The Resurrection and the Life

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

13th March 2022

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.