John 11.1-44
You may not realise this, because I’m told I hide it a lot
of the time,
but I am
actually someone with deep emotions:
I feel
things profoundly, I get hurt, I have my insecurities.
The things that happen to me, and to those I care about
(which
includes the congregation here at Bloomsbury),
can affect
me greatly.
You may not often see me cry, but it does happen.
More likely you will see a flash of frustration
when I feel
misunderstood or misrepresented;
or a moment of silence when my spirit is stirred
and I don’t
trust my voice to keep steady.
But please hear and know that beneath all this,
is someone
longing to be loved, wanting to help,
and trying
to make a difference in the lives of those around me.
Now why, you might wonder, is Simon starting a sermon in
this way?
Surely it
goes against all the advice to keep a sermon about Jesus,
rather
than about the preacher?
Well, it comes from a conversation I had this week with my
Spiritual Director,
who invited
me to reflect on
What Jesus might want to say to me?
So I’m sharing my thoughts, my response to this question,
because I
hope it might stir a similar engagement for you,
as you
listen to me reflecting on this.
What might Jesus want to say to me?
What might
Jesus want to say to you?
My answer to my Spiritual Director fell into two areas:
firstly,
what might Jesus want to say about the things I do?
And then
secondly, what might Jesus want to say to who I am,
to
my spirit, to my soul?
The difficulty with answering questions such as these, of
course,
is that if
we are to avoid simply putting our own words into the mouth of Jesus
and then
asking him to say them back to us,
we have to turn to scripture, to the gospels,
to see who
Jesus is, what he said, and what he did.
And it occurred to me that what we don’t often see with
Jesus,
is him
expressing his emotions.
Mostly he bounces around the Holy Land,
delivering
stupendous sermons,
responding
pastorally to the needy,
challenging
the systems of oppression,
and
calling out religious hypocrisy.
He seems to make enemies with ease,
and then
not mind when they turn on him in anger and threaten his safety.
It’s all a bit intimidating, if I’m honest.
As someone
who preaches, offers pastoral care,
and
speaks out against injustice,
it’s a lot
to measure up to!
Particularly when people I’ve annoyed or upset start to bite
back.
But more broadly, however, I also sense encouragement here.
What might Jesus want to say about the things I do?
Well,
hopefully, he’d tell me to carry on! To try harder!
To
keep going! To be not discouraged…
We are, as the old hymn puts it,
to fight
the good fight with all our might.
We are to keep on keeping on,
to take
heart and not grow weary.
The path we tread in this world is not new ground,
because
Jesus goes before us to show us the way.
For a church like Bloomsbury,
which has
an activist spirit, and is hard-wired to engage in actions
that
make good news a reality for people
whose
lives are dominated by bad news,
the activist example of Jesus that we see in scripture
is an
encouragement and an inspiration.
Which is great, right up to the moment when we hit the wall.
But what happens when we are derailed? Thrown off course?
Or just run
out of steam altogether?
My suspicion is that this is where many of us find ourselves
right now:
at the
limit of our energy and our emotional capacity.
The upheaval of the pandemic
and the
changes it has wrought in so many areas of our lives;
coupled with the horrific news
that
streams into our consciousness from the Ukraine;
added to the profound uncertainties many of us feel about
the future
as we
grapple with the rising cost of living,
fears of
escalation in international conflict,
and the
ever-growing needs of the poor and vulnerable in our own city;
all these have left many of us in a place of emotional
exhaustion,
overwhelming
grief, and paralysing fear.
It’s like we’re stuck in the darkness of a sealed cave,
with our
hands and legs bound, and our eyes covered.
Which brings me to our reading for this morning from John’s
gospel,
and the
story of the death of Lazarus.
This is the moment when, in the fourth Gospel,
Jesus hits
his own emotional wall.
It is in chapter 11 that Jesus finally breaks down, loses
the plot for a while,
and stares
death and despair in the face.
Verse 35, ‘Jesus wept’, is famously the shortest verse in
the Bible.
But in
those two simple words are captured a whole world of pain.
