Transgendering God

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

19 December 2021

 

Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci, 1499-1510

 
John 1.1-18

 
Have you heard of the ‘Jesus is my girlfriend’ critique of contemporary worship songs?
            It suggests that you take a song or hymn,
                        and try substituting the name ‘Jesus’
                        with the name of your significant other;
            and that if the song still makes sense,
                        it’s probably not such a great worship song.
 
It’s easy to do, and you can certainly have some fun with it;
            a bit like when I was a teenager
            and discovered the first-line index at the back of the hymn book.
 
It turns out that if you only read the first line,
            some favourite hymns or songs
            sound a lot more lewd than the author ever intended.
 
I mention this not to be disrespectful to contemporary worship,
            there are some fantastic modern hymns,
            and I think we should learn more of them at Bloomsbury.
 
But I mention it because it raises for us the question of God’s gender;
            and particularly the gender of God, as God is made known in Jesus.
 
And the thing is, this matters,
            because for most of its history the church, the body of Christ,
            has been a patriarchal institution.
 
From male-only priesthoods, to the idea that the husband is the head of his wife,
            to the denial of contraception and abortion to women,
            to the contemporary complementarian ideals
                        perpetuated in the ‘biblical womanhood’ movement,
the church has a woeful history of prioritising masculinity,
            and denigrating femininity.
 
And so much of this owes its origin
            to the fact that the baby Jesus was a boy.
 
If Jesus, born in a stable, is God incarnate,
            and if Jesus is a male child,
then, the logic of the millennia has asserted,
            God must also be understood as male.
 
Particularly notable for us today, in terms of patriarchal legacy,
            is the fact that many of the early church fathers
                        based their theology of male-headship
            on the language of the word-made-flesh that we find in our reading
                        from the prologue to John’s gospel.
 
Here I’m afraid I need to introduce you to a word from Ancient Greek;
            but that’s OK, because we’re all experts in classical Greek now,
            thanks to the naming convention adopted for the COVID-19 variants of concern.
 
Admittedly, a global pandemic wasn’t how I wanted the world to learn biblical Greek,
            but I’ll take what I can get.
 
Anyway, the word I want us to learn this morning
            is the word ‘logos’.
 
And, perhaps ironically, the meaning of this word, ‘logos’, is in fact ‘word’.
            ‘Logos’ is the ancient Greek term for a word,
                        for a thing uttered in speech or language.
 
And we meet this word, this ‘logos’
            in two key verses from our reading for this morning:
 
In the beginning was the logos,
            and the logos was with God, and the logos was God. (Jn. 1:1)
 
And the logos became flesh and lived among us. (Jn. 1:14)
 
And the thing is, in ancient Greek, ‘logos’ was a masculine word.
            But not in the rather simplistic way in which,
            for example in French, a car is female, but an apple tree is male.
 
Rather, in the ancient Greek world, the task of ‘logos’, of uttering truth,
            was a male domain.
It was the men who spoke, the men who articulated thought,
            while the women merely echoed the ‘logos’ of the men.
 
The philosopher Aristotle,
            who lived some 400 years before the writing of John’s gospel,
had used the term ‘logos’ to describe the rhetorical technique of reasoned discourse,
            the act of constructing a logical argument,
and this was something which he saw as a male task,
            arising from what he believed were inherent masculine characteristics.
 
And building on this, the Stoic philosophers of the ancient Greek world,
            had taught that the speaking of reason and logic, the delivery of ‘logos’,
            was the act of speaking order into a chaotic world.
 
For them the universe only made sense
            because of the reason and logic of the ‘logos’,
which they saw as an almost divine word that brings order,
            spoken into a world of chaos.
 
And these ancient Greek concepts of a male, logical, divine logos,
            dominated the world in which Christianity grew and developed,
and they became fused with the way in which the early church
            sought to understand John’s gospel’s language
                        of a ‘logos made flesh’,
                        of a logos which was in the beginning with God, and which was God.
 
And what happened, perhaps predictably,
            was that God came to be understood as inherently male;
            God was the man who spoke order into chaos, logic into irrationality.
 
And what God spoke was Jesus:
            the baby-boy born in the manger was the word incarnate,
            who became the man who called twelve male disciples.
 
