by Dr. Lani Wilson

Good day, ATBC faithful. We continue to pray and and fast for our Deep East Oakland way station. Praise God for answered prayer and for patient mentors, tutors, and friends who resist judgment and lovingly embrace our foibles. Where would we be without them and how could they be without God?

Our word given this week is weary. Why this word? For some of us it is personal but in the larger picture of things, why this week and why this word? Significantly, weary can be an adjective.

feeling or showing tiredness, especially as a result of excessive exertion or lack of sleep: he gave a long, weary sigh.• reluctant to see or experience any more of; tired of: she was weary of their constant arguments | [incombination: war-weary Americans. • calling for a great amount of energy or endurance; tiring and tedious: the weary journey began again.
Apple Online Dictionary

Or it is a verb.

[ with obj. ]cause to become tired: she was wearied by her persistent cough. • [ no obj. ] (weary of) grow tired of or bored with: she wearied of the sameness of her life.
Ibid.

It’s a great word, an expressive word, not used in everyday language. In so many ways, it reflects a feeling of not just physical but emotional exhaustion; not totally giving up but ….enough already.

…and Jacob's well was there. So Jesus, being wearied from His journey, was sitting thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
John 4:6 (NASB)

Jacob’s well was still there. Jesus, worn out by the trip, sat down at the well. It was noon.
Ibid. (TMB)

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Mathew 11:28 (NET)

Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest.
Ibid. (TMB)

When He saw the crowds, He felt compassion for them, because they were weary and worn out, like sheep without a shepherd.
Mathew 9:36 (HCSB)

Whenever crowds came to Him, He had compassion for them because they were so deeply distraught, malaised, and heart-broken. They seemed to Him like lost sheep without a shepherd.
Ibid. (VOICE)

While He was still speaking, a man from the house of the director of the synagogue came and said [to Jairus], Your daughter is dead; do not weary and trouble the Teacher any further.
Luke 8:49 (AMPC)

While Yeshua was still speaking, a man came from the synagogue president’s house. “Your daughter has died,” he said. “Don’t bother the
rabbi any more.”
Ibid. (CJB)

• In John 4:6 weary means to be physically tired.
• Mathew 11:28 tells us that weary means people are weighted down with life’s trials.
• In Mathew 9:36 Jesus sees that the crowds following him are weary because they are lost, bedraggled.
• But in Luke 8:49 weary refers to the potential of Jesus being harassed or bothered.

Don’t all four of these uses of the word fit our human condition? Though we may not use the word much at all, doesn’t weary aptly describe much more of the human condition than we would like to sometimes admit? Or is that un-Christian because Christians live eschatologically? That is, our hope and faith lies in the future guarantee of heaven. The New Testament tell us that Jesus was human and although there have always been differences in belief about when, how, and even if He experience the full range of human psycho-physical experience, we trust that He did. The logic being that otherwise, He could not empathize with our suffering. The counter-logic would be that if He was God, he wouldn’t have to be human to know our suffering. So, what was the purpose of Him going through all of that suffering anyway? Either He needed to be fully human in order for Him to identify with us or He needed to be fully human in order to us to identify with Him. It cannot be both. Or can it? And where does weary fit into this?

In Langston Hughes’ first published book of poetry (1925), we can feel all four slices of weary in the poem, The Weary Blues.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied—
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.
The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes
Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org

The earliest verses set a leisurely pace.

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.

But then further down, Hughes drops us into the pain of this lazy sway.

“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Until, the Negro lays bare the core of this poor piano moan.

“I got the Weary Blues
And I can’t be satisfied
Got the Weary Blues
And can’t be satisfied ---
I ain’t happy no mo’
And I wish that I had died.

And we are finally left with

The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

In the movement of this poem from its beginning, droning a drowsy syncopated tune, there is a gradual buildup, a slow-burn energy and emotional rhythm. One can almost feel the pathos of 19th century slavery to Jim Crow to the Great Migration of the early 20th century. Certainly, all of it is wearying. But rather than a steady, static condition, weary just might be a stage that we must move through. The blues, the quintessential American musical genre, is a product of slavery and the unwilling and violent transportation and transformation of people from one continent to another. It united disparate African peoples through the lens of slavery and brutality, and although universal in feeling, it is unique to the North American experience.

In terms of content, the blues is diverse, but the genre is largely concerned with secular (rather than religious) issues. Meta-analytical approaches to the archive of blues lyrics of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrate that the most prominent topics in blues lyrics are love and relationships, movement, and anxiety about changes brought about by movement—in other words, topics that reflected “the disruptions going on in contemporary African American social relationships” (Taft 196). Historical blues lyrics, then, often concern social change and the ways in which singers and the communities they addressed navigated such change. Extended into the literary, blues lyrical content became core themes of African American literature, especially suffering, survival, and social communication (Boone 84).
Blues Narrative Form, African American Fiction, and the African Diaspora. Daniel Barlow, Narrative, (2016)24(2), pg. 137.

