St. Paul Lutheran Church, Albuquerque

5^th Sunday in Lent, March 13, 2005

Text: John 11:1-45 (Series A, Revised Common Lectionary)

Pastor Harold Nilsson

Some of you have been here the last couple of years on the Sunday after Easter when we’ve celebrated the day by telling jokes.  This tradition, sometimes called Bright Sunday or Holy Hilarity Sunday, has its roots in the notion that Jesus’ resurrection was a cosmic joke on all the forces of evil arrayed against him.  When Jesus was raised from death, God pulled a fast one on sin, death and the devil, and that’s reason for our joy.  Again this year, on April 3^rd, we’ll tell jokes and funny stories to celebrate the living Christ (and I’d appreciate your giving me any good ones you’ve heard lately that can be retold in public.) 

But before resurrection there is death.  Before Easter comes Good Friday.  Before cries of joy from the heights come cries of grief and despair from the depths.  The story of Lazarus begins in the grave. 

Today the village of Bethany is El ‘Azariyeh.  If you listen carefully you can hear the name Lazarus in the Arabic ‘Azariyeh.  The village lies on the east side of the Mount of Olives, just down the slope, in fact, from Augusta Victoria Hospital that the Lutheran World Federation has operated in Jerusalem for more than 50 years.  From the backside of Augusta Victoria’s property you can look down on the village and its collection of bus garages, car repair shops, vegetable vendors and battered apartments.  And a couple of churches, one Catholic, the other Eastern Orthodox, that mark the traditional site of the tomb of Lazarus.  The tomb itself is unadorned.  It’s deep and dank.  Not for the claustrophobic pilgrim.  One other piece of construction marks the view today.  Israelis calls it the “security wall.”  Palestinians name it the “Separation Wall.”  El ‘Azariyeh is a West Bank village being surrounded by a 14 foot wall.  The wall separates Jews from Palestinians, workers from their jobs, sick children from their kidney dialysis treatments, and often, despair from hope. 

Whether or not the wall is providing security, it is an ironic symbol encircling the village where Jesus performed the miracle.  For death is separation.  It is the wall that separates us from this body, this time, this place, these relationships. 

Claims of channelers aside, there is no movement from one side to the other.  In medieval times there were those who sought to prepare for a “good death.”  We might agree that, since we will all die, the good death will be one where we are among our own, surrounded not by beeping meters and blinking monitors but by the faces of family and people who care.  We might hope to be reasonably alert and free of pain up to the last.  When this happens (and thanks to the hospice movement, it happens more often), thanks be to God.

But it is death.  Admittedly there is a bit of confusion in the first paragraph of our text.  When Jesus hears that Lazarus is sick, he says “This illness does not lead to death.”  Yet four days later when Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus is dead by every common definition of the term.  Jesus apparently meant something else by his comment.  We’ll get to that in a few moments. 

Death is separation.  And that occasions grief.  Grief, as Thomas Lynch puts it, “is the tax we pay on the loves of our lives, our habits, our attachments.  And like every other tax there is this dull math to it—if you love, you grieve.”¹  The family and friends of Lazarus were paying that tax for their love of Lazarus.  The funeral was over and the formal 30-day period of mourning had begun when friends came to call on the bereaved sisters.  These ancients knew—as some today do not—that the community of family and friends and faith need to come together to grieve and share stories including God’s story, even if the one who died asks that there be no services. 

Sometimes grief has a sharp edge to it, and that reaction is there in a detail of this story.  When Martha goes out to meet Jesus, he tells her, “Your brother will rise again.”  She responds in much the same manner as believers have ever since: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  The unspoken implication then and now is: “that’s not good enough.  Don’t tell me that time will take care of my grief.  I am in pain now.  I can’t imagine living another day without this one I love, never mind waiting for reunion in the life to come.” 

Among all the reasons for her emotional turmoil there may be a practical one: As single women, it is quite possible that Mary and Martha may have been financially dependent upon Lazarus.  Their livelihood may have died with him.  How many families have been disrupted by the death of the wage earner? 

Some other dynamics families go through in grieving are in this story.  Blaming, for instance.  Twice Jesus is told, if you had been here, this would not have happened.  If somehow the responsibility for the death or loss can pinned on someone or something else, we think our pain will be eased.  But is it?  Jesus doesn’t react to the reactivity voiced against him.  He gives the sisters the emotional space to cry from the depths of their grief.  In fact, Jesus himself sheds tears. 