Well, today I want us to begin unpicking this heritage of patriarchy,
            and I want us to start to see that God is not so easily defined as male.
 
Today’s sermon is actually the beginning of a new series on John’s gospel
            which will take us through the story of Jesus’ life through to Easter,
and so it’s important for us to think about this foundational issue of gender,
            because, as we will discover over the next few months,
the story of Jesus in the fourth gospel
            consistently and persistently challenges the gender-based hierarchies
            that dominated the ancient world
and which continue to dominate our world today.
 
It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention
            that gender is less easily defined than you might at first think.
 
Biologically speaking, of course, it’s reasonably straightforward.
            The presence of a Y chromosome will trigger development as a male.
            While its absence will trigger development as a female.
 
However, while biological sex is, with some rare exceptions, easy enough to test for,
            gender is something far more complex.
 
Those who study these things recognise that gender is a construct
            that overlays our underlying biology.
 
At a simple level, for example, there is no biological reason
            why men should wear trousers and women should wear skirts.
In fact in some cultures, men wear skirts too,
            and similarly these days in our culture,
            there is nothing unusual in women wearing trousers.
 
However, if I had come into this pulpit wearing a dress,
            you might wonder what I was saying about my understanding of my gender;
unless, of course, that dress was clerical dress,
            in which case you might wonder why I’d suddenly gone all Anglican on you.
 
You see, even at the level of what we wear, gender is fluid, non-defined,
            and you can write this across other areas of our being,
            from speech patterns, to movement, to occupation.
 
And whilst some of us find that our biological sex
            and our gender identity feel in harmony,
others find that their gender identity is more diverse, more fluid,
            less binary than ‘male’ or ‘female’.
 
And so we have a glorious set of words that have emerged,
            to describe people’s understanding and experience of who they are.
 
I’m not going to try and define these for us today,
            because I want us to get back to John’s gospel;
but as we do so I’d like us to hold in our minds,
            the fact that the concepts of male and female
            are not always experienced in the same way by different people,
and that any overarching framework
            that seeks to define what it is to be male, or female,
is likely to be experienced as oppressive
            by those who don’t fit that definition.
 
So, back to ‘logos’, this ancient Greek term for masculine rationality,
            which came to define the Christian understanding
                        of a male God, a male priesthood,
            and a patriarchal authority structure for both society and the home.
 
And here we need to depart from the world of Greek thought,
            and remember that although the fourth gospel was written in Greek,
it was written by someone who was Jewish,
            and that its thought world owes at least as much to the Hebrew Bible,
            as it does to Aristotle and the Stoics.
 
The clue is there in the opening words of the gospel,
            which echo the opening words of the book of Genesis.
 
‘In the beginning God created…’
            becomes ‘In the beginning was the logos….’
 
The author of John’s gospel is wanting his readers to make a connection
            between the story of God speaking creation into being,
                        separating light from darkness and declaring it good,
            and the story he is about to tell of the word-made-flesh
                        that is the light shining in the darkness of the world.
 
But of course, the creation story from Genesis
            isn’t just about the mechanics of creating the cosmos,
it’s also a story about the creation of humans:
 
So God created humankind in his image,
            in the image of God he created them;
            male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27)
When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God.
Male and female he created them, and he blessed them
            and named them "Humankind" when they were created. (Gen. 5:1-2)
 
And here we need to notice something significant about gender, and it’s this:
            there is diversity of gender within God,
            and this is reflected in the diversity of gender amongst humans.
 
Genesis does not describe an unambiguously male God,
            and neither does John’s gospel offer an unambiguously male logos.
 
Whilst ‘logos’ may be a male term within the classical Greek tradition,
            John’s gospel clearly has in mind another tradition from the Hebrew Bible,
            known as the ‘wisdom tradition’.
 
Other Jewish writers from the same period made the same move,
            with the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria
            using the Greek words ‘logos’ and ‘sophia’
                        (the Greek word for ‘Wisdom’) interchangeably.
 
In places such as Proverbs (1-9) and the Apocryphal book of Sirach (24)
            we meet this character called ‘wisdom’, always personified as a woman;
and she is presented as the agent of God’s communication, of God’s speech.
 
In the Hebrew Bible, when God speaks salvation, hope, and judgment to humanity,
            God does so through the female form of wisdom.
 