If we think of being weary as a rung on the ladder of suffering in life, then maybe we can understand why it was important for The Nazarene to feel the four elements of weary as described at the beginning: Physical fatigue or exhaustion, the heaviness of human burdens, the lost-ness or alienation in human suffering, and the irritation of harassment. Just as Jesus dragged His bloodied, pain-shivering body through Jerusalem to the exile of Golgotha and the triumph of The Cross, there are times when we, on a greatly diminished scale, must drag ourselves along through life: Those are the weary times. Are they meant to be forever? No. When we are there at those rough corners of suffering and we get weary, it is critical to remember that Jesus the Christ saw it coming… because He has already been there.

Bob Dylan wrote a now epic song in 1963 called “Lay Down That Weary Tune.”

His [Dylan] writing in the sixties was suffused with an apocalyptic imagination, much of which was on the side of judgment, not salvation, but this song is surprisingly consoling. It turns the apocalypse inward as Dylan reflects on the demise of both himself and the world around him. Substitute “life” for “tune” and you will hear just how christological the song is. Dylan is carrying the song here just as Jesus carried the cross, and he knows that he will have to put down his singing at some point, no matter how good the burden feels. This is a song about the end of songs— as well as what comes after.

Webb, S.H. (2014). THE SOUND OF SALVATION. First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion & Public Life, (246), 45-49.

Thus, if we treat being weary like the middle-of-the-night, freeway road construction and congestion that it is, we might get through it more patiently. We know that it will eventually be completed and how long it takes is truly not up to us. But God knows.

“Lay Down” sounds like a hymn and reads like poetry. Although he is often called a poet, this is one of his few songs that does not suffer by
being read on its own non-musical terms. One of the remarkable aspects of this song is the way it combines sadness and joy—or rather, how Dylan allows joy to arise from the sadness, so that the joy is not gratuitous and the sadness not self-indulgent. By bringing these two emotional qualities together in a way that respects and yet reconciles their apparent opposition, he accomplishes a kind of christological acoustics of the heart. Indeed, his voice, which sounds prematurely aged, embodies the theme of the song, which is one of death and rebirth.
Ibid.

Although we think of weariness as a physical state, it is usually accompanied by emotional and/or physical pain. But there is a deeper question: “Is it suffering?”

⁷Wall, P. Pain: the science of suffering, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1999). For a Christian perspective see the now classic Brand, P. & Yancey, P. The gift of pain, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan (1997), (previously entitled: The gift nobody wants). Brand was a leprosy doctor and leprosy destroys the ability to feel pain. His view of pain is summed up ‘Previously, I had thought of pain as a blemish in creation, God’s one great mistake ... pain stands out as an extraordinary feat of engineering valuable beyond measure.’ (p.62). He also distinguishes between pain and suffering ‘In more advanced cases of leprosy, my patients felt no pain at all ...yet all of them suffered’ (p. 251).
Srokosz, M., & Kolstoe, S. (2016). Animal suffering, the hard problem of consciousness and a reflection on why we should treat animals well. Science & Christian Belief, 28(1), 3-19 (footnote #7, page 5).

Is it possible to distinguish between pain and suffering? Dr. Brand thinks so. Is weariness the intermediary between pain and suffering? Does pain plus weariness equal suffering? The Christ would know.

But he was being punished for what we did. He was crushed because of our guilt. He took the punishment we deserved, and this brought us peace. We were healed because of his pain.
Isaiah 53:5 (ERV)

We are not going to solve these ancient and modern questions here. But what we can resolve is that to be weary is not to have reached the endpoint of exasperation but as a stopping-off point, a precipice. When Jesus reached the Sheep Gate he had about two and a quarter (2¼) miles to walk to Golgotha: It was his precipice. We need to remember that our weariness is ours. That once we get past it, there is rebirth, resurgence up ahead. That is the gift of The Christ, the Resurrection; because that leap has already been accomplished.

Sheep Gate-Sheep Gate-Jerusalem www.gatesal.com

Finally, Dylan writes that there is rebirth even as the old is being torn down. For our consideration is the idea that to live between the blues and a shout, between slavery and freedom, between life and rebirth is to often be weary. But it is not a destination or a dead end but the beginning because The Nazarene, The Christ, The Master has already passed through and is just on the other side.

The refrain begins with the line “Lay down your weary tune, lay down.” What is to be laid down? “Lay down the song you strum” is the answer. And then comes this remarkable passage: “And rest yourself ’neath the strength of strings/No voice can hope to hum.” “Lay down” can mean establish as well as relinquish, and the delicate interplay between the two is at the heart of this mysterious song. The song tries to imagine the moment when the world will both die and be reborn, and it seeks to meet that end by hoping to hear a voice that can follow us to our lowest depths.
Ibid.

We heard You and we hear You, LORD. There is none like You and we know Your voice. Call to us in our weariness, our fatigue, and renew us as only You know us. Sometimes, we feel like it is too late when actually, we are too early. Thank You for keeping time, keeping us when we have to stop, slow down, and catch our breaths to catch up. We are weary for a minute as You measure it. We will hold there until You release us and newness begins ------- again.

And again
And again
And again…and again…and again…and again…and again…

Amen.