Everywhere, seeing as you asked

Lent 5A: John 11:1-45

The writer Annie Dillard, in one of her short stories, has a scene in which a family is sadly gathered at a grave to commit a loved one’s body to the earth. At one point the minister intones the familiar words from I Corinthians, “Where, O Death, is thy sting?”  Upon hearing that, one of the family members looks up.  He scans the sorrowful faces of his family and sees all around him row upon row of headstones in the cemetery.  And then he thinks to himself, “Where, O Death, is thy sting? Why, it’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked!”

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked. Indeed it is. At all times and in all seasons, few things make the news like death, particularly lots of deaths. Wars, as in Ukraine and now in Iran. Tornadoes rip through central US, laying waste to towns and cities, leaving dozens dead. An earthquake hits a Third World country and in the span of a few seconds tens of thousands of lives disappear.  But those are just the big events. The unrelenting power of death can also be seen in the everyday, in the nightly news reports about gang shootings, drug overdoses and deaths of despair. And that on top of the “normal” deaths from disease, accidents and old age. I mean, when have you ever opened the newspaper’s Obituary column only to see the word “None”?

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked. So is the denial of death. Don’t look your age, defy it!, the make-up commercials say.  You’re only as old as you feel, the old saying goes. People go to extreme lengths to cheat death, by being put in cryogenic frozen storage, by getting themselves cloned, by “uploading” their consciousness into a computer, and any number of schemes aimed at making an end run on our common human denominator.  But all to no avail. As soon as we are born, we discover that our condition is “terminal.” None of us are getting out of here alive.

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked. It’s everywhere in today’s reading from John 11, too. And not just in the obvious place of the tomb. It begins in verse 2, where John alerts us to how this Mary is the same Mary who will in a few chapters anoint Jesus with perfume. John explains there that this is in effect a burial anointing. The specter of death is visible too when Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus has died, and again when Thomas suggests he and the other disciples “go and die” with Jesus. Jesus, you see, had just narrowly escaped being stoned in the previous chapter. And so naturally they believed going to Bethany would be to step back into the jaws of death.

But nowhere is the choking reality of death better on display here than in what Jesus encounters once he finally arrives in Bethany. Before he headed up the hill, he could hear the plaintive song of death, the wailing cries of the professional mourners mixed with the heaving sobs of Mary, Martha, and others. Grief creates its own kind of presence, doesn’t it? I’ve felt it as a priest when walking into a hospital room, or living room, or funeral parlor.  It’s like walking into a layer of wet gauze. It’s palpable and engulfing.

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked, and it surely was in Bethany that day.  Jesus encounters Martha first. “Lord,” she says, “if you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died.” It’s hard for us to tell just how she sounded. Were her words those of resignation, sadness, confusion, or perhaps a bit of anger? “Well there you are! It’s about time. This whole thing could have been avoided had you just shown up when we first called you!”

If there was a dig intended in her words, Jesus doesn’t pick it up. Nor does he, as we might, seek to comfort her with words like “He’s gone on to a better place,” or “I guess God needed another angel in heaven,” or “Everything happens for a reason,” or some other well-meaning, but unhelpful (and untrue) platitude. Instead he reminds her of a fact she already knows. “Your brother will rise again.” At first, this seems cold consolation. “Lord, if I had wanted a Hallmark card, I’d have asked for one…  I know he will rise again at the last day when the roll is called up yonder by and by. But I’m hurting this day, we’re afraid what will happen to us now, Lord!”

And that’s when Jesus says it. He fixes Martha in an unusually intense stare and makes a claim so audacious, it’s either the best, most amazing news in the world or else the saddest, cruelest joke: “Martha,” he says, “I Am the resurrection and the life. That hoped-for reality of God’s victory over death is not a long way off, but right before you. Now. Today.  Do you believe this, or does that still sound like a Hallmark card?” With trembling lips and a quivering chin, Martha says, “Yes. Yes, I do believe.”  It was a bold thing for Jesus to say and a bolder thing for Martha to believe.

But even with that daring affirmation, within minutes, when Jesus sees also Mary and then the others, he loses it. The loss, the tragedy, the unfairness suddenly hits him. Jesus is disturbed, he’s indignant, he’s distressed. And he weeps.

He weeps not because he doesn’t believe his own words.  Nor because he has forgotten that he’d be having supper with Lazarus within the hour.  No, he weeps because, as the One who was with God in the beginning and through whom all things were made, he knows better than anyone there that day that this is not the way it’s supposed to be. He didn’t say “Let there be light” in the beginning to end up with a world so full of darkness and sorrow. He didn’t make all things good and humans very good just to see his creations undone. Jesus weeps, because he loves the world and hates to see the object of his love hurt, broken, destroyed by death.

I remember when I was in high school, a priest in my diocese, the dean of the cathedral, told us about a terrible pastoral visit he had to make to a family one time. The father was backing his truck out of the garage and didn’t see his toddler daughter was just behind the truck. When the priest got to the house, he admitted to us he was at a loss for words, didn’t know what to say. There was nothing he could say that could make the situation any less horrifying, any less devastating. The only thing that came to mind, that he could offer, was that God was weeping with them in heaven. And then they all cried together.

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked, and no one sees it with more startling clarity than Jesus himself. But after crying, Jesus does something to put death, if even for just a little while, in its place. He raises Lazarus from the dead, calls him out of the abyss, out of the deep, and restores him to life. Oh, Lazarus is not immortal now, He will die again. Mary and Martha may still have to go through another funeral for him at some point, probably sooner rather than later. But Jesus makes it clear who has the final say, and it’s not death.

And yet, still it’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked. Death may have been thwarted this time, but it’s not vanquished. Just as soon as Lazarus walks out into the sunlight, we hear warning of a secret plot to kill Jesus. It was too much for the religious authorities that Jesus raised Lazarus. They figure—understandably so—that if Jesus keeps doing things like raising the dead, it’s going to start to get pretty tough for them to convince people that Jesus is, as they say in Texas, “all hat and no cattle.”  Raising the dead has a way of getting people’s attention, you know. And so they decide to put to death the giver of life. With life breaking out all over Bethany, the authorities decided they needed to bring things back to normal, where death has the last word.

It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked. And for now, despite the joy and spectacle of John 11, that remains our reality, too. And that would be utterly despairing, were it not for those grand words of Jesus’ that have echoed down through the centuries as a shining ray of hope: “I am the resurrection and the life.” And were it not for what happened next, what happened after they executed Jesus. I know we are jumping ahead a little—Easter being still a few weeks away—but I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the plot to kill Jesus backfired. Jesus did die, but the crazy thing is he didn’t stay dead. Which really shouldn’t be all that surprising. I mean, how can you expect to kill someone who is Life itself, who is the embodiment of resurrection?

Indeed, the church has long understood Jesus’ raising of Lazarus as a sign, a precursor, a sneak peak of what was about to happen to Jesus himself a few weeks later. What Jesus did in Lazarus God will do in Jesus in the garden tomb—bring life out of death. And in the same way, Jesus’ resurrection is itself a preview, a foretaste, the first fruits of the general resurrection that will happen to everyone upon Jesus’ return.

You see, while it’s true It’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked, that doesn’t mean that it will always be the case, that death will always win. Indeed, resurrection shows us that in the end God will be victorious. God, not death, gets the last word. What Jesus did, in raising Lazarus and in his own resurrection, was he took that future resurrection and brought it back to us. He took a strand from that glorious day and tied all of history to it, making resurrection not just our destiny, but a force, a weight, an overarching reality and power for us in our lives now. Death is just about everywhere, seeing as you ask, but now so is new life.

Something else we learn from the raising of Lazarus, and also from Jesus’ resurrection, it needs to be said, is that this promise of new life doesn’t mean we are spared from suffering and dying. Lazarus wasn’t protected and neither was Jesus. Both felt the sting of death. So we shouldn’t understand Jesus’ claim to mean that we will never have to suffer death, that we will live forever. God’s answer to death isn’t immortality; it’s resurrection. It’s even though we die, we have life in Christ. Because in Christ, death is not the end. When we die, we fall asleep in the Lord, just as Jesus says of Lazarus, waiting for Christ’s call to rouse us. Indeed, the only death that matters in the end, the death that is true death, is our separation from God, a condition we’re promised we have been spared on account of Jesus. In him, we trust, we have life eternal with God.

So now when Jesus asks each of us the question he first posed to Martha, “Do you believe this?” we have a new way to answer. Yes, we do believe in Jesus, that we will rise again one day. We believe it will happen because, in Christ, it already did happen! Nothing can prevent the eternal life Jesus offers us because it has already come! Which means that whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s, because he just is, right now, the resurrection and the life. That has enormous meaning for when the roll is called up yonder by and by, when we come to our final days. But we don’t have to wait that long. It is here, now, at this table, where we get a taste, a literal taste of resurrection, a taste of the heavenly banquet, of eternity with Jesus our Lord.

“I am the resurrection and the life.”  Because of these words from Jesus, when we get asked by people, “Where can you find any hope in this world,” we can now boldly reply, “Why, it’s just about everywhere, seeing as you asked.  Amen!