Sermons
9th March 2008 - Fifth Sunday in Lent - Passion Sunday
One of the reasons I wanted to have today’s gospel read dramatically with people playing the different parts is that this very rich story from John’s gospel is all about real characters, people we can identify with, people of flesh and blood, people dealing with issues that each of us faces in various guises over the years, the issues of death, dying, and bereavement. Which character are you in the face of death? Mary and Martha going between trust and frustration, the disciples doubting if Jesus really knows what he is up to, the opposition mocking from the sidelines, or what about Jesus himself? Could we be like him and if so, what are his thoughts through this sequence of events that lead through one man’s death and rising again just as another begins his own journey towards the death of the cross. The characters in this story provide us with images of confusion and faltering faith in the presence of death even though some of these characters are followers of Jesus, followers of the one who brings a message of resurrection and life. So these characters: Mary and Martha, the Disciples and Thomas, the Jews, and Jesus himself display the nature of their faith in God, and each of them is as alive to the difficulties of faith as is each one of us.
Notice first how Mary and Martha simply tell Jesus the problem, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill’. They don’t instruct Jesus or plead with him, they are like that other Mary at Cana saying simply ‘they have no wine’ and leaving the problem with Jesus. And Mary and Martha get a similarly unexpected reply, this illness of Lazarus is for God’s glory. And not only does Jesus give this apparently brutal response of the primacy of God’s glory in the field of human suffering he goes on to neglect even to visit the sick man for two full days. His actions and words seem to say that God will act in his own time not yours, he will act on his initiative not yours, you have to let go and let God. How many of us can do that in the face of illness and death? How many of us can simply explain the situation to God and leave it with him? Mary and Martha clearly couldn’t leave it at that. As Jesus arrives in Bethany we hear the other side of their grief, the side that rages against God, the side in all of us that asks why? Martha instead of greeting her Lord and master reproaches him ‘If you had been here my brother would not have died’. And again how very like us she is in the face of death, how many times after a death we say to ourselves ‘if only’. ‘If only I had said what I wanted to him’ if only she could have stopped smoking’ ‘if only I had been at his side when he died’. And it is too late, taken from our hands. And to Martha the exasperating Jesus now says ‘Your brother will rise again’ prompting her cross reply that she knows all about that resurrection at the end of time, and what sort of comfort is that supposed to be to her? Her brother is dead in the here and now not in some distant theological future, that business of resurrection at the end is all very well but what are we to do about the now in which he is dead?
So how about the disciples? As usual they display misunderstanding of what is going on and faltering faith in Jesus’ ability to know what he is doing. First they try to persuade him not to go back to Judea as if Jesus hasn’t really got much idea about the worldly opposition which has recently been throwing stones at him. Then comically misunderstanding Jesus’ euphemism of death, saying ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep he will be alright’. And they crown their ineptitude with Thomas’ wonderfully morose Eeyore like comment, ‘let us also go that we might die with him’. They have no vision that this story points ironically towards the fact that Jesus is the one who is going to die and that through that death all will be offered life.
The Jews get a mixed press in this story. Some of them are with Mary consoling her, and they seem to marvel at Jesus’ love for Lazarus, ‘See how he loved him!’. But their true colours come out in the mocking and nervous question with its tiny hint of faith in Jesus’ previous ministry ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’
And finally, what of Jesus himself? Jesus in this story is very much a flesh and blood God, the words used to describe his emotions are strong. This is not a distant deity idling watching his playthings suffer and die. This is someone who is angry, indignant at the death of his friend, his weeping is the usual human mixture in bereavement of anger and distress, he is troubled - the word used by John meaning shuddering or shaking with emotion and with a desire to do something. This is not a remote God without passion and feeling, in Jesus God experiences fully all our human emotions, our pain and our grief and our love.
But the identity of the central character is of course radically different from the supporting cast. When Martha is frustrated with Jesus’ question about the resurrection Jesus speaks plainly about his identity, an identity which radically transforms the ways in which we can contemplate death, dying and bereavement. He says to Martha ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live…do you believe this?’ It is not that Jesus will offer those who follow him some theology of the end-time it is rather that his very identity is resurrection and life breaking into the present. Jesus says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. He is both what will happen at the end, and the life to which we will be raised, but that ‘I am’ is standing before Martha, the resurrection and the life are present to her, the end is present in time. And with power he calls Lazarus to hear his identity. There isn’t even a verb in what he says, it is pure command, ‘Lazarus! Here! Out!’ And out comes the bound figure, still wrapped up having been parceled off to death, placed in the darkness with no hope. ‘Unbind him, and let him go’, the beloved friend is released, unbound, the same word used as that for the release given by forgiveness in the Lord’s prayer ’forgive us our sins’ ‘release us from our sins, from the things that bind us to death and prevent us from accepting the gift of life that Jesus offers us. We are called to accept new life, we are called to recognize how we need unbinding, releasing, letting go.
Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection and the life’. And all who believe him will share this life, indeed as Jesus has promised they have already passed from death to life. New life is what we are called to. We are called out of our deathliness, out of our often self-imposed tombs, the dark places we like to crawl into wrapping ourselves up so that we are dead to the world. Jesus says You! Here! Out! Be released from what binds you, receive the gift of freedom, receive the gift of life. In this most human story of death and dying and bereavement we are shown that God is present in all our sufferings, in all our anger and disbelief, in all our faltering faith, God says be released, unbind yourself, let go, and let God. Receive the gift of life, receive the gift of resurrection, now.