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Sunday March 9, 2008 Lent 5AThe story of the raising of Lazarus reminds me of a scene in one of my favorite movies The Princess Bride. The dead Westley who is attempting to stop the marriage of his true love Buttercup to the evil and ridiculous Prince Humperdinck is brought to Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal). Westley is brought to Miracle Max by his partner, the revenge-seeking Spaniard Inigo Montoya.
Miracle Max: [Lifts and drops the arm of the dead Westley] I've seen worse.
Miracle Max: He probably owes you money huh? I'll ask him.
Inigo Montoya: He's dead. He can't talk.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Jesus, a bit of miracle worker himself, has been hiding out across the Jordan River after a confrontation with the religious establishment in Jerusalem. He has gone back to his roots, back to where his cousin John had been baptizing. He is renewing himself, his mission and his base of followers. Every good prophetic movement can benefit from a retreat to re-organize and gather strength.
While across the Jordan, Jesus receives a message from Mary and Martha, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Jesus’ response is strange, for though he loved the whole family, he lingers a few days before making his way to the village of Bethany near Jerusalem. Though in Jesus’ defense the message does not seem urgent and there is no reason to believe that the illness was life-threatening.
John’s Gospel is full of cryptic talk about Jesus’ motives for going to see Lazarus. There talk of glory being revealed even as the disciples are fearful of once again going back into the region of Judea where the religious elites had sought his life and would be happy to arrest him.
Jesus arrived in Bethany too late. Lazarus is more than just mostly dead. He has been in the tomb four days which is significant because of a basic Jewish belief that the soul lingered near the body for 3 days so that death was truly final on the 4th day. Lazarus’ body had begun to rot and according to Jewish custom his soul had departed. Lazarus was all dead.
Jesus meets with both Mary and Martha separately but the two sisters unknowingly deliver the same line, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” The tone of the conversations is simply sadness. There is no accusation, no bitterness, just a quiet confidence that if Jesus had been with Lazarus things would have worked out differently.
In the midst of this long and strange story, the writer of John offers a crucial theological point that is the commentary for this culminating “Sign” in John’s Gospel. Jesus engages Martha about the nature of resurrection, and proclaims one of the I am statements this Gospel is noted for, “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. Martha proclaims her faith in Jesus at that moment but fails to connect this to her brother’s death and leaves Jesus to find Mary.
Mary’s arrival takes this story out of the head and into the heart of all those involved. Jesus is himself greatly disturbed and deeply moved by the weeping of Mary and others. As Jesus begins to seek out the place of Lazarus’ burial he too begins to weep. Jesus’ response is odd and puzzling. He was “deeply moved,” the text tells us, but the word in the Greek means more than that. It implies that Jesus was not only moved but angry, full of righteous wrath, and ready to act. Why is Jesus so disturbed? Why does he weep? At whom or what is he angry?
Perhaps Jesus’ tears were for the whole world. Perhaps his anger was for the cruelty of death, that stalks all, takes some violently, snuffs out lives too soon, leaves such big holes, causes such suffering. To be sure he wept for his friends Martha and Mary in their loss. He wept for his friend Lazarus, decaying in the grave. But Jesus wept for more than that. He wept for the frailty of life, and the crazy unfair way of death’s dark dealing. More than likely Jesus’ wept because he knew that there was so much more to the story than those in front of him seemed to understand. There was so much fear in their eyes, such a resignation toward death. Perhaps he wept because so few seemed to understand what he was about, so few seemed to believe in what they had seen already.
But they weren’t just tears of sorrow and anger either. For in the midst of his tears he found his center, his calling, and felt the quickening of the Spirit. There was life in him, a wild kind of life that needed to be let loose. There was a life in him that reached out to say there is more, more than you might believe, more, than you can even hope. And there is a big difference between being merely dead and being alive to God.
Surrounded by a crowd of mourners musing about his love for Lazarus and his wonder-working abilities, Jesus approached the tomb, commanded that the stone be rolled away despite the protestations of the truly reasonable. Jesus filled the air and bodies around him with prayer until they crackled and buzzed with the glory of God, and uttered the fearsome call, “Lazarus, come out.” There was a trembling of the earth, the sound of wings and rushing air, and cries and moaning from within.
