Sermon

The Fifth Sunday in Lent (Year A, RCL)
March 9, 2008, 2008

The Reverend William Flanders

The resurrection of Lazarus, his dead body resusitated: how do we, how can we relate to this story in John’s gospel? The outline of the story is clear: Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, is dead, his body laid in a tomb; Jesus, who’d been summoned by the two sisters, delays his arrival until four days after Lazarus’s death, and states that Lazarus will rise from death; he directs that the tomb’s entrance be opened, and cries, “Lazarus, come out!”; bound with strips of cloth, the dead man emerges.

This is a tomb story, itself entombed. We walk all around the story, we tap here, we poke there, we we may even batter and kick. But how do we get inside the story? How can this story bring life to our lives?

We might see the story as a literary device, as one of John’s “miracle” stories, trying to illustrate a theological point - like Jesus’s turning water into wine. We might - but that would still leave us outside. There is a seriousness to this story that we can’t ignore. The seriousness is the reality of death. This is not death depicted as a deep sleep from which one is awakened by love, as in Snow White or in The Sleeping Beauty. Nor is it, as in Romeo and Juliet, a death-like state, induced by an apothecary’s potion, that in time wears off. This is death that doesn’t prolong, but ends life. It is real and it is universal.

This story is not only about death, however; it is also about Jesus. John, the writer, is concerned about who and what we think Jesus is. John wants us to see Jesus as fulfilling his words: “I am life.” Some will probably always feel that this means we have to focus on the historicity of this story, and decide if it did or it didn’t really happen just as it’s reported. Others will probably try to dodge that either-or choice by saying, “Who knows? It might have happened.” At one time or another I have taken each of those positions. But now I find it more challenging and more helpful to relate to this story as a parable. Seeing it as a parable, I think we can break through the outer tomb of this story and understand it not as Jesus’s calling Lazarus out of death, but as Jesus calling death out of Lazarus.

That’s claiming quite a lot. Let me back up a moment and say what I believe a parable is, and what it isn’t. My dictionary says that a parable is, “A simple story illustrating a moral or religious lesson.” But I would say that this is what a parable is not. This is not the way that Jesus conceived and used parables. The theologian John Dominic Crossan writes that, "What is most important about Jesus [is] his experience of God.” And, Crossan concludes, “That Jesus spoke in metaphorical parables...is important for an understanding of his experience.” What a difference there is between understanding a parable as “illustrating a moral or religious lesson,” and understanding it as attempting to communicate a deeply personal experience!

But...to understand this story as Jesus calling death out of Lazarus - what does that mean? Let’s be clear: physical death is a reality of life, of my life and yours. If nothing else, this is affirmed by Jesus’s own death on the cross. We laugh when Woody Allen says, “I’m not afraid of dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” We laugh because we know too well that we haven’t a choice.

But death is not confined to the physical. Each of us is subject to death in other ways: to a death of honesty, a death of courage, a death of loyalty, a death of imagination, a death of compassion, a death of generosity, a death of love. Jesus’s own experience of God seemed to be of life free of these inner, spiritual deaths. And when he summoned others into such a life, he called it entering “the kingdom of God.” It was the underlying meaning of all that he said and did. His teachings, his healings, his communal meals, his final passion - all were directed to convey his experience of God to others, and, finally, to us.

Which brings us to a crucial question: If Jesus could call death out of Lazarus - not physical death, but what we realize is spiritual death - can he call death out of us today? In the great litany we intone over and over “Good Lord, deliver us.” If deliverance is to come, I believe it will be not so much by what Jesus can do for us, but by what he can be for us.

Jesus can be for us transparent. Transparent to the presence of God within him, pervasive, and leading him through life. It is this very transparency to God that is the object of all of Jesus’s parables. And to what degree we can see God within Jesus, we may also be open to the revelation - I would say the faith - that God is within us, too. God, as our strength against the insidious numbness of spiritual death - not as a wizard, but as an actual life force within us, within all persons, within all of life. Through Jesus, our Christ, this is the basis for a true and solid faith in ourselves as children of God, as knowing that our ultimate potential is to fulfill the life within us.

The problem with being a christian, however, is that calling Jesus “Christ” can so easily lead not only to our beholding God in him, but to seeing him as a god, and not as a human being. “God from God; very God from very God.” The only way in which I can hold on to the essential bond between Jesus and us is to believe that he, too, had to discover and respond to God within him; he, too, had to feel the reality of spiritual death and learn to emerge from that tomb into his fullness as a child of God.

Many of us here know that we would find it almost blasphemous to say, with Martha and with Mary, that, “Lord, if you had been here, my parent, my husband, my wife, my child, my friend would not have died.” But, if we are honest with ourselves and aware of closed off and even abandoned spiritual possibilities in our lives, we might well declare, “Lord, if, encouraged by your life and your wholeness, I can open myself to God, I will be less dead and more alive to possibilities that life puts before me.”

I suspect that each of us has some pretty strong intuitions as to where our spiritually dead areas lie. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we are haunted by them, or even deeply concerned about them. And, certainly, we can’t deal with all of them at once. But, if our heart is open we may find that there is an area we would like revived, an area in which we deeply want to give ourselves a second chance. For some this will prompt prayer; for some, meditation. The object, though, finally will be movement, action, a new and concrete expression of what we strongly feel and of who, after all, we are.

And later, perhaps much later, we may look back on our life and see that in this area, at least, we have come out of our cave, our self-imposed tomb. And, along with a heart filled with gratitude and love, we may even feel - oh yes! - a little proud of ourselves.

Amen