permeated my thinking from those early days because it all seemed to be a confused jumble of doctrines and rules and demands that were impossible to achieve except for the very strong.

But worst of all I felt totally inhibited to be able to even express my frustrations, confusion and resentment for fear of severe retribution and censorship. The religion I knew did not tolerate dissent and all such talk was strongly discouraged and repressed. I was afraid to even admit to myself the rage that continued to increase inside of me against God for fear that He might see it and come down on me severely. So I strengthened habits of emotional repression and built into my heart a very large reservoir of anger, bitterness and wrath that remained largely out of sight both from others and largely even from myself. Any leaks in this reservoir were quickly plugged for fear that someone might discover how I really felt. Religion and keeping up appearances was more important than dealing with the true condition of my feelings about God.

With this background it might be seen why this response of Martha to Jesus might get me excited. Martha must have shared at least some of my feelings of frustration with God in this moment in her life. She had counted on Him to come through for her, had been very patient and polite with Him, had given Him the benefit of the doubt, had put her complete trust in Jesus just as she believed she was supposed to do. Yet after doing everything right that she knew how to do, it seemed to her that Jesus had failed her in her greatest moment of need. She could not see any explanation that would make sense as to why Jesus had chosen to ignore her desperate pleas for help.

Added to this was the intense external pressure from people around her intent on amplifying any of her doubts about the love of Jesus and His claim to represent the real truth about God in sharp contrast with religion's claims about Him. Martha found herself in the very center of the intense battle between two supernatural forces contending over what is really true about God's character and how He chooses to relate to His children. The temptation to believe negative things about God was increasing exponentially in her heart, yet her own personal experience with Jesus and the time she had spent in His presence had introduced radically different perceptions of what God was really like.

Martha, Lazarus and Mary had chosen to embrace the truth about God as revealed in the life of Jesus in contrast with what most other Jews believed. Because of this family's openness and willingness to lay aside their traditional views of God Jesus had found their home to be one of the very few safe havens where He could relax and be more open. These times together had cultivated a close bond of mutual respect and love and appreciation that few have had the privilege of experiencing. Martha had seen Jesus up close and had come to know for herself that He was worthy of her trust. Because of that she also knew that she could feel safe to express her frustrations with Him and even vent her anger without fear of censure or retaliation on His part.

But she also knew enough from her times with Jesus to realize that she did not know Him completely. While she could not formulate any reasonable explanation of why He was acting the way He was in her situation, she also knew His heart well enough to be able to both vent on Him but also to express her trust in His heart in spite of her feelings. This is the lesson that really resonates with my own soul coming from the background of fear as I have. I am greatly encouraged by seeing Martha's willingness to tell Jesus bluntly how she felt about the way He handled her situation, to tell Him her frustration but still to make a confession of faith that He was still worthy of her trust in spite of her intense feelings.

Over the years I have met various people who have learned this lesson in their own lives. At first it came as quite a shock for me to imagine that God might tolerate someone venting their true feelings on Him without reacting violently. But as the real truth about God has become more clear in my mind and heart, it makes more and more sense to believe that God is never intimidated or angered by my expressions of doubt, frustration or even resentment. At the same time it is important that I also give Him opportunity to explain Himself in His way and in His time. That is what I want others to do with me and it is only reasonable that I give God that same opportunity.

Martha told Jesus just how she felt about Him and I am sure her tone of voice conveyed even stronger how she felt, maybe even to the point of embarrassment at first. But Jesus didn't give the slightest indication that her venting on Him was any problem. In fact, He used her words as a foundation to build on and as a means of beginning to answer her deepest questioning. He seized upon her fragile expression of faith and immediately responded with a counter-offer that must have nearly overwhelmed her mind.

I sense in my reading of this interchange that Martha was daring to try to think radically outside her typical sphere of possibility. Jesus had previously challenged her to pay more attention to Him like Mary was learning to do and I believe Martha had done just that. Now when everything seemed to challenge her growing trust in Jesus she was choosing to be radical like she sensed He wanted her to do and tentatively may have even inferred in her words the crazy idea that Jesus might do the impossible if He so chose. This idea seemed so bizarre that even she may have not dared to voice it openly, but she left the possibility in tack in her words to Him and Jesus instantly seized on her tentative faith and sought to give it deeper roots in her heart.

What I find interesting is that what Martha said to Jesus was that she had chosen to trust in His relationship with His Father as well as His relationship to her. I perceive that maybe she could not yet bring herself to hope in the Father as much as Jesus did, but that her trust in Jesus based on all her previous experiences with Him was her choice when everything seemed to be pushing her in the opposite direction. She was confident that Jesus had something of a hot line with God and she would choose to rest in Jesus' love for her no matter how things turned out in her brother's situation. This was the best choice she could have made with the faith that she had and Jesus honored her faith and strengthened it in His response to her words in a very interesting way.