March 13, 2005 John 11:1-45
A Grave Situation
According to Garrison Keillor, each of us will someday have a great big celebration thrown on our honor. The sad thing, he says, is that most of us will miss it by just a few days! Which is a pity, really. It brings to mind the story I heard about the three friends who were discussing death and one of them asked, “What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?” The first of the friends said: I would like them to say, he was a great humanitarian who cared about his community. The second said: he was a great husband and father, generous and kind and a man of integrity, an example for many to follow. The third friend said: I would like them to say, “Look, he’s moving!”
That, of course, is what Lazarus heard, as he came forth from the tomb to his party, a bit dazed and rather smelly, astonished to see the light of day again. At least, that’s the story, and I do read it as a story, a parable, part of that larger story or dramatic work of art that we know as the Gospel of John. I learned a long time ago that John, the last Gospel to be written, in the last decade of the first century, was never intended as history or biography. The Jesus we meet there is not the historical man of Nazareth, but rather the already-risen Christ, the “post-Easter Jesus” as Marcus Borg puts it, the one the church experienced not as a flesh and blood human being but as light, as living water, as the Good Shepherd, as bread, as the power of their life itself. And so I understand John in the same way I would a play or a musical or a painting or a sculpture – a work of art that gets at some very deep truths. I agree with the third century theologian Origen who said, “Although John does not always tell the truth literally, he always tells the truth spiritually.”
And thus it is important in understanding this story and discovering that truth that we ask the right questions, and don’t ask the wrong ones. A wrong question would be, “Did this really happen?” Or, “Did this mean that since Lazarus would at some point die again, that Mary and Martha would have to pay for two funerals?” That would be like going to the Lincoln Memorial and thinking him actual size, or coming out of a movie about a young boy and his friends who go to a special school for wizards, and asking, where can I buy one of those flying broomsticks?
I think it’s also a mistake to try to make the story acceptable to our modern, scientific sensibilities by speculating that perhaps Lazarus wasn’t as dead as they said he was, that maybe he was just living a meaningless life, or was really depressed, or primitive medical science missed some sign of life before committing him to the tomb. That’s trying to make it literal. For the purposes of this story, Lazarus was dead. That’s why Jesus waited several days to come, just so there would be no mistake. To paraphrase what the coroner of Munchkin Land in the Wizard of Oz proclaimed about the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house fell on her, Lazarus is “not only merely dead, he’s really most sincerely dead.” Without that, there’s no story!
Better questions might be, “What is the point of this story?”
Or, “What did it mean for the early church to experience Jesus as the resurrection and the life?”
“If Jesus raised Lazarus so that we might see the glory of God, where do we see the glory of God?”
“Where are we in the story?”
And, “What happens now?”
So let’s explore those questions. “What is the point of this story?” For the writer of John, his whole gospel has to do with the identity of Jesus, whom he sees as God-in-the-flesh. To demonstrate this he has Jesus perform a whole series of very public miracles, or “signs,” beginning with turning water into wine, and continuing with various healings and feats of increasing difficulty, culminating in the raising of a dead man to life. These are interspersed with what are known as the “I am” sayings, in which Jesus proclaims his identity as the Son of God, as one with God. And it this final miracle that leads the authorities to plot Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. Jesus’ brings Lazarus from the tomb ensuring that he himself will have to enter it. As Elaine Pagels reminds us, this event alarms the Jewish authorities not because they regard him as a trouble-maker (which is the likely historical reason, and reflected in the synoptics), but because they “secretly recognized and feared his power.” As Caiaphas says to Council: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and destroy our holy place and our nation.” Which is precisely what happened, and reflected the situation of the early church, for whim John was written.
But in the midst of the story, John makes another point, when Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is the second of several conversations leading up to the miracle itself, conversations full of wordplay and misunderstanding. When Jesus says that Lazarus is asleep, the disciples hear it as slumber and not death. When he says that Lazarus will rise again, Martha presumes Jesus is talking about a general resurrection of the dead at the end of history. But Jesus moves the action from the future to the present. It’s not about what’s going to happen, it’s about what is happening, right now. I AM resurrection and I AM life. Not “I will be”, but I AM!” The realm of God is not just coming, it’s here, it’s now. That’s what is declared when Lazarus walks out of the grave. And to the early church, which must have been perplexed by the fact that history had not ended as they thought it would, which must have been struggling with how to cope in the midst of persecution, the message was: don’t give up or give in; don’t just lie down and die and wait for God to fix things up in the future. Rather, open ourselves to resurrection now, experience God’s power now, look for God’s realm in your midst.
And maybe this is where the story begins to have some real meaning for us. For as here is Martha, confused about the whole thing and more than a little worried about the dead man is going to smell after four days of decay. As Jesus says to Martha and to the church, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
Throughout the Gospel there is a strong connection between believing and seeing. Believing always comes first. And believing means not so much an assent to certain facts or theological propositions, believing is FAITH, it is trust, living “as if.” To paraphrase a poem, as the swimmer trusts the water, as a bird trusts the air, so we trust God, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Trusting God means trusting that life has meaning, that God’s ways of love and forgiveness and giving life away to find life....work! It means that what we see is not all there is. That the whole earth is holy ground. That even our enemies are children of God. That the way of living Jesus has shown us is the way that leads to life as God intends. Believe and you will see.
And so the question further becomes, What do you see? Where do you see the glory of God?
I usually don’t have too much trouble seeing the glory of God in nature, in magnificent sunsets, great waterfalls, dense forests, and so on. But of course nature also includes tsunamis and blizzards, and there God’s glory is not in the events themselves but in the human response, in the compassion we show which is so reflective of God’s nature, of that which is God-within-us. So I see the glory of God in human caring, and in human transformation, when people change and grow and become all that God wants them to be. As Saint Iranaeus proclaimed in the second century, “The Glory of God is the human being fully alive!”
And then the question, which we ask of any good parable, is “Where are we in the story?” Where do you see yourself, and where is the church, where is our church, for after all, Gospels were not written so much to individuals as they were to the community of faith.
Maybe we see ourselves in the Disciples - people of big hearts, wanting to follow Jesus, but having a hard time getting it right, people with a good measure of faith, but not quite enough to really commit, who understand what GK Chesterton meant when he said Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and left untried. The good thing about being disciples is, disciples are learners – sometimes slow learners, but learners none the less, and God does not give up on sincere disciples.
Some of us might see ourselves in Mary, upset that her brother had died, and maybe even more upset with Jesus – “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Is she disappointed in God, maybe even angry? Do we sometimes wish that maybe God had done a better job with the world, maybe should have known better than to give us fallible humans so much responsibility? These are honest questions and God can take them!
Or maybe we see ourselves in Martha, especially in her comment about what opening the tomb might reveal: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” I love the way the old King James Version puts it, “Lord, by this time he stinketh!” I certainly identify with her, because I hate stirring things up. As they say on the farm, if it don’t stink, don’t stir it! Better to keep quiet than create a fuss, or a controversy. But if our job is to not only comfort the afflicted but afflict the comfortable, that may occasionally involve uncovering a stink, and it’s only by way of facing the unpleasantness and dealing with it that we can move on.
No doubt some of find ourselves in Lazarus – feeling less than fully alive, mourning our dead dreams, caught in tombs of despair, spirits dry and hope extinguished – and we long to hear the call to come forth into a new world and a new life. That’s the promise of Easter, which is coming, but is also here and now. It’s the good news we hear every Sunday, in the assurance of forgiveness, for example. And it’s why the first Christians changed their day of worship to Sunday, the day of resurrection and new life.
And maybe we are audacious enough to identify with Jesus himself. That’s not as brazen as it sounds, for as Richard Rohr writes in Radical Grace, “Though Jesus brings us life, he needs us, the body of Christ. He needs the community to unbind Lazarus. We now share in the power of resurrection. The eternal Christ says to the eternal Church: Unbind the suffering world and let it go free! That is the meaning of Church. It is our call, our burden, our task in human history. The risen Christ invites us on his path of liberation.”
So, where are you in this parable, in this story? Where is the church? And then, and finally, “What happens now?” In other words, what’s the rest of the story? If you were Lazarus, would you be able to walk out of the tomb, a transformed person, and simply go back to your old life? Given a second chance, wouldn’t you do things differently? An alcoholic coming out of a treatment center, clean and sober for the first time in years, perhaps, would not want to go back to their old way of life. And neither should any of us who have been transformed by God’s love. One Christian tradition, interestingly, holds that Lazarus, fresh from the grave but learning there was a plot to kill him, fled to France where he became a bishop and was martyred. Another says that he and his sisters fled to Cypress, where he was later ordained by Paul and Barnabas, became a bishop and died (again) at age 60 and was buried, but even then not for good. In 890, his remains were removed to Constantinople by the Byzantine emperor who in exchange built a church in Lacarna, Cypress that survives to this day. Whether any of this is true is unlikely but really doesn’t matter. What does matter is, If you and I have been transformed by the power of the living Christ, called into new life and unbound, then things simply cannot and will not be the same as they were before. And this new chance at life is a gift we are given each and every day. God’s mercies, says Jeremiah, are new every morning.
There is a movie featuring Angelina Jolie that tells this kind of a story, a Lazarus story. No, it’s not Tomb Raider, but rather Life, or Something Like it. In it she plays Lanie Kerrigan, a TV reporter in Seattle, who seems to have it all – great hair, fabulous house, baseball-star-boyfriend, super job – but it’s not enough. For what she really wants is to be on national, not just local TV. One day she interviews a homeless man who is known for being a seer of sorts, and who gives her an outrageous prediction for the score of that weekend’s big football game. He also predicts some weird weather, an earthquake, and finally tells Lanie that not only will she not get the national job, but that next Thursday, she is going to die! She tries to brush it off, until things begin to come true: the game ends in the upset he said it would; it snows in Seattle; and the earth shakes in California precisely as predicted. So now what does she do? Figuring the she may well die, she starts doing all sorts of outrageous things, but in the process actually wins the coveted national job in New York. Figuring the homeless seer was wrong afterall, she goes east, where her first assignment – on the day of her predicted death – is to interview a famous Barbara Walters-type reporter, where she departs from the script by simply asking if her life has been worth it – was it worth all she had to sacrifice to get where she was. This leads to an on-camera breakdown of the famous star. Assuming this will lead to her firing, Lanie leaves the studio and prepares to head back to Seattle, but as she steps into the street, she is caught in the crossfire of a police stand-off, and has a near death experience. In the hospital, she is called back to life by the one person who really loves her, her camera man who has followed her to New York to beg her to come home. In the voice-over at the end of the film, Lanie says that in a way, she really did die that day. All that she thought she wanted before, all that she tried to live for and strive to achieve, didn’t mean anything in the end. Her old life was not life at all, but only something like it, and only after that died, did she come to know the abundant life, the glory of being “fully alive.”
And you and I don’t have to sleepwalk through life or wait for death in order to wake up and have a second chance. We can, as Paul put it, die to self, more than once if necessary, put behind us an old life, and awaken to a new one, filled with new adventure, renewed relationships, and ultimate purpose. And maybe we won’t have to wait until our funeral for others to say of us, “Look! He’s moving!”
