10 April 2011

“Faces of faith – Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead”
John 11:1-45 5 Lent A 10 April 2011


In some ways, it feels like “déjà vu all over again.”
Once again this week, the two people at the center of our Gospel text are not the primary focus of its words and actions. Jesus … and one he is moved to heal … Lazarus, suffering from the ultimate “something’s wrong with him” … he’s dead … they are there ... here … but the story really isn’t about them, is it?
There’s Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary – they send Jesus word that their brother is ill.
There’s the disciples – living through another lesson in missing the point.
There’s the crowd … once again described in John’s “code-language”as “the Jews” … but please, read, hear those words as John meant them … not as another anti-Semitic cultural swipe but merely a term used for what we might say are the “religious professionals” as well as the “professionally religious” … religious leaders as well as laity … today we’d call them “churchy people.”
Yes, there’s Lazarus … sick unto death at the beginning, dead through most of the verses, and then, NO, NOT RESURRECTED, but curiously RESUSCITATED, made alive again in this life for living in this life which would, once again … and, if we believe the words of Scripture, cruelly … end in death for him.
And then there’s Jesus.
Jesus, who starts out this Sunday’s encounter in the Way of and to the Cross in exactly the same way he began last week’s story about the man born blind: saying that everything which will happen here, will happen for God’s glory.

The sisters (Mary and Martha) sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Last week – as we heard Jesus’ words as they are actually written … he said the same thing … the blind man’s illness would be for God’s works to be done, God’s glory to show through what he- Jesus - would do because of it. While everyone around them fretted and fussed about what this healing meant for them … bystanders not believing it actually happened … Pharisees and “Jews” not believing it actually happened because they said it couldn’t have actually happened, and what they said about religion was the word, after all … even the blind man’s parents, more concerned for their own safety than for the welfare of their son, deciding to remain silent about it … while everyone around them made it all about them … Jesus and the formerly blind man lived into God’s work, God’s glory happening, showing forth through them … “Lord, I believe,” the formerly blind man said, and he worshipped Jesus.
Jesus gingerly sidestepped the whole “pin-the-blame-on-the-sinner” game – despite the all-too-ready nature of those around him … and even, the text translators of our time and place – to make illness, suffering, a game of self-justification (I don’t do that, therefore, I won’t get that, or suffer that, because I’m better than them) or, worse, a place where God enters history to manipulate it to God’s own selfish, capricious ends – willy nilly making some people sick and some well, some to become crippled and maimed in car accidents and others to safely arrive at their destinations.
Ah, but that was last week.
Here, today, we have a whole new set of circumstances. Jesus gets word from Mary and Martha that their brother, his friend, Lazarus, is dying … and yet, he stays away two days longer than he had planned.
What’s going on here? Is Jesus manipulating things here, letting Lazarus die, so he can prove something?
Certainly the cries of Mary and Martha, once Jesus does come to them, sound like that’s where they are, in their thinking and feeling.
And their words, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” are they not our words too, our cries when someone near and dear to us has suffered, is suffering, is dying, right before us?
God seems so far away at the deathbed of a loved one. These words of Mary, of Martha, we know them, we who have been in that place too, we know them well. Why can’t God come, why can’t Jesus get off his can and get here, right here, right now, and DO SOMETHING to make it all right?
We know them, these words, these feelings, but maybe, probably, we can’t bring ourselves to give them voice. Something holds us back. We might fear that words, feelings like this, they just aren’t right.
“Who are YOU to question God?” that little voice inside our heads says. Just accept it … that’s what we tell ourselves … it’s God’s will, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.
Yet … this story ... it neither criticizes those who share Mary and Martha’s cry of anguish … nor does it intimate that Jesus is just manipulating these matters of life and death for his own benefit.

First, if Jesus would have really wanted to manipulate circumstances, he would have dropped everything and run straight to Lazarus, healing him, preventing him from dying. “The Jews” gathered there at Lazarus’ tomb speak the words for all of them there … and, perhaps, probably, us, here, too … “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
And yet … if Jesus would have done this … he would truly have been manipulating the situation. And so what would have been the outcome if Jesus would have gone to Lazarus before he died and healed him? “When Jesus is around, no one has to die,” that would have been the byword, the catch phrase … in so many ways, Jesus would have been living out precisely what the Devil was tempting him to do, back in the desert, back in that text we heard the first Sunday in Lent.