Questions sometimes are raised about Jesus’ tears: If he knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, what was there to weep about?  Was he crying in anticipation of his own imminent death?  Was he saddened by the lack of faith he saw around him?  Or was he being the person the Christmas story claims he is—the child of God who has come into our life as a fully human being to suffer with us and die for us?  If he was and is this person, the tears he shed that day were tears of empathy and compassion, tears of his own deep sense of loss, tears he sheds over every one of our losses and disappointments and failures.  Jesus’ tears tell us that grief is not to be glossed over with pious but painful platitudes like “he’s gone to a better place,” or “God needed her more than you do.”

Jesus acknowledges our need to grieve, because grief is the process by which we change and grow.  Ultimately, by grieving we admit that we are not in control.  We strive to delay death, to reduce its power, to deny its impact, but we cannot overcome it.  Death comes to all life.  Learning that is hard.  Without that learning, however, we are impoverished.  Lazarus has no control.  He is dead.  And Jesus calls him forth.  Resurrection is what Jesus does.  And the prerequisite for resurrection is death.

Now as was mentioned, at the outset of this story Jesus said of Lazarus’ illness, it “does not lead to death.”  Here is one of those confusing instances in John where Jesus speaks simultaneously on two parallel planes.  He appears to be saying, Lazarus will die—physically.  But his physical death will not cause spiritual death.  Not even death, as St. Paul will say at the end of the 8^th chapter of Romans, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  Not someone else’s death.  Not our death.  God hurdles all the separation walls, no matter how high they are.  Those who live and believe in Jesus, even though they die, will live.

The raising of Lazarus is a unique.  Nothing quite like it happens anywhere else in the biblical story.  He’s brought back to this life—for a limited time.  He dies again, when and under what circumstances we aren’t told.  There is a parable-like quality to this story, because it points to a larger truth that John’s gospel lifts up repeatedly: Jesus is in the business of giving new life, and that life can begin now.  It doesn’t have to wait until your heart stops beating and your brain wave is flat.  Resurrection isn’t only an end-of-life hope; it’s a mid-life reality.  But it does require giving up control and letting Jesus do his thing.  It is precisely this living in the resurrection now that St. Paul points to when he says in baptism we die with Jesus and are raised with Jesus.  We are invited to live now, knowing that death is not the last word.  We can embrace its reality, even with its pain and grief, without denial. 

Lazarus (who represents all of us Christians) comes stumbling out of the tomb with a new lease on life.  But he is still dragging around with him the wrappings of death.  He has experienced dying but can’t yet quite experience living.  He has received the gift of new life from Jesus, but he still is bound up in his old life.  He needed the help and support of the community to live the new life.  And isn’t this what we’re about here as a community of faith.  In a world of death, a world where loss is endemic, Jesus calls us to the work of unbinding, of helping each other gain a vision of the alternative life he offers.²  Here we have a standard to use at our congregational meeting later this morning when we evaluate our past year’s life here at St. Paul.  How well have we done at offering the new and freeing life of Jesus?  How have we invested ourselves in acts of resurrection?

A few years ago when driving back to Albuquerque from the upper Midwest, I stopped for a day in Lindsborg, Kansas, where years earlier I had gone to Bethany College.  Late on that summer afternoon, I went out to the town cemetery and walked among the graves, reading the markers.  Before long I came on the graves of my chemistry professors, Dr. Hermanson and Dr. Gusenius.  Nearby were the plots of Dr. Fahrer, my German professor and Gerry Shannon who taught history, and that of Doc Holwerda, the town physician who removed my appendix when I was 19.  In retrospect, when these folks were alive, they constituted a resurrection community.  They unbound my mind and my body, and helped me become more of what God called me to be.  They gave me a more expansive vision of life.  And isn’t that what we’re to be about as a community of faith, on this side of death?  To unbind and set free?    

An ominous postscript follows hard on the heels of the Lazarus story.  It is this event, the raising of Lazarus, that in John’s gospel is the direct cause of Jesus’ death.  It moves the religious authorities to gather and decide to kill Jesus.  The miracle will glorify Jesus.  Not so much because people will praise him for it—which they did.  But because life for Lazarus leads to death for Jesus, and that death gives life to us and the world.  But that’s the story for next Sunday and the week that follows. 

¹  Thomas Lynch, “Good Grief,” The Christian Century, July 26, 2003, p. 20

²  With appreciation for this idea to the Rev. Sheila Gustafson, “The Grief and the Glory, PCUSA speaker, Day 1, March 24, 1996.