Lent 5

The story of Lazarus has Jesus appearing to behave a little oddly, to put it mildly. He is told of Lazarus’ illness yet does not do anything like going to Bethany for two days. This behavior seems strange at the least and possibly downright callous. We are not sure why Jesus did this – Tom Wright suggests he needed to spend the time preparing to go to Bethany  - perhaps this is true, but even so, it is a little bizarre.

We assume though, that when Jesus finally heads out to Bethany, he knows what he is going to do and he knows what the result will be. Thomas also seems to understand the ramifications of this journey and its outcome – perhaps Wright is correct and Jesus was just taking a deep, two day long breath, before heading out on this final leg of his earthly journey.

It is tempting to make this a sentimental time for Jesus but there are very real currents, agonizingly real pains, which permeate the story. The Jews are, by now, furious. John’s Gospel has been all about timing, so when Jesus goes to Bethany, to this explosive miracle, it is in God’s time. I think it is safe to assume that Jesus has a pretty good idea about what will happen, about what he will do and about the path that this will set him on.

Into an emotionally charged situation comes an emotionally charged Jesus. It is not enough to say that he weeps solely because his friends are upset or because Lazarus is dead – whilst he empathizes with human tragedy he knows he will bring healing – rather he weeps with the whole human condition. It cannot be far from his mind that this set of friends and disciples will soon shed tears of grief again as he himself lays bound in a tomb.

Jesus mourns this, but I think he also mourns the fracture which exists between Creator and Created – not, I want to believe, in some sort of self-pitying, see what I have to do now, sense but in the grief of longing which God experiences for us and in the grief of absence which we too often experience as we wander to and fro lost in our own story.

Lazarus offers a break in that story – a foretaste of the life which Jesus brings. There is no hint that Lazarus did not go on to die a normal, human death along with all those who watched Jesus that day. Eternal life is for eternity but the message is clear in John, that old way of scarcity and death is over and eternal life begins now. This realized eschatology as it is called (the end in the present time) is usually seen as a Lukan motif as Luke juxtaposes the Kingdom of Heaven in the Kingdom of Today. But John has this theme of abundant life in Christ. Water which flows in great supply, bread which will not run out, fruitful grape vines. By the time Jesus gets to the Last Supper he is showing in action what this abundance means, an upside down world of service but or service which is experienced in and lived out in fellowship with God – God in Trinity, God in Community.

We don’t know why Lazarus, why not the other hundreds of people who had been put in graves that week. We don’t know how it worked, the mechanics of raising the dead. But God who creates can always re-create, reform atoms and molecules. The fact that God does not points to a truth of which we are aware but unable to articulate about a darkness which inhabits creation.

Jesus is light to that darkness. It is an interesting record of the saints that although many of them faced great trouble, great darkness, they were not immune, the way they survived intact was simply that it meant less and less to them as compared to Jesus great light.

This is the story of abundance. We live so much in lives of scarcity. We have real emotional, physical, financial, spiritual drains on us but too often we find ourselves allowing this pull in every direction as normal. Well we are all busy – we say. Really? Are we? Or are we just indulging ourselves in too much complexity out of some sense that that complex rushed-ness validates us?

Too often people who are getting on in years say apologetically that they “cannot do much” any more. I usually give the answer that they can pray. This might sound glib and far too easy but spending time with God is a gift not only to the one who gets to do it but to the whole Church community. The level of frustration which we thrust upon ourselves when we become unable to do the things which we think are necessary ( and usually are not) is completely incapacitating.

There is a story which my husband likes to tell of two men who are in a contest to cut through enormous tree trunks with an axe. One man chops and chops all day without ceasing. The other man chops for a while, stops, and chops again. The second man wins, not only because he forces himself to rest, but because he uses those periods of rest to sharpen his axe.

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is a pause in the usual. It is a point to draw breath, where we see who Jesus really is and gaze for a moment into the sorrow which that brings to his heart. It is sorrow, not just for those who will condemn him, not just for those who will mourn him but for us also –and perhaps in our frantic and frenzied world for us in all our busy-ness when we would as soon run by the Cross – oh just another crucifixion, just another week, just another Friday – as stop and enter into the promise which it offers us.

That promise is life – perhaps that is why Jesus waited – to show that life is not cheap, not easily formed or held or given . I do not think God plays with us, tests us out, tries to see what we will do – God reaches out into the ordinary, even into ordinary death, and transforms it.

A life of snatched moments and caught breaths is a life of scarcity and there is good psychological data to back up the fact that we cannot think straight in scarcity – let alone pray straight. Our souls, our spirits, our deepest insides, that bit which hears God even when the rest of us is doing our level best to keep moving at breakneck pace, those inmost parts of us need the abundance of eternal life, of water which never dries out, of fruitfulness which comes from the true vine, of bread  which feeds more that will ever gather.

When we force ourselves into the scarcity of the quick fix, of perpetual motion, we starve ourselves of who we really are, we cut ourselves off from community and from the God who brings life from death, even death which seems incontrovertible.