His beloved friend, Lazarus, a dead man was walking again, drinking in air, stumbling on weakened limbs, searching for answers to too many questions at once. People were shouting and crying and shrieking and running and feinting. Jesus’ voice pierced through the noise, “Unbind him and let him go.”
What does one do when one is brought back to life? One of the problems with this story is that we never find out how Lazarus responded. He is the recipient of one of Jesus’ biggest miracles and then he drops out of view. Lazarus is snatched from the stench of death and is never heard from again. No one asks him what it was like to be dead? We’ll never know, or will we?
To be sure things like this don’t happen every day in Albuquerque. It would be easy to allow our skeptical historical-critical view of this story to neuter it beyond any fertile use. Some scholars will remind us that John’s Gospel is a very late one and that much of the material in it seems to come from the experiences of a later faith community and not from eyewitness account of Jesus’ life and ministry. Jesus was not some primitive Miracle Max. He was a first century Galileean wisdom teacher who said some interesting things but didn’t do that much that can be historically verified.
The trouble is that the more you hang around people who are attracted to Jesus the more weird miracle-like things you find happening. The more new life seems to be the order of the day. The more resurrection reveals itself. Oh, to be sure, there is the tendency among the educated faithful to disregard “signs” even when they stand out against the ordinariness of life. Our interpretive machinery begins to whirl and clank and we historicize, or we psychologize, we defend ourselves against the uncanny, the unusual, the unfamiliar. What’s dead should stay dead, that is the way the world works.
John’s gospel is clear about how the religious authorities responded to Lazarus being called into newness of life again. Yes, they immediately began to plot how to kill Jesus. I suppose we might want to be careful lest we do the same.
When Jesus shouts, “Unbind him! Let him go!” he is not only shouting to dead Lazarus, he is shouting loud enough to be heard even by us, listening in on the scene. He is shouting to a dead man but also to every dying person. Jesus’ words are not just for long ago, these words are for today as well.
We are all of us Lazarus. Oh we may not be dead yet, but we are headed there and some of us are in more of a hurry than others. What of death binds us, controls or confines us? What part of our life needs to be made new? The truth is that like the line of a T.S. Elliott poem we are all “living and partly living.”
The point of this strange pre-Easter story is that Jesus loves Lazarus enough, loves life enough to call Lazarus back into it. In essence he says there is a big difference between all dead and mostly dead. He saw in Lazarus more life to be lived.
For many of us death is an article of faith, functionally we believe: there are no second chances, you can’t teach a old dog new tricks, people don’t change, I had no other options this is all I could do, I like things just the way they are, or I simply cannot face the pain and uncertainty of new life. We are hooked, addicted, stuck, bound, and fearful. We have all kinds of names for these tombs we inhabit: substance abuse, factors beyond our control, burned-out, apathetic, the facts of life, depression – but these are really the facts of death. As this Lent sharpens into Holy Week, honestly taking stock of our lives is the basis for moving forward into newness of life. Is it possible to pray, to pray of ourselves or of our friends, “Lord if you had been here, our brother or sister would not have died”?
One of my favorite Easter Hymns, Now the Green Blade Riseth is beautiful commentary on this passage. [sing the fourth verse]
When our hearts are wintry, grieving or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
Into the midst of our lives, into the midst of this community Jesus confidently strides and yells, “Come out,” “Unbind her. Let her go!” It is the nature of Jesus to intrude, to surprise, to shock with new life. One does not need to wait for Easter, for Jesus is the Lord of life from the beginning of time. He comes with resurrection in his fingertips, his heart weeping and his eyes alive with compassion.
Are we willing to allow Jesus to lead us into newness of life as individuals, as a community of St. Michael’s? This past week someone told me, “There is so much new life at St. Michael’s so much energy, things are changing and growing around here in such remarkable ways, that I’m excited to see where this community is headed, what it is becoming.”
It’s true, Miracle Max is not going through the pockets of St. Michael’s looking for loose change, we are not all dead, in fact far from it. However, I believe that Christ is calling St. Michael’s into newness of life. What is the shape of Christ’s resurrecting love that wants to be known in us? Yes, we are planning to build onto our existing campus, but with what kind of life will those new buildings be filled? What new life will the people of this city find at St. Michael’s? Will this be a place where people come back to life again?
On the edge of the village, among the tombs, in the midst of St. Michael’s Jesus is crying with a loud voice, “Lazarus come out.” The air crackles. The earth trembles…Love is come again.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church