For a Time Like this: Lazarus, come out!

Jamie Howison’s sermon on John 11:1-45 from March 29, 2020

 I have to confess that there are aspects of this gospel story of the raising of Lazarus that have long left me wondering. And this year, as our city is quite closed down, our Lenten liturgies limited to live-streaming and podcasting, all of us feeling vulnerable in a time of pandemic, and news from so many parts of the world on just how devastating this virus can be, the story becomes for me all the more difficult.

 “Why?”, you might ask. It is a story of the conquering of death, and isn’t that great good news in such a time as this? Well sure, for as Robert Farrar Capon once quipped, “Jesus never met a corpse who didn’t sit up and pay attention, right then and there.” Jesus’ friend Lazarus has fallen seriously ill, Jesus is summoned by his sisters Mary and Martha, and when he arrives and finds that Lazarus has in fact died, he cries out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And sure enough, that dead man is resuscitated, and will live to see another day. This isn’t a resurrection story, by the way, for someone who has been resurrected would not grow old or get ill again and die. Resurrected life is what Jesus alone knows; resurrected life is the promise for us, in the culmination of all time. Lazarus is raised—resuscitated and restored—but he did eventually die, in circumstances unknown to us.

But even that’s a good news story, right? Whatever it was that made Lazarus ill and ended his life simply could not stand up to the presence of Jesus, who is—as he says to Martha—“the resurrection and the life.”

Still, there is this aspect of the story that I can’t entirely get my head around: “after having heard that Lazarus was ill, Jesus stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” Jesus stayed on those two days, John tells us, because he knew that, “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.” John says quite clearly that Jesus stayed put, even though he loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus. I’d so much rather he’d set out toward Bethany, right then and there, wouldn’t you? Just think of all the times that someone comes with a request for help and healing, and he just gets up and goes to their home to offer life to a dying child or even to that Roman Centurion’s servant. Now with this little family who he loves and who have befriended him, he delays.

“What was Jesus doing?’ asks N.T. Wright.

What was Jesus doing? From the rest of the story, I think we can tell. He was praying. He was wrestling with the father’s will… The time of waiting was vital, exploring the father’s will in that intimacy and union of which he often spoke. Only then would he act—not in the way Mary and Martha had wanted him to do, but in a manner beyond their wildest dreams.

 Okay… that’s maybe helpful, so far as it goes. In John’s understanding, that intimate union between Jesus and the father is so, so central. It is what makes him who he is, and in turn it will be what will make his people—us, in fact—what we are meant to be.

 And so after two days, he departs for Bethany, with his disciples cautioning him that is dangerous because the Judeans have already threatened him with death. “Let us also go, Thomas says somewhat morosely, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” 

They arrive, and Jesus is met first by Martha who comes out to meet him with first a challenge—“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”—and then an expression of hope—“But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” After that brief exchange in which Jesus assures Martha that God is about to act through him, they go toward the tomb where the dead man’s body has been placed. Now he is met by Mary, who drops to her knees and repeats the words of challenge that her sister had just uttered: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

She’s weeping—they’re all weeping—and it evokes in Jesus a most extraordinary response: “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” You can almost see his body shuddering, his very spirit writhing, as the tears begin to flow… “Jesus began to weep.”

Here N.T. Wright is insistent:

 When we look at Jesus, not least when we look at Jesus in tears, we are seeing not just a flesh-and-blood human being but the Word made flesh. The Word, through whom the worlds were made, weeps like a baby at the grave of his friend. Only when we stop and ponder this will we understand the full mystery of John’s gospel. Only when we put away our high-and-dry pictures of who God is and replace them with pictures in which the Word who is God can cry with the world’s crying will we discover what the word “God” really means.

 Still, with all due respect to so great a biblical commentator as Bishop Wright, I do wonder if the flesh-and-blood human Jesus is also confronting just how painful it is to only act once that clarity of action has come through his intimate union with God. As he confronts the agony of grief in the faces and tears and wailings of those two sisters who have befriended him, is his shuddering spirit responding to all that they have been going through as he chose this path of delaying those two days?

 We can’t possibly know, of course. We can know that he wept, and we can take solace in the truth of those tears. We can know that because Jesus wept, God weeps with the world’s crying, even—or especially—now. We can know that “Jesus never met a corpse that didn’t sit up and pay attention, right then and there,” Lazarus notably among them. We can know that in Jesus, death does not have the final word. 

Yet in my heart of hearts, I’d much sooner he had not tarried those two days, and that all of those spilt tears and aching hearts had been spared.

And now, just a couple of weeks into this physical distancing and closing down of so much of what makes our lives familiar, including being able to gather here in this place? I hope that God’s holy and healing Spirit will not tarry too long. Thankful for all of the work being done by all those staff in hospitals, for the research scientists labouring so hard to find a cure or vaccine, for people working in grocery stores and other essential services… and hopeful that maybe here, in this province and city we have acted in ways that might truly slow and limit the spread of this virus… all the while mourning the depths of the loss in places like New York City and Italy, Iran and China… I do take solace in the knowledge that Christ weeps with us.

But Lord God, give to this world the leaders and care-givers and researchers we most need, and teach us what we most need to learn. Too many are weeping, too many are growing weary, and we need your touch. Weep with us, Lord Jesus, but raise us up.