Just forget this “fully human” stuff Jesus … be Jesus Christ Superstar … superman, superhuman … turning stones into bread, jumping off tall temples at a single bound, and not dying … that was his temptation.
Basically, for Jesus to turn his back on us, our situation, our life-and-death existence, by becoming so totally un-like us that he would have been of little use to us.
Who, indeed, needs a superman God who doesn’t understand what it is like to be me … or you … with all the temptations and trials, suffering and pain, we feel, every day?

So, just as in last week’s text, Jesus doesn’t enter history to short-circuit it. Just like last week, when his message was __________ (you fill in the blank) happens, and yet, I will be glorified in, through, because of it … this week, he says, DEATH happens, and yet, I will be glorified, in, through, because of it.
Jesus refuses to short circuit the natural human life cycle, which ends for all of us in death … because he wants to show us a sign of what God is going to do through death.
Which, granted, is a hard word for us to hear. It confuses us; how can Jesus just seem to stand idly by while his friend suffers and dies … while we suffer and die?
Again … __________ happens. This is the way of our human lives, and Jesus is saying here by his actions that by his coming, he’s not going to do an end run, pull a rabbit out of a hat, make a quick fix, a band-aid, a bailout, of how things must be in this life. Recall that in his Sermon on the Mount … our text for most of the Epiphany season just past, he tells his disciples that “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” And the law for all life on this earth IS death.
That being said, though … observe, see, watch where Jesus is in the midst of all this.

He is right there alongside those who are suffering because of death … the non-anxious presence, not whipped into a frenzy of selfish self-interest because of the anxiety of those around him … but truly loving, caring, and engaged with them.
He stayed two days longer in the place where he was. This brought him to Lazarus’ grave four days after he died. This is deliberate. Had Jesus shown up sooner, there could have been a chance for Jesus to manipulate things … there was a feeling in those days, that in the three days following death, the deceased might not really be dead … in the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva,” waiting and wailing with the deceased’s family for three days following death … there was always the hope that the visible outcome might be different. But by the end of the third day, there was no hope. Those who remained “sitting Shiva” for the full seven days … on day four, they knew this death was real. And the mourning would become deep and painful, because the finality of it all would sink in.
“Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” says Martha, and her needs from Jesus are spiritual. She needs to hear the Word about a God who brings life through death, resurrection and life and salvation. So that is precisely where Jesus meets her, even before he gets to where Lazarus is buried, Jesus meets Martha and gives her the word of life … “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
“Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” says Mary, and her needs from Jesus are emotional. Thus he doesn’t say a word to her, but asks where Lazarus is buried, and he weeps along with her.
“Lord, if Lazarus has fallen asleep, he will be all right,” say the disciples, and their need is faith-cognitive. They need to believe what Jesus is really about, as he makes his way to Jerusalem and the cross, and so Jesus tells them, “For your sake I am glad I was not there (with Lazarus, to heal him), so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”
Jesus is right there, alongside those who are suffering because of death.
It is a prefiguring of Jesus’ own death, to be sure. Did Jesus not have to go to the Cross, not have to suffer, not have to die there at that dark day on Calvary? Of course. And we have heard those words ourselves, Jesus’ own demons tempting him to become the great glorious Messiah-King without going through the garbage of what the rest of us experience as life. Illness, poverty, suffering, hunger … he didn’t need to have any of it … he is God after all.
And yet … what kind of a relationship would, could we have with a God who sets up this world for us, and just lets it spin on, while he looks out for himself, his own best interests, we keep suffering and dying and he just goes on doing whatever the hell he wants. We might worship a God like that out of fear and trembling … appeasement … a sense of “God’s gonna get you if you don’t” … but certainly, there would, could be no love in that relationship.
And so Jesus comes to show that this God, our God, chooses another way. Another way to be with us, as one of us, taking on everything we do and are in this life, for us, for the sake of love.
Make no mistake. The path of what we might see as glorious and god-like, it’s nowhere to be found here. This way of Jesus, this taking on our humanity fully, completely, it literally stinks.
“Lord, already there is a stench because he has been in the ground four days.” The climate of Palestine makes this statement particularly true, but also for us, death stinks. Literally … as we see the pictures of the masked rescuers and recoverers in Japan and Haiti … and figuratively … as we experience the suffering and pain of it all … the pain, the suffering, the tears … death stinks.
And yet … and yet … there is Jesus in the midst of it all.
DEATH HAPPENS. It happened for Lazarus because of his illness …as we read this story beyond the verses provided for us today, we find that it will come again, soon, for him, as the chief priests and Pharisees plot Lazarus’ death because people believe in Jesus after they see Lazarus resuscitated from death.
DEATH HAPPENS. It is the natural outcome of what it is to be human.
DEATH HAPPENS. Although we humans will do everything in our power, spending millions, bailing out that which is terminal, taking all sorts of heroic and extreme measures … to manipulate, to play God ourselves … DEATH STILL HAPPENS.
And yet … Jesus, in resuscitating Lazarus … raising him to this life, once again … is pointing to what will soon follow … Jesus, suffering and dying on the Cross, so that, that time, in that moment, death itself would die. People did and are and will still die after Jesus’ death and resurrection … but this time, things have changed, death itself is in its death throes, and there is the promise, the hope, for us, of eternal life.
Which is, of course, the One Main Thing about our faith. It’s not songs and hymns. It’s not nice pleasant gatherings, potlucks, parties, social affairs. It’s not even synod assemblies and congregational meetings. The One Main Thing about this following Jesus stuff is that we hold onto hope, because of the promise made to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus, that death just plain is not the end.

