(Lazarus, Come Out!)
Ezekiel 37:12-14
Romans 8:8-11 John 11:1-45
To the churched and unchurched[1]
gathered
in a church not built by human hands[2]
First
reading from Ezekiel 37:12-14
“I will open your graves.”
Thus says the Lord God: O my people, I
will open your graves
and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the
Alleluia, alleluia.
A reading from the holy
Gospel according to John
Glory to you, Lord.
The gospel from John 11:1-45
“Lazarus,
come out!”
Jn 11:1-3, 5-8, 11-14: Lazarus
dying
A man named Lazarus, who lived in
Jn11:16-29: Martha believing
Thomas (called the Twin) said to his
fellow disciples, “Let us all go back to unfriendly
Jn 11: 32-37: Jesus weeping
When Mary came to where Jesus was and
saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my
brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had
come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where
have you laid him?” They said to him, “Sir, come and see.” And Jesus wept. So
the Jews said, “See how he loved him.” But some of them said, “Could not the
one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man
would not have died?”
Jn 11:38-45: Jesus commanding
So Jesus, grieving again, came to the
tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. Jesus said, “Take away the
stone.” Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now there will be
a stench; he has been dead for four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell
you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” So they took away the
stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me.
I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this,
that they may believe that you sent me.” And when he had said this, He cried
out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, tied hand and
foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to
them, “Untie him and let him go.” Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and
seen what he had done began to believe in him.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus
Christ.
----------------
Introduction
A very special friendship
John writes that, “Jesus loved Martha and her
sister, and Lazarus.” (Jn 11:5) Jesus apparently had a special friendship with them.
He frequently visited their home in
Bethany, a small village near
Though
Jesus had a special friendship with all three, the church has a special friendship
only with Martha -- the one busy and fussing over many things, but who, at the
end of the day, came to believe that “you are the
Messiah, the Son of God.” (Jn 11:27) The church celebrates a special
feast day (July 29) only for Martha and not for Mary and Lazarus.
Out to kill them both
John
places the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead immediately before his
passion and death. It was precisely the raising of Lazarus that incited the
authorities in
Jesus
commanding
As we approach the Good
Friday tomb of Jesus, the fifth Sunday of Lent (Cycle A) always takes us to the
tomb of Lazarus in
Tombs
we build for ourselves
The human journey is strewn
with the various tombs we build for ourselves. We build comforting tombs of
self-pity, painful tombs of jealousy and cold tombs of fear. We build sweaty
tombs of hate, nervous tombs of fret and foggy tombs of addiction. We especially
build tombs of certainty for ourselves -- fortresses which conveniently shut
out anything we do not want to see and hear -- prisons which happily lock us up
in our certainties. Fetus-like we curl
up in all these tombs and linger there retarded, unless the process of growth
(mandated for all living things) succeeds in calling us out of their darkness
and stench.
On this fifth Sunday of our
Lenten repentance, Jesus bends down and calls into the tombs we build for
ourselves and commands us to come out. And at the tomb which a loved one has
built for himself, Jesus commands us to help roll the stone away for him and cut
him free from his burial cloths. Yes, during this season of Lenten repentance
Jesus calls into the tomb of certainty which even the church has built for
herself. In that tomb are certainties about the “one-true-church,” sexuality,
homosexuality, celibacy, the ordination of women, etc. Tombs and prisons those
certainties are, and Jesus calls in and commands the church to come out and set
herself free for a holy conversation with the entire people of God.
The tomb death builds for us
The mother of all tombs,
however, is the tomb that death builds
for us. That’s the tomb from which all other tombs get their umbrage and
stench. That’s the tomb in which Lazarus lay for four days. That’s the tomb in
which Jesus lay for three days. That’s
the tomb in which you and I and all the ones we love are finally and surely
laid to rest. That’s the tomb which the Lord God of Ezekiel promised us He
would open to set our beloved dead free. That’s the tomb which Jesus ordered to
be opened to set Lazarus free. That’s the tomb in which Jesus was laid on Good
Friday until God set him free on Easter morning.
Though we might
succeed in evading the thought of the tomb, at the end of the day, there is no
escaping its fact. In a little volume
entitled A View from the Ridge, Morris
West (who characterizes himself as an
optimist) in his eightieth year
faces the inescapable fact that we are born to die. He writes,
We are conceived without our consent and come whimpering into a mad
universe with our death sentence already written on the palms of our helpless
hands: a cancer will eat our guts, a fanatic with a sword will cut off our
heads, a drunken fool will mow us down with an automobile [a sociopath will shoot up
our sons and daughters in a university classroom]. There might be deferment of the death sentence to a ripe old age of
80 but there is no amnesty from it.
Morris
West trusts.
In the same little volume West
pictures himself as a climber who, after a long and arduous ascent, has reached
a height and then pauses to catch his breath to muster up enough courage for
the last lap of his journey. He writes,
Before me the
land falls steeply into a dark valley, beyond which I see (or I think I see)
the lights of the city which is the goal of my pilgrimage. By any measure of time, I am not far away
from it, but I wonder, as I have often wondered before, whether the city is an
illusion and whether its lights are only jack-o-lanterns. However, I have
always known that one day I would have to go down alone into the dark valley
and make my own discovery of what lies on the other side.
Strange as it may seem, I am not afraid. I have accepted long since the fact that a
confession of faith is a confession of not knowing. I have accepted to trust that the city does exist, and
that the lights are real, and that what awaits the pilgrim is a homecoming.
Prove it I cannot, but with trust I accept it.
Trusting our hearts
Morris (who died in 1999 in the 83rd year of his life) trusted
concerning the grave, and so do we. What is it we both trust? We trust our hearts. We trust our hearts demanding nothing less than life beyond the grave for a
departed and very beloved spouse of many years.
We trust our hearts demanding life eternal for a son or daughter, a
brother or sister, a husband or wife whose young life has been cut short in the
battlefields of
We trust our hearts. We trust that such
demands of our hearts are not tricks our hearts are playing on us. We trust that
such demands are our hearts knowing (in the very unique way that the heart
knows) that
the heavenly
A robin
That
trust, however, is not a sheer shot in the dark which grits its teeth and
believes with simply no proof at all that the heavenly
At the end of the day, however, we know
that the back of winter has been broken when the first robin appears. From now
on it is the snow that's silly. Diehard snowdrifts, holding on for dear life,
finally succumb to the newborn sun, and spring bursts forth in all its glory.
All heaven and earth are flooded with intimations
of immortality[3] -- with hints and hunches that God,
indeed, will open all our graves and raise us up and bring us to the
A cardinal
A friend, who bravely battled ovarian cancer
for two years and finally succumbed to it, wrote in an Easter card,
I like spring a lot. It's a time when so many things are giving just the slightest inkling, the smallest sign, that perhaps things aren't really what they appear to be--dead. Trees aren't really dead at all. Seeds aren't really lifeless pebbles. There is a lady cardinal taking twigs, one at a time, to a secret place in a fir tree. It's the merest whisper of a promise of things to come.
A mystic experience
On his blog a wayfarer writes of a
mystic experience.
I have said a few things here about the
spirit, but the other day I felt its reality. I was walking up
It is so easy to say, “Oh, yes, I have
always believed in that!” or perhaps, “No, there’s no evidence for that!” What
hit me was an experience that I cannot easily put in words. In that moment,
near the traffic lights, about
Conclusion
Intimations of immortality
At the sunset of his life, Morris West wrote that he accepted to
trust that the heavenly