But even more than this, wisdom is also presented
            as the agent of God’s creation (Prov. 8.22-23):
she, that is ‘wisdom’ was in the beginning with God,
            and she participated with God in the creation of the world.
 
Wisdom is a decisively female image for God,
            and of God’s spoken word taking human form,
and so when John’s gospel speaks of God’s word made flesh,
            this female image of wisdom is part of that incarnation.
 
If God creates humans male and female after God’s own image,
            then God’s word takes human form as both male and female too.
 
And whilst the human being of Jesus may be biologically male,
            in Jesus are embodied the full diversity of gender,
            which is reflective of the full glory of God’s diversity.
 
And we will see this time and again
            as we work through the fourth gospel over coming months,
            with Jesus consistently subverting gender norms and expectations.
 
As Elizabeth Johnson puts it: ‘
            ”The gender particularity of Jesus
                        does not reveal that God must be imaged exclusively as male.
            In Jesus Christ we encounter the mystery of God who is neither male nor female,
                        but who as source of both and Creator in the divine image
                        can in turn be imaged as either” (Johnson 1985: 280).[1]
 
In fact, the very language of God as creator,
            is itself a reflection God’s own gender diversity.
 
The fact that the Hebrew Bible assigns to the female character ‘wisdom’
            the creative roles of builder, architect, and director,
                        (perhaps more typically masculine roles),
            along with the unambiguously female act of creating flesh from flesh;
means that these female images for God
            have to sit alongside any image of God as male,
to remind us that God is not just the Father of all things,
            but the eternal Mother of us all as well.
 
And it’s this idea of God as mother that I want us to sit with for a moment now,
            as we explore another aspect of the prologue to John’s gospel.
 
Here I want us to turn to v.18, which in the NRSV translation we use reads as follows:
 
No one has ever seen God.
            It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart,
            who has made him known.
 
However, and forgive me turning back to the Greek again here,
            I don’t think this is the best translation.
 
Just so you know, I’m going to borrow much of what I want to say about this verse
            from Karoline Lewis’s remarkable commentary on John’s Gospel. [2]
 
The first issue we have here is with the word “son”,
            because the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of John
            do not include the term “son” here.
 
It was added later, most likely by scribes
            on the basis that the Father–Son relationship between Jesus and God
                        is a central theme of the gospel.
 
However, and interestingly for us, that does not seem to have been
            the original focus here in the prologue.
 
Rather, John was showing his readers
            that Jesus reveals God’s nature
            in a new and profoundly different way.
 
At this point in the story, the logos is God, begotten of God,
            but not yet gendered, not yet God’s ‘son’.
 
This is God’s word and wisdom, embodied but ungendered,
            fully human and fully God.
 
And then we come to another translation problem,
            with our pew Bibles telling us that the begotten logos
            is “close to the Father’s heart” (NRSV)
 
But the word ‘heart’ isn’t actually used here,
            the word in Greek is better translated as “bosom.”
 
And I don’t want any sniggering at the back!
 
The King James Version rightly translates this,
            saying that the divine word, the logos,
            is ‘in the bosom of the Father’,
 
The reason later translations change this, opting for the ‘at the Father’s side’
            or ‘close to the heart of the Father’
is because the word ‘bosom’ has become, in many of our minds,
            inextricably linked with the heaving bosoms of period dramas!
 
In other words, it makes us think of a woman’s breasts.
 
However, Margaret Miles, in her study of the breast as a religious symbol in art, [3]
            argues that before the mid- 18^th century
            a primary image for salvation was the infant Jesus
                        nursing at the exposed breast of Mary.
 
The believer, in viewing this picture,
            was invited to imagine being in Jesus’ position
            and, in this way, to experience salvation from of God as nurturer.
 
Margaret Miles goes on to suggest, however,
            that the simultaneous advent of medical anatomy and printed pornography,
meant that depictions of the female body moved
            from being a representation of the source of nourishment of life
            to becoming a detached object of study and desire.
 
From this point on, there was no longer the possibility of visualizing God in this way,
            and viewing the breast as a religious symbol became impossible.
 
As a result, the primary representation of salvation in art
            moved from the nursing baby Jesus, to the crucifixion.
 