This is the message of Hope For Us.

And granted, lately, it’s become harder and harder to be hopeful, when pretty much everything around us which we used to count on can’t be counted on anymore. This week I kept track of all the news I’ve heard about “cutbacks” (which, you know, is just another term for ‘death’) … in government, to be sure … but also, in people’s lives, their hopes, their dreams … homes, vacations, retirement plans, career goals.
Those of us gathered at Bishop’s Convocation last Tuesday heard about how the next moves in our ELCA denomination will be … yes, more cutbacks … a coming large decrease in the number of synods and the vital work those staffs do.
It does get depressing, and I’ll admit to my own “Gen X-ness,” taking on of much of this hopelessness. I joked with one of my friends recently that my personal retirement and healthcare plan was to work until I was so old that during worship I drop face first into the chalice and drown. It’s gallows humor to be sure, but there’s seriousness behind it. The reality of life for anyone who is 50 or under these days is that their … our … lives will not be better than our parents, but harder, bleaker … worse.
It is a hard time to be hopeful. And yet, personally, there is one Word to which I cling, sometimes, in my own life, it is the only thing, the only Word which gives me hope, which keeps me going, from day to day.
And today … it’s right here before us: “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” And Jesus began to weep.
Today, it’s right here before us: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

In the midst of death, death all around us, we have The Word of promise and hope … or rather, that Word has us … that death is not the end. And that Word … that person of and in that Word named Jesus … he walks with us through the very valleys of the shadow of death, carrying us from death to life.
But we must not stop there. For, in the midst of so much hopelessness, it is now our blessing to be stewards of this word to the world.
It’s no mistake that Jesus’ final words in this story are to the gathered community … really, to us … to take the once-dead Lazarus and set him free … “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Jesus has unbound us from the hopelessness that binds us unto death. Now we … the gathered community, receiving that Word in Water and promise, Word of forgiveness and promise, Word in bread and wine of promise … we are called to go and unbind others, in their hopelessness and despair, to bring them … in our all-too-human words and actions … fragile and failure-prone though they are … Jesus entrusts us to bring that Word of life, freedom and hope to the world.
In these days of hopelessness and despair … this is a charge we must take on with all soberness, seriousness, and strength of purpose.
For it is only through us … our words, our acts … that the world will receive ANY word of the life which really is life, life eternal, life abundant, life which makes this life worth living, worth risking for, worth taking chances in love for others … for we have been given his Word on how it all turns out… For Us.
Yes, DEATH HAPPENS. And Christ is there … and here … and THERE.
And so shall we be, in his name … for life. Amen.