Encountering Jesus: Lazarus
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church March 13, 2005
John 11:1-45
Martin Marty writes: “In real life, those whom we love
die.” Marty’s extraordinary book, A Cry of Absence,
recounts the long and difficult death of his wife, Elsa. As
cancer ravaged her body, Marty and Elsa took on a spiritual
discipline. At midnight each night, as she was awake to receive
a particular medicine to ease her physical suffering just a
bit, they would read psalms to one another. He read the evens;
she read the odds. Early in the book, Marty asserts that “In
real life, those whom we love die.” The final words of
the book are equally spare, and equally true, if not more so.
“One hopes.” One hopes.
I do not know if the words of the psalms were comfort to Rowland
Barnes, the judge who along with three others met violent deaths
this past week in an Atlanta courtroom. One hopes that that
was the case, as does one about the seven churchgoers who died
in a suburban Milwaukee hotel yesterday, and the man who took
his own life. One hopes the same for Specialist Matthew Koch,
a U.S. Army soldier from Henrietta who was killed Wednesday
in Taji, Iraq, when a bomb detonated near his vehicle. Or for
the 70 homicide victims in Monroe County in 2004.
One does not know, but one hopes.
Nor do I know, but I have a hunch, a good hunch, how the words
of the psalms, or, more broadly-cast, the words of faith itself,
have mattered to those whom we have loved and who have died.
An aging parent. A beloved spouse. A child whose death comes
entirely too soon. A partner, a neighbor, a teacher.
The deaths come quickly or unfold slowly. Some provide a sense
of relief after a long season of suffering. Others come –
and continue to function – as a moment that takes your
breath away and leaves you gasping for air and searching for
direction.
“When death comes,” poet Mary Oliver writes. “When
death comes like the hungry bear in autumn;/when death comes
and takes all the bright coins from his purse/ to buy me, and
snaps the purse shut;/when death comes/like the measles-pox;
/when death comes/
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades… /”
We do now know, but we hope. I do not know, we do not know,
if Lazarus had someone to read him the psalms at midnight as
he lay dying in the little village of Bethany just a short way
from Jerusalem. We do know that there were those who loved him,
who cared for him, probably until his very last minutes, as
he breathed his last breath.
We have, this Lenten season, been encountering episodes in
the gospel of John where people have encountered Jesus. Nicodemus,
an unnamed Samaritan woman, an unnamed blind man. This morning’s
story is about Lazarus, but in equal parts, if not more so,
it is about an encounter with two others. Martha and Mary. They
send word to Jesus. They receive him when he arrives in Bethany.
They chastise him for his tardiness. They receive his sympathy
and compassion.
This story so clearly parallels what is to come – the
raising of Lazarus and the resurrection of Jesus. In fact it
will be this event that will agitate the religious and political
machine so much that the process of crucifixion gains significant
momentum.
Sandra Schneiders writes of the tension in this story, the
tension between the clarity of theology and the ambiguity of
the experience of human death. (Written That You May Believe,
page 151 and ff.)
Again, we live in a 21st century, scientific world. We are
skeptical of any story whereby a body is resuscitated after
four days of burial. And we know, as we sit at the hospice bedside
of a loved one, that this very physical, very earthly process
will not be reversed. Our prayers, our pleas, our best hopes,
cannot reverse what would seem to be the inevitable.
The real theological question, then, and now, is not one of
avoiding death. It is one of facing death, and what resources
will guide us, and how our faith, and belief and trust in Jesus
whom we have seen and in whom we have believed, will now matter
and make a difference.
And it does. And it will. We are united to Christ in his life,
connected to his community. We are united to Christ in his death.
And we shall be united to Christ in his resurrection. We experience
a kind of little Easter here, a foretaste of what resurrection
will look like, when death’s hold and power will be no
more.
That does not mean that death now, for us, for those we love,
is to be taken easily or lightly, or that grief is not real
nor pain present. By no means. But even now, as Martha and Mary
– as we – move to Christ in our pain and sorrow,
he is waiting to encounter us, to take it all in and offer compassion
born of suffering. Because Jesus loves us, and we believe in
that love, eternal life conquers death, even without abolishing
it. (Schneiders, page 160)
Through this one in whom we are called to believe, even death
is transformed. We will weep, but we will not despair. We will
weep, but we will not despair. What has been a community of
seeing and believing has now become a community of eternal life,
for Lazarus, to be sure, who will die physically again, but
for Mary, for Martha, for Nicodemus, for a blind man and a Samaritan
women. They all have seen Jesus and have believed, and have
passed on the story, and have become the story.
So that when death comes, we will live in hope, that nothing
in life or in death can separate us from the love of God made
known to us in Jesus. Journey’s end. Eternal rest. Perpetual
light. Eternal life. In life and in death we belong to God.
One hopes in this. One hopes.
Let us pray. O Lord, support us all the day long, until the
shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is
hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.
Then in your mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,
and peace at the last. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