Translations of John 1:18 published after this point
            demonstrate this remarkable shift in the perception of the female body.
 
Describing Jesus as nursing at the bosom or breast of God
            suddenly became sexualised or even sordid,
and so Jesus being 'in the bosom' of God,
            became Jesus being 'by the side', or 'close to the heart', of God.
 
However, to abandon this image
            in favour of a more socially acceptable portrayal,
is problematic because the meaning conveyed in this picture,

            of Jesus at the bosom of God,
            is one of extraordinary tenderness.
 
One would be hard-pressed to find a description of relationship
            more intimate than the nursing of a child
and the rest of the Gospel depends on this description
            of Jesus’ relationship with God.
 
Who God is, for the believer as a child of God,
            is their parent, their mother,
            who provides everything necessary for sustenance of life.
 
God is the life-sustainer in the Fourth Gospel,
            and Jesus’ signs and words that will follow
            all bear witness to God as the one who is the source of true life.
 
To be a disciple of Jesus is to become, like him, a child of God,
            as we experience God the nurturing mother,
            as well as God the loving father.
 
Interestingly, the only other time in the Gospel of John
            that the word “bosom” is used is in 13:23, at the last supper.
 
Here we have the disciple whom Jesus loves,
            resting his head against Jesus’ bosom.
 
Those reading the gospel are encouraged to emulate this disciple,
            and to share with him in the intimacy of his relationship with Jesus,
just as Jesus invites us to share in the intimacy of his relationship with God.
 
And through all of this, we encounter these astonishing images
            of both God and Jesus, encompassing the female characteristics
            of nurturer and sustainer.
 
And so we get to the final few words of verse 18,
            where we are told that the only begotten, born of God,
            the one who is sustained by God’s loving nurture,
                        is the one who makes God known.
 
This is the revelation of God,
            and it is a trans-gender revelation.
 
The God of the prologue to John’s gospel is no alpha male,
            and the only begotten of God is no macho man.
 
The logos, the word and wisdom of God,
            spoken into human form and flesh,
reveals to us a God who creates humankind after God’s own image,
            with gender transcending biology at every turn.
 
And so as we come towards Christmas,
            to the point where we encounter God as the dependent child in the manger,
I pray that we can discover that for each of us,
            however we experience ourselves in these complex and wonderful bodies of ours,
            we will know deeply and truly that we have been created in God’s image.
 

---

[1] Quoted in Scott, J. Martin C., Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: John (pp. 38-39).
[2] Lewis, Karoline M., John (Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries) (pp. 21-24).
[3] A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008]

Mortal, can these bones live?

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

5^th December 2021, 11.00am

The Valley of Dry Bones engraving by Gustave Doré

 

Ezekiel 37:1-14   

John 11:1-3, 11-13, 17, 21-22, 32-40, 43-44  

 

Over the last few weeks, this congregation has had a bit of a run

            of services to give thanks for the life of friends who have died.

 

These have been good occasions:

            appropriately sad, but also with time to remember

            and to re-tell the good things about those who are no longer with us.

 

We have had laughter as well as tears,

            and rightly so, because a life well lived is worth celebrating,

            even as we mourn its ending.

 

But our engagement with the mystery of death

            has also reminded us that there are no easy answers, and no quick solutions.

 

As C S Lewis memorably put it, the death of a loved one is an amputation,[1]

            and although time can bring some healing,

            the loss remains forever a part of us.

 

Well, our two lectionary readings for this morning,

            invite us to face the reality of our own human mortality.

 

Let’s start with the Old Testament,

            and this week we find ourselves with the prophet Ezekiel.

 

He was a contemporary of Jeremiah who we heard from last week,

            but whereas Jeremiah had remained in Jerusalem,

                        writing to the Jewish exiles in Babylon to seek the welfare

                        of the city to which they had been exiled;

            Ezekiel was one of those exiles,

                        and his job was to interpret God’s word

                        for those people who had lost everything.

 

Many of them would, I am sure, have been personally bereaved,

            they would have lost family and friends during the Babylonian invasion.

 

But their grief and loss was more than personal, it was structural:

            because they had lost their city, their society, their homes, their futures.

 

And so in Ezekiel’s vision, we are confronted with a horrific scene:

            It’s the aftermath of a war, and the vision is of the site of a battlefield.