Yes, Jesus is weeping because his beloved friend has died.
But he is
also moved to tears by the emotions of those around him
as Mary and
the other Jews are crying in their grief.
It’s a bit like that moment you get sometimes at a funeral,
where one
person starts weeping, and that sets off others as well,
until you
have a communal outpouring of sorrow and grief.
The sad truth is that those of us raised in the British
culture
can
struggle with such Public Displays of Emotion.
I remember being told at school that, ‘big boys don’t cry’,
and many of
us have learned over the years to suppress our emotions,
to keep it
all inside, to ‘bottle it up’.
And yet, as we see in the story of the death of Lazarus,
communal
expression of emotion
can be the
precursor to something wonderful.
Many years ago, in my first church,
we had a
child in the fellowship who had developed cancer.
It was terrible, heart-breaking,
as her
young life hung in the balance.
We had been praying for her and the family for weeks,
and of
course supporting them in a variety of ways.
But somehow it didn’t seem real.
We knew it was happening at an intellectual and practical
level,
but we
hadn’t, as a congregation, owned it emotionally.
And then, in open prayer one Sunday,
my
colleague lifted his voice and started shouting to God
that
this situation was intolerable!
He told God that it was utterly unacceptable
that a
child should be facing death,
and that despite all our prayers,
and all the
skill of the medical profession,
she
remained gravely ill.
He continued for a couple of minutes, tears rolling down his
cheeks,
articulating
before God the raw emotion
and
rage and impotence we all felt.
It was like watching a Psalm taking form before us.
Many of us joined him in tears,
and somehow
in that moment,
which is
still with me all these years later,
the communal owning of our grief
opened the
door to a new world of hope,
as we entrusted our fears of the future
to a God we
dared to believe was a God of love;
as we entrusted a little girl’s short life
to God’s
eternal loving embrace.
Another more recent example, from Bethlehem in 2018,
when we
made our Bloomsbury visit to the Holy Land.
Each evening, back at the hotel,
we sat
around to process together what we had seen that day.
A wall that divides a community.
Children
who have been shot at.
A
refugee camp. A city under siege.
Evidence of
illegal weapons.
And several times we found ourselves crying together.
Holding the
pain in communion before God,
hardly
daring to believe that a better future might ever exist
for
those whose lives have been blighted by war.
And tomorrow, I shall be going to join a vigil at King’s
College London,
as we will
stand in solidarity and prayer and hope
for the
people of the Ukraine.
And yes, I will probably shed tears there too.
Crying with others, and for others, is a profoundly
Christ-like action.
And somehow, before God,
tears of
despair can become tears of hope, tears of resistance,
in a world
where, in Christ, death does not get the final word on life.
But there is yet another dimension for us to explore,
in this
shortest verse of the Bible.
Yes, Jesus wept in grief at the death of his friend;
and yes he
wept in solidarity with others.
But maybe also here we find Jesus weeping for himself.
The Fourth Gospel doesn’t include the story of Jesus in
Gethsemane,
sweating
blood at the prospect of his imminent death.
Instead, it is here at the tomb of Lazarus
that Jesus
confronts the reality of his own mortality.
It is no coincidence that we are reading this story in the
season of Lent,
as we make
our own annual pilgrimage towards the cross.
The story of the death of Lazarus
is
carefully constructed by the author of this gospel
as a
precursor to the story of Jesus’ own death which follows it.
The Lazarus narrative is the final of John’s ‘Seven Signs’,
and as with
each other sign, it points beyond itself
to a
revelation of the kingdom of Christ.
So as Jesus makes his way to his friend’s tomb,
he is also
taking decisive steps towards his own death.
And he weeps.
This is no divinely disconnected being,
emotionlessly
floating through life on his way to somewhere else.
This is rather the word made flesh,
a human
being confronting his own frailty and contemplating death.
And it is in this context that we find Jesus pondering the
meaning of life.
It starts with his conversation with Martha (vv.23-26),
as they
debate the nature of resurrection.
