NewCreation

Homily for Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the fifth Sunday in Lent. This is the last Sunday before Palm Sunday, and in it we get the last of the great Johannine signs, the seventh sign in John's Gospel. This is the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and as you'll see, it has a lot in common with the other signs, including even references to them in the text, as we will see. And it brings us closer and closer to Jesus showing what he really is about in the Gospel. So let's look at it. "Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair. Her brother Lazarus was ill." So, interesting — it starts with mentioning that someone was ill, a certain Lazarus of Bethany. And in fact he, unlike the man blind from birth, is going to be a purely passive agent throughout. He is mentioned, referred to, brought back from the dead, and unbound, and that's it. We don't get to hear him speak. We know nothing about him apart from the fact that he had two sisters. Curiously, this passage — "Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair" — that refers to an incident which has yet to happen in St. John's Gospel. That's actually in the next chapter. So John must have assumed that people knew this story about Mary and Martha; they were well-known people, even though he hasn't got to that story yet. And when he does tell the story, he says that Lazarus came along for that occasion as well. But so we have these sisters. Jesus is at this stage not in Judea — he's out of harm's way, as it were. "So the sisters sent a message to him: 'Lord, the one whom you love is ill.'" "He whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God's glory, so that the Son of Man may be glorified through it." So it's a similar reaction to the reaction he had to the man blind from birth, when the disciples asked whether it was because of this man's sins or his parents that he was blind. Here Jesus preempts the question and just says, "No, it's not a sin to death, it's not an illness to death — it's so that God may be glorified through it." He recognizes that a sign is forthcoming, that he will do the sign accordingly. "Though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was." That's going to be quite important, because it means that when eventually he gets to the place where Lazarus was buried near Bethany, it's on the sixth day after he's heard. So, because Lazarus will by then have been four days dead, there are these two days, and then four days dead — we'll see why that's important in a second. Then after this he said to the disciples, "Let's go to Judea again." The disciples said to him, "Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you." So this was after the healing of the man born blind, and then Jesus is teaching about the gate and the good shepherd. "And are you going there again?" And Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world, but those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them." So you remember previously, when he talked to the disciples about the healing of the man born blind, he talked about the hours of the day and the work that could be done. So here he's onto the same thing, but he's saying that sign there — the man born blind — we're now several hours later, but there are actually twelve hours in the day, and we're getting to that, we're getting to the twelfth hour, the sixth hour of the evening, because the day started from 6 a.m. around until 6 p.m. We're getting to the twelfth hour, but for as long as it is light, I can do my works, so I'm going to carry on doing the work. "Those who are able to walk do not stumble because they see the light of this world." And that's interesting — he's saying that he's able to work his way through the traps of those who are trying to entrap him. "Those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them." So the people who are going to gang up against him, they're going to be caught in their own traps. After saying this, he told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep." Now, interesting — previously Mary and Martha had said to him, "The one whom you love, your singular love, is ill," but here he says "our friend," which suggests that he sees things in a collective way, whereas they are inclined to see things in an individual way, at least so far. And that's something he's going to be breaking out of them — we'll see more of that as the dynamic of this passage goes on. "It's our friend Lazarus, but I'm going there to awaken him." And the disciples said to him, "Lord, if he's fallen asleep, he'll be all right, he'll be okay." Jesus however had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. For your sake I'm glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him." Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, "Let's also go, that we may die with him." In other words, Thomas tends to have quite fast reactions. He tends to glom on to whatever the bad feeling is. Do you remember he's the one who doesn't believe that Jesus was risen from the dead? He's kind of a bit of a gloomy fella. But here he thinks, oh well, he's going to be killed. We might as well all be killed. So no one is getting that this is a careful walk into a place where a trap is going to be avoided and something is going to be done that will be a major sign. So when Jesus arrives, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. And that's very important, because Jesus is about — therefore this is the sixth day — so we're talking about coming towards the end of the sixth day. The seventh day is going to be one of rest, which we will know from Holy Saturday, and then the eighth day will be the first day. It's when everything starts again. So here we're coming to the end of the days of creation, in which something true and real is going to be shown about what creation is all about. He found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. In fact the standard form of consoling would be ritual wailing, ritual mourning, and there was a whole series of rites that were proper to that. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him. So she's probably aware that things might be dangerous. She and her sister and Lazarus are probably of Galilean origin, because the form Lazarus is actually the Galilean form of Eleazar. So it's probable that they were Galilean transplants into Judea. So Martha had heard that Jesus was coming and she went and met him. So she's being wise and cautious, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." So again, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died." She immediately, as it were, recriminates his tardiness against him, and therefore obviously doesn't understand what he had said earlier: "For your sake I'm glad I was not there, so that you may believe." The whole purpose of this was to enable people to believe. But notice also "my brother" — not "our brother" or "your friend," but "my brother." Again, very individual, and that's how she tends to see things. "But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." In other words, she's quite rightly well aware that Jesus can do something about this. And then Jesus says to her, "Your brother will rise again." And Martha, reasonably enough, faced with such an implausible claim, says, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." That would have been the standard teaching in certain circles of Judaism, particularly in Pharisaic circles, following on the understanding of the resurrection developed amongst the Maccabees at the time of the Maccabees. So this would have been the popular Pharisaical teaching. as opposed to the Sadducees who didn't believe in the resurrection, this would have been her saying, "Yeah, I know that, I know that he's going to rise again, so I'm not — I'm not ultimately concerned of a loss forever." But Jesus says to her, and this is the stunner obviously, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live." So he's saying that resurrection on the last day, I am the source of that. I am the power that makes that possible. And I am here now. Life comes from me, goes out from me. I give it to whom I will. I bring to life. In other words, this is the strongest statement of being not only the creator but the life-giver of everything. "And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." In other words, I want to bring all those who are aware of who I am into life. "Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world." So we get several more titles: the Messiah, the anointed one — so that's the Davidic heir, the priestly, kingly figure — the Son of God, the one coming into the world, the one who's promised in the Psalms. So yes, she's got these titles, but it's not quite clear whether she's got what that actually means now. When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, "The teacher is here and is calling for you." Well, that's odd, because we've got no evidence for that other than Martha saying this to Mary. But Mary takes up — when she hears it, she gets up quickly and goes to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. So now here we have a little bit of a problem, because she gets up quickly. The Jews who were in her house helping her mourn, engaging in the appropriate — or at least then considered appropriate — weeping and wailing, they see where she's going. So they follow her. In other words, what Martha has told Mary is going to make it more difficult for Jesus. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died." In other words, she says exactly the same thing as her sister. The recrimination — for this she does kneeling at his feet, that which she's going to do again when she washes his feet with her hair and with perfume. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews also with her also weeping, he was greatly… "Greatly angered in spirit" is what it actually says, and our translators for some reason dumb it down to "deeply perturbed." So here's the question to which we're being raised: why was he so angry, why was he deeply perturbed? Well, the word "perturbed" appears in Jesus's case whenever there is some confirmation that the passion is about to come. In John's Gospel, as it were, the perturbances that happen in the garden of Gethsemane in Saint Luke's Gospel happen in the Temple, and here as well as in the garden of Gethsemane in John's Gospel. So Jesus facing up to what is about to come to him is lived through. But then there's the question of this anger. He appears to be angry with death, with this whole scene, with these people engaging in their weeping and wailing. He's angry at the cult — what I would call the cult of death — at the notion of all these people giving meaning to something that should have no meaning. If you are life itself, you're naturally angry when you see people run by death, which they needn't be and shouldn't be. So again, angrily, he says, "Where have you laid him?" — and he says that in the plural, "you" — later. And they said to him, "Lord, come and see." And Jesus began to weep. Now why does Jesus weep there? This is something well known: the verb for his weeping here is quite different from them crying. They wailed, and he wept. It's the only time this verb appears in John's Gospel. I suggest it's because of "Where have you laid him? Lord, come and see." Because that refers back to the very beginning of Jesus's ministry, when the disciples who are walking along see him walking along by the lake of Galilee and say, "Where do you stay?" And he says, "Come and see." So it appears that them saying, concerning a tomb, "Where have you laid him? Come and see," may have sparked off something about his own reaction to what he's going to be going through. This is a Gethsemane moment. So the Jews said, "See how he loved him." Well, that may have been the case, but I suspect that there was something special about Jesus's weeping there that is very, very difficult to capture. And I don't think we can bring it out without seeing Jesus in this place. But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" In other words, they bring out the notion, the memory of the person who had done the work which only the Creator could have done, and again recriminate, because they don't see the purpose of the sign which is going to be at the end of the full day of light and on the sixth day before. He rests. Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, "Take away the stone." The sister of the dead man said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench, because he has been dead four days." Well, all the language about the place, the stone, "take away the stone," and the presence of – but in this case Martha takes us, of course, immediately to what will happen in a few days' time at the tomb in the garden. And so many of these verbs and words are literally reflected in what's going to happen. So Jesus is facing up to where he himself is going to be, in the tomb. Jesus says, "Take away the stone," and Martha of course reads the matter literally. She's the equivalent of people getting upset about the mud in the case of the blind man, or the woman at the well of Samaria talking about the pot, leaving her pot behind. And Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So he's telling her what the purpose of this is. So they took away the stone, and Jesus looks upward and thanks the Father for having heard him. "I know that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here." It's another of these public utterances, so that people can see what's going on. He's showing them what God is going to do, and he expects God to show the people what he is going to do. That's how this works. When he said this, he cried out with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth." So here is the creative word itself, bringing to life – the megalephōnē, the great voice, summoning someone who was dead to life. Something that hasn't been heard, if you like, since before the creation of the world. This is what the creation of the world looks like: the Word calling forth life. In the Epistle to the Hebrews there is a mention of how, before his death, he entreated the Lord with great cries. I suspect that this was one of the great cries that they knew about. Jesus knew that he was dealing not only with Lazarus here, but with what he himself was going to go through. This is part of him entrusting his life-giving capacity into our hands, by bringing someone to life so that we may know it's possible – so this person might be a sign not just to his friends or his sisters, but to everybody. The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him and let him go." Now please notice: exactly the same pieces of cloth are being referred to as were found, nicely put aside, in the tomb when Peter and John visited after Mary Magdalene had looked into it on the first day. Exactly the same. But here the difference is that someone has been unbinding him. There what shocks and stuns is that the person themselves, Jesus himself, has risen unbound and put aside. There has been no robbery, there has been no one else to do anything. It was pure activity that put those things aside. Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. So she almost despite herself has turned out to be, as the Samaritan woman at the well was, a disciple, an apostle in bringing people along who had then witnessed this extraordinary fact. Someone who was dead, who was well after the number of days at which it was assumed that the soul left the area of the tomb — it was assumed in Palestinian circles at the time that it was about three days after death that the spirit left the vicinity of the tomb — so the fourth day is very clearly there's nothing there to, as it were, to put together. It's a holy new miracle of bringing to life. And Jesus has enacted this in the face of what his whole mission has been about from the time when he said "come and see" to what is going to happen to him in the tomb. In other words, he's producing in them the faith that he himself has in what God is going to do. And this is what we are being asked to receive, so that we can be inducted into it, into this power of life. That means we need not fear death, we need not fear those who are out to get us, but we can walk in the light in the midst of darkness. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.