In his word is my hope…said the Psalmist to God. In his word is my hope.
As he sits in whatever deep and dark place he is in, as he waits for a morning
that seems to be a long time coming, he knows that what he needs is a word, but
not any word, a word of God. He needs to hear what God is saying to him. That’s
what will pull him up out of these depths he has fallen into. Words can do
that. Words can change the world, if they are the right words, from the right
person, at the right moment.
There are a lot of words in
our readings today. I don’t just mean that they were long, though they were,
but that they are full of messages and conversations, full of people saying
things to one another. But often those words seem to bring more confusion than
clarity.
“Can these dry bones live?”
says God to Ezekiel in a vision. Ezekiel looks around at the scene, an ancient
battlefield scattered with the bleached, dried out remains of a fallen army of
people. What kind of silly question is this? Can these dry bones live? No, of course they can’t. I’m sure that’s what
Ezekiel thinks, just as we all would. But he hedges his bets, suspecting that
there is more to this question than meets the eye. “O Lord God, you know”.
Ezekiel really doesn’t have a clue what is going on, and every step along the
way as this vision unfolds is a new challenge for his faith. It isn’t till the
end that the reason behind God’s bizarre command to prophesy to the bones
becomes clear. This is a message of hope to the exiled and hopeless people of
Israel. They may feel like dry bones, but God hasn’t finished with them yet.
The Gospel reading is equally
baffling to those caught up in its story. It is full of misunderstandings.
Is Lazarus seriously ill?
“Yes, but it won’t lead to
death,” says Jesus.
He’s right – in a sense. At
the end of this story no one is dead.
But the disciples take him literally. It’s a relief. They didn’t really want
to have to go dashing off back to Judea anyway. They’ve only just managed to
escape from Jesus’ opponents there who wanted to stone him.
So they are a bit dumbfounded
when, two days later, Jesus suddenly announces that they are heading for
Lazarus’ house after all.
Has he taken a turn for the
worse?
“He has fallen asleep,” says
Jesus.
“Well, that’s all right then.
He’ll wake up again. We don’t need to put ourselves in danger” they say.
So Jesus has to spell it out
– Lazarus is dead.
Now, why didn’t he say that
in the first place?
While they’re still trying to
take this in, to add insult to injury, Jesus starts telling them that this
delay is part of God’s plan , that he is using it to build up their faith. No
wonder Thomas seems to give up even trying to understand at this point. Death
seems simpler than all this confusion.
When they get to Bethany,
things don’t really improve much. Martha and Mary both greet Jesus with
identical words. “If you had been here my brother would not have died.”
It’s a pointed and painful
comment. Jesus has healed all sorts of other people, often complete strangers
to him. Why could he not have prevented the death of this very special friend,
the one whom he loved?
Jesus may know what he’s up
to, but he doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of communicating it. But if
we feel aggrieved on behalf of Martha, Mary and the disciples, if we feel sorry
for Ezekiel, faced with that unanswerable question from God, then I think
that’s because we are meant to.
Of course, for all these
people, the end of the story is a happy one, but they don’t know that at the
outset. Ezekiel’s vision ends with those scattered bones being brought
together, clothed in flesh and given back their lives. Lazarus comes out of the
tomb, trailing his grave clothes, and is restored to his family. But there is
no reason why Ezekiel, or the disciples, or Martha and Mary should have
expected that to happen.
The idea that the dead could
rise again wasn’t quite as unthinkable to ancient people as it might be to us.
They believed God could raise the dead, but they didn’t think he would
do unless there was some exceptional reason. They expected and assumed, like us, that death was final and
irrevocable. Whatever they thought came after it, there was no way back.
And just like us, they didn’t
want to die, and didn’t even want to think about dying if they could avoid it.
Who would? But the thought of death has a way of intruding into our lives at
some point anyway. A car screeches to a halt with inches to spare as we step
off the curb without looking. A suspicious symptom turns out to be nothing, but
might not have been, or maybe a serious illness is caught just in time. That
could have been it, we think.
Someone close to us, our own age, dies in some random accident. That
could have been me. Suddenly it comes home to us that we are fragile,
mortal creatures and that in the end the battle for life is one we will all
lose.
If that thought makes you
uncomfortable, you are in good company.
Most people are scared of death to some extent. Even if we believe in an
afterlife, we don’t want to lose the life we have and know. Some fear the
process of dying. Some fear the thought of leaving their loved ones behind.
Others simply struggle with the thought that they won’t be part of this world
any more, part of the events of life, as if they are being snatched away early
from a party they were really rather enjoying.
Martha, Mary and Jesus’ other
disciples don’t want to think about death, any more than we do. They don’t want
it to acknowledge that it is going happen to them, or to their friend Lazarus.
They want Jesus to stop it, wave a magic wand or prescribe a magic potion.
They won’t want Jesus to die
either when the moment comes, which it very soon will do, and that is what this
story is really pointing forward to. He
has told them clearly that it is inevitable that he will be killed because of
the message he preaches, but they will
try as hard as they can for as long as they can to hold that thought at bay.
They’ll pretend it can’t happen and won’t happen. We’ll protect you, Peter
will say. God won’t let you die.
As Jesus is arrested and
crucified they’ll look to the skies for God’s angels to swoop down and rescue Jesus, to spirit him away from
his captors, to enable him to leap from the cross. When that doesn’t happen and
his body lies cold in the tomb, they’ll be baffled and angry, convinced that
all their hopes have died with him.
Martha and Mary say to Jesus
“If you had been here our brother wouldn’t have died”.
After Jesus’ death the
disciples will echo those words in their own minds. “If God had been there, Jesus wouldn’t have
died…” How could this man be God’s
Messiah if God had let this happen? It is only when he rises from death that
the question is answered for them, but it isn’t answered in the way they
expected. Instead of avoiding death, Jesus has gone through it and come out of
the other side.
For the early Christians this
wasn’t just a miracle. It was also, and more importantly, a vindication. It
told them that God had been with Jesus,
even as he suffered and was humiliated and died. And it made all the difference
to them in their own lives, because if God could be with Jesus even when he was
suffering and everything seemed to be going wrong, God could be with them too.
Many of them would die
violent and squalid deaths too. They would look – and maybe feel - like
failures. But the death and resurrection of Jesus convinced them that this wasn’t
the case. Death didn’t mean that God had deserted you or judged you and found
you wanting. What mattered wasn’t that
they died, or how they’d died, but whether they had walked in the way of
Christ, loving those around them, living with integrity. Dying or living,
succeeding or failing in the world’s eyes, they were still held securely in
God’s hands. Neither their living or their dying was in vain.
That’s something we need to
know too, not just as we face our physical deaths, but also as we face the
myriad small deaths that come before it; the moments when we realise that we
aren’t the all-powerful, self-sufficient, all-knowing, sorted out people we’d
like to think we are. We can’t avoid death or failure - they are part of being
human - but we can discover God’s presence and God’s blessing within them and
when we do that they start to lose their power to terrify us.
Death shouts loudly at us
sometimes, but the word of God, the word of life can cut through the noise if
we will pay attention. Yes, it says, the human life we know in this world is
limited in all sorts of ways, including in its length, but what joy and
blessing there can be within it, for us and for others, if we have the courage
to live it fully, wisely and lovingly, not constricted by the grave clothes of
fear, but clothed in the love of God which is eternal.
In God’s word is my hope, said the Psalmist. For all the confusing words in our
readings today, at the end the words that really matter are crystal clear.
“Lazarus, come out!” shouts Jesus. Come out and live. Come out and love. Come
out and walk in the way of Christ.
Amen.
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