Fifth Sunday in Lent

John 11:1-45

One of the ways we teach how to read Scripture is to read it in four contexts; that is, to read (1) as a devotion, paying attention to what the text says about my relationship to God and who I am as a child of God and a person of faith;

(2) as a historical text that has something to say about the time and place and audience to whom it is addressed, being attentive to what those details teach us;

(3) as literature, noticing what the author is doing and what kind of writing it is. Remembering the Bible is a library of 66 books, we can expect to find different kinds of writing in it;

(4) and finally, because we are Lutheran, how do we relate our Lutheran theology and teaching to the Scripture; for example, where do we see both law and gospel and how does the text point to who Christ is for us as a community of faith?

I say all this because as we begin this fifth week of Lent, I hear the stories of Ezekiel prophesying to the dry bones and of Jesus calling to Lazarus in his tomb differently than I have in the past.

While I’m familiar with the image of breath being blown into dry bones, I hadn’t thought about how significant it was that the prophecy was spoken to the exilic people living in Babylon.

And, while I knew that in John’s Gospel, the raising of Lazarus was a catalyst for the religious leaders wanting to kill Jesus, I hadn’t read the story of Lazarus as a foreshadowing of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

Reading the texts again this time was a good reminder that every time we hear the living Word of God, we are different from the last time and God continues to speak through it in new and fresh ways.

 

So, let’s start with Ezekiel.

Unlike some of the other prophets who were warning Israel and Judah to repent before their destruction, Ezekiel is speaking to the community now living in exile in Babylon. His listeners are living in the throes of upheaval, death and hope-lessness.

And we hear God say, “[The whole house of Israel says], “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”

But the Lord God says to them: “I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”

They are in deep mourning, but it is not without hope because God is there.

 

Similarly, in John’s Gospel,

when Jesus goes to the village where Lazarus had lived with his sisters Mary and Martha,

he hears Martha’s anger and he sees Mary,

and the other Jews who are with her,

weeping because Lazarus is dead.

Traditional Judaism teaches that the soul stays near the body for three days after death, but by the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been in the tomb four days, leaving no doubt that he was dead.

Jesus’s first response is, like God’s response to the exiles, a statement of promise.

He says to Martha, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they died, will live…” 

In Jesus, there is life, even when what we see is death.

We can, like the Israelites and like Martha, Mary and their friends, grieve deeply for what we have lost, but our mourning is not without hope, because God is there with us.

Importantly, even as we recognize the meaning of these stories in their historical time and place, we hear God’s promises for us today.

The Scriptures give us permission

to lament the things that cause us sadness and pain, and 
grieve our losses and the deaths we experience.

We are invited to name the ways we feel like we are beyond God’s reach and when we feel like God is distant and unresponsive.

We are encouraged to employ rigorous honesty and name that there are “times of life that really suck” and despair overshadows hope.

And we are reminded to wait on God’s redeeming action,
confident that God will fulfill God’s promises.

When Jesus makes his “I AM” statement to Martha, he is saying that in Him, even those things that were dead can be redeemed.

That is the promise we receive in the Resurrection, right?

Death does not get the final word. Our God is an active, life-giving God who conquers death.

In these stories, Israel and Lazarus are exposed. For the exiles and for the dead man, their separation from God is visible and public, but often I think we hide what is dying.

Do we think God doesn’t know us and see us?

That God cannot be trusted to restore what is life-giving?

In this fifth week of Lent,

I wonder

how are we cut off from God or feel like we’re beyond God’s reach?

what is the tomb Jesus is calling each of us out of?

what deaths have we experienced that we need to trust God to redeem?

In Lazarus, we witness this redemptive and life-giving power when Jesus commands the man who has been entombed four days:

“Lazarus, come out!”

But God’s work employs our hands. John tells us that when the dead man emerges from his tomb, he is still bound, and Jesus orders the crowd of witnesses, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

If Lazarus had come out and been ostracized or shunned by his family and neighbors, the story might have had a different outcome.

Remember the Jewish laws that prohibited touching dead bodies? We talked about these rules when we studied the story of the Good Samaritan a couple of Wednesday nights ago.

If the people who saw Lazarus emerge had not risked being rejected themselves as ritually unclean,

Lazarus would have remained bound,

just like he was inside the tomb.