It seems that Martha is of the view
that
resurrection is some future event for people to look forward to.
She says, ‘I know that [Lazarus] will rise again
in the
resurrection on the last day’ (v.24).
And in this she was expressing a view common in Judaism at
that time,
and in fact
this is a view found amongst many Christians today also.
The idea has its origins in the philosophical question
of how to
justify the goodness of God
in the face
of a world where bad things happen to good people.
Many atheists today point to the existence of pointless
suffering
as a key
factor in their disbelief in God.
And one possible religious answer to this
is the one
articulated here by Martha:
It all gets
sorted out when we die.
Sure, in this world some people die young and tragically,
but they
will get their heavenly reward at the resurrection;
and sure, some people commit terrible deeds and seem to get
away with it,
but they
will get their comeuppance on the last day at the final judgment.
It’s highly compelling, quite logical,
and many of
us will have been taught this, or something very similar to it.
The problem, however, is that this isn’t what Jesus means
when he
talks about resurrection.
In reply to Martha, Jesus says, ‘I am the resurrection and
the life’.
And it is
worth our while spending a few moments unpicking this
if we are
to get to the heart of what is going on
in the story of Lazarus’s death.
Firstly, it’s another one of those ‘I am’ sayings
that we’ve
met before in John’s gospel,
where Jesus deliberately echoes the words spoken by God to
Moses,
when Moses
asked for God’s name:
‘I am who I am’, said the Lord;
‘I am…’
says Jesus, positioning himself as the revelation of God,
the word of
God made flesh.
And then we get these two concepts
of ‘the
resurrection’, and ‘the life’.
We would be mistaken to think
that these
are simply two different ways of saying the same thing,
as if ‘the
life’ was a synonym for ‘the resurrection’.
Rather, Jesus uses these two terms to provide a different perspective
on the
meaning of life in the face of suffering,
to that
just offered by Martha.
For Martha, ‘the resurrection’ was something future,
something
that comes after life.
But what Jesus wants people to grasp is that in him,
through his
human embodiment of God’s divine nature,
the resurrection is something that people can be part of
in the
here-and-now of this life.
If you remember, one of the key concepts of John’s gospel,
articulated
clearly in the opening prologue,
is that the
word became flesh and dwelt among us.
And in today’s reading, from this central chapter of the
gospel,
we discover
that the final decisive revealing sign of God’s kingdom
is the reality of resurrection;
and here we
get to discover what it means for us
that the word has become flesh and
dwelt among us.
The abundance of life that is in Jesus, is our today.
The assurance of ‘death defeated and life without end’
is ours in
the here-and-now.
We do not need to wait until this life has ended
for life
eternal to begin.
Quite the opposite!
Rather,
eternal life is ours now,
as death’s
hold over our lives is broken.
Did you notice what Jesus said as Lazarus came out of the
tomb,
still bound
in his grave clothes?
‘Unbind him, and let him go’ (v.44).
And I wonder what binds you?
What is it
that constrains your freedom,
covers your eyes, shackles your
movements?
What hold
does death have over you
from which you long to be released?
What fears hamper us? What sins hold us back?
What damage
done to us scars our present and our future?
Well, hear this: Jesus says, ‘I am the resurrection and the
life’.
Jesus is the one who reveals God’s abundant life to us,
who calls
us forth from our tombs,
into a new
life of love in community, and hope in life.
This is an invitation for us to centre the reality of
resurrection
at the
heart of our faith and our lives.
People often place the cross at the heart of their faith,
focussing
on the significance of the death of Jesus
as the key
theological truth of his life.
But John’s gospel offers a different perspective:
it centres
the resurrection.
The indwelling of God in human flesh is a gift of life,
to be
experienced by each of us, today, here, and now.
This life matters, because in Christ,
God is
present in our lives, today, here, and now.
Calling us from the tomb,
unbinding
our ankles and our hands,
and lifting
the grave clothes from our eyes.
The word became flesh and dwelt among us.
In him was
life, and the life was the light of all people.
The light
shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.
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