 

Ezekiel sees an open mass grave, with the bones of so many bodies,

            lying intermingled and bleached by the sun,

            stripped clean by the carrion.

 

It is hard to read this passage,

            without thinking of the killing fields of more recent years.

            From the war graves of Flanders and the Somme

                        to the European death camps of the mid twentieth century,

                        to the massacres of Bosnia and South Sudan;

            mass death, and mass burial,

                        remain a tragic and traumatic part of the human story.

 

So many lives lost,

            so many hopes and dreams cut short.

 

A few years ago Liz and I visited Cambodia,

            and we went to one of the killing fields sites just outside Phnom Penh.

 

As we walked around we could see scraps of clothing and fragments of bone

            eroding out of the dry soil:

testimony to the shallow mass graves

            of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.

 

A valley of dry bones is both the literal reality

            of the aftermath of a battle or massacre,

and also a fitting metaphor for the people

            who have suffered at the hands of others.

 

And as Ezekiel wanders in his vision around the field of bones,

            it speaks to him of his people:

                        taken from their homeland, into exile in Babylon;

            the victims of an ethnic cleansing

                        from which it seemed there was no way back.

 

For Ezekiel, death had come not just to a person, but to a whole nation.

            In a terrifying precursor to the holocaust,

                        the dry bones of Ezekiel’s vision

                        are the bones of his fellow Jews,

            broken and cast aside

                        by the nationalistic ideology of another nation-state.

 

And in the midst of this vision of devastation,

            Ezekiel hears the voice of the Lord,

                        asking him a question:

 

            ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’

 

And in this question, we are taken to the central question of human mortality.

            Is death the end?

            Does death get the final word on life?

 

These same questions echo through the story of the death of Lazarus,

            as we encounter Jesus living the personalised agony

            of the death of a dearly loved friend.

 

And the questions are the same:

            Is death the end?

            Does death get the final word on life?

 

            Mortal, can these bones live?

 

The story of Lazarus is a long one,

            continuing even beyond the end of this morning’s reading,

and within the structure of John’s gospel

            it is the seventh of seven signs of the kingdom

            which reveal to the reader

                        the nature of the new world that is coming into being through Christ.

 

And it’s as if the author of John’s gospel

            invites us to enter into the detail of this story,

                        to spend time with those who are affected by the death of Lazarus,

            and to share with them in their range of responses.

 

One of the books which I have turned to again and again over the years,

            is a study called On Death and Dying,

                        which was published in 1969

                        by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-American psychiatrist.

 

In this, she proposed that those faced with a diagnosis of a terminal illness

            typically experience grief in five stages.

 

These five stages of grief, as they have come to be known,

            can also often be seen in the lives

            of those who have experienced a bereavement,

and although they shouldn’t be thought of as a programme to work through,

            and people experience in them in any order,

                        often returning to different stages over a period of time,

            many people have found them a helpful guide

                        to what they find themselves experiencing

            as they are brought face to face with the reality of death.

 

I have often thought that Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief

            can be seen in the various responses of the people around Lazarus,

                        in John’s story of his illness and death,

and I think it’s worth our while spending a bit of time with them today,

            as we enter into these to texts of grief

            from the books of Ezekiel and John.

 

Kübler-Ross suggests that the first stage of grief is often that of denial;

            these are the ‘it simply can’t be true’ feelings,

                        where we keep expecting the person to just walk through the door,

                        or we convince ourselves that we can still hear them speaking.

 

The disciples do just this when Jesus tells them that Lazarus had died.

            He breaks it to them gently, using the euphemism of sleep for death,

                        telling them that ‘our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep.’ (v 11)

 

            And the disciples grasp onto this and respond with hopeful denial of the reality,

                        ‘Lord,’ they say, ‘if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right’ (v.12).

 

            And so Jesus has to tell it to them plainly,

                        ‘Lazarus,’ he says ‘is dead.’ (v.14)

 

Kübler-Ross says that

            ‘Denial is usually a temporary defence

            and will soon be replaced by partial acceptance.’[2]

 

But what this acceptance brings with it

            is often the next stage in the grieving process,

            which for many people is an experience of anger.

 

Anger is an emotion that is hard to control or to predict,

            we don’t know where it will strike, or in which direction.

 