Jesus shows us that

the freedom we gain in Christ is not solitary, and

new life is nurtured by relationships

and sustained in community.

As we continue in Lent toward Jerusalem and the events of Holy Week

when we will again witness God’s redemptive action in Jesus Christ,

I pray we will place ourselves in God’s loving care,

trusting in God’s promise to restore us to life and

to plant us in places where we nurture and sustain our faith and lives in Christ. 

Amen.

Lent 5A

John 11:1-45

Hearing the gospel this time, what caught me was how Martha and then Mary say the exact same thing to Jesus. Whether it was tinged with grief or laced with accusation, they say,

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Our Psalm for today also gives voice to the despair we feel in times of loss. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice!”

I expect most of us have at some point in our lives said,

“God , if you had been here, this horrible, very bad thing wouldn’t have happened.”

or

“God, where are you? Because if you were here this horrible, very bad thing wouldn’t be happening.” To me, to us, to the person or people I love.

It’s a natural human response. The question of why bad things happen is a common one, and I don’t pretend I can answer it. We could have a theological discussion about humanity’s free will or about God’s permissive will or we could talk about the science of how weather and disease wreak havoc in our lives. But I doubt we’d get to a satisfactory answer.

But faith isn’t about having all the answers. Faith is believing God’s Word and trusting in the promises given to us by God.

In John’s Gospel, especially, believing means being in relationship, or knowing, God. Jesus isn’t transactional. Jesus is relational.

When Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night, and the Samaritan woman met him at the well, and the man who was born blind was healed, Jesus took time to talk with them, to answer their questions and to invite them into a deeper relationship.

In today’s gospel, we see Jesus motivated by relationship. Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha were Jesus’ friends. John bears witness to their friendship when he writes that the sisters sent a message to Jesus about Lazarus calling him “the one that you love” and when Jesus speaks to the disciples about returning to Judea and calls Lazarus a friend.

And, just as we want to go and be with the people we love when they are hurting, Jesus goes to Judea because his friend Lazarus has died.

But when Jesus arrives, the sisters are angry with him and that’s when they make their accusation, or perhaps their lament. But even in their despair, Martha makes the confession that Jesus is the Messiah, and Mary kneels at his feet. They do not grieve without hope, because Jesus is the source of their hope.

And, when Jesus speaks to the sisters, he doesn’t hide his own sorrow at seeing their suffering. Seeing the pain caused by the death of his friend, John tells us that Jesus “was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” (11:33) And when he sees where Lazarus was buried, he weeps.

I’m sure that Jesus wept because his friends were suffering.

But what else is he weeping for?

Is he weeping because while Lazarus will be resuscitated this time, Jesus knows that he cannot take death away permanently? [i] He cannot stop the suffering and the emptiness that comes with grief.

Is he weeping because he knows what is ahead? While he dismissed the other disciples’ concerns when they returned to Judea, Jesus must have known that the people who tried to stone him (John 10:31) were still there in Jerusalem and that he is also on his way to his own death. Next Sunday we will celebrate Palm Sunday and his triumphant entry in Jerusalem, before we enter into Holy Week and see him arrested and crucified.

Watching Jesus weep, I wonder what we weep for, and for what do we grieve today? 

I wrote these words yesterday. We had already had one death in our congregation this week and now we've had another. 

Certainly, we weep when a loved one dies. We weep because our lives are emptier because they are absent. And we lament the loss of what won’t be. Of the celebrations and milestones that are lost.

We weep when a beloved is hurting, and we cannot fix it. We weep because of our helplessness.

We weep when we receive bad news or experience pain.

We weep at the terror of war and the destruction of floods and the horrible ways we inflict pain on one another.

Our tears, like the ones Jesus shed, are testament to the love we have for one another.

And like Mary and Martha, our grief is not without hope because the source of our hope is Jesus.

Today’s Gospel assures us that we worship a God who is fully God and fully incarnate, fully divine and fully human, who weeps and comes alongside us when we are hurting.

Today, during Holy Communion we have prayer ministers present to pray with you and I invite you to bring your grief to them. Follow the witness we have from the psalmist and in Jesus, Martha and Mary, and cry out to God, not as one without hope, but as one whose hope is in Jesus.

Let us pray…[ii]

Good and gracious God,

From the beginning you wired us for friendship, community and for belonging.

When we suffer loss and grief, remind us that you share our sorrow and that we are not alone in the heaviness of it all.

Draw us to you and into community with one another that all will know the hope found in You.

We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

---

[i] Karoline Lewis. “Sermon Brainwave” Luther Seminary.

[ii] Adapted from “Seeking: Can these bones live?”, Fifth Week of Lent, A Sanctified Art.

Fifth Sunday in Lent

John 11:1-45

Grace and peace to you.

Sometimes when stories, like this morning’s gospel, are character-rich, the pastor preaches a first-person account, imagining the story from the perspective of one of the lesser characters. It’s one thing to hear the story and place ourselves in the roles of Mary or Martha, but imagine being the messenger who brought the news that Lazarus was ill, full of expectation perhaps that Jesus would return with him to Bethany. Or being one of the disciples who cautioned Jesus against returning to Judea, preferring to stay out of sight and away from the attention of religious authorities. 

What we hear, and see, depends largely on where we sit, or where we find ourselves in the story.

As I listened to the story this week, I found myself sitting with the ones who are grieving alongside Mary and Martha.

During these first two weeks of precautions to slow the spread of coronavirus, my grief has not been as immense as the grief that accompanies the death of a beloved, but it has been real grief all the same,

certainly for the loss of our in person gathered community and for the sacrament of Holy Communion, and for the absence of visits to congregation members in nursing homes and assisted living;

but also well beyond our congregation and ministry:

for the high school theater productions that won’t make it to the stage;

for grandparents who don’t get to visit newborn grandchildren as quickly as they planned;

for people living with illness or pain who are having to postpone medical procedures and operations;

for high school and college seniors whose plans have been disrupted;

for teachers who don’t know if they’ll see their students again this school year;

for employees who have lost work and pay, and for Shelby’s small business owners who have worked so hard to make uptown alive.

I expect you can add your own half-dozen or more laments.

And I want to give you a minute to do just that.

In the chat or comments, aloud from wherever you are this morning, or silently in your hearts, name something you have lost during this time of social distancing and staying at home.

In our grief it would be easy to join Martha and Mary in saying, “Lord if you had been here,” it would have been different. (v. 21, 32)

But Lazarus didn’t die because Jesus wasn’t there.

It’s true that Jesus stayed away and it’s true that Lazarus died, but there’s no cause and effect relationship between the two events. As much as we want to see one, because we want an explanation that makes sense, there isn’t.

Similarly, I have heard and read where people are saying the coronavirus is like God hitting a reset button, or that God is getting our attention by letting the virus spread, so that we will pay attention to first things and return to God.

I absolutely believe God is present in the midst of this disease and our community’s response, but I do not believe that God willfully let more than 30,000 people worldwide, each one beloved by God, die because we weren’t devoted enough.

“The way of Jesus doesn’t avoid death.” Facing the reality of human mortality and finitude, that death cannot be avoided, Jesus didn’t perform a miracle. Jesus knew that God’s future hope for the world is persistent, that God is at work even when all we can see is the death in front of us.

So when Jesus met Martha and then Mary away from their home, he didn’t hurry their grief or ignore the weight of their loss. He grieved alongside the sisters, weeping for the loss of their brother and his friend.

And then, together they waited for the Lord because, in the words of the psalmist, in God’s word is our hope. (130:5)

In John’s prologue we read, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us….”(John 1:14). In Jesus, God’s Word is alive for us even when all we can see is the death in front of us.

Grief is complex. There is grief for what we have lost, there is grief at our circumstances now, and there is anticipatory grief for what will be different in the months ahead. Martha and Mary bear witness to the complexity of grief and how we can hold anger, frustration or disappointment and faith at the same time.

Unnamed grief creates separation and distance, cutting us off from others. But Jesus embraces the sisters letting them name their disappointments and reminds them what they know about God’s saving power. Together at the tomb where Lazarus is buried, Jesus then calls out to him by name and commands him to come out, telling the people around him to unbind him and let him go.

Again this is God’s Word at work against death. God’s call restores us to community, whether we are buried by grief or entombed, behind heavy stones. God calls us to come out of the places where we have been stuck, even when the stench of whatever sin binds us still lingers. And God invites others to help us find freedom and new life.

“The way of Jesus doesn’t avoid death.” But it does defeat it. And that is Good News indeed.

Thanks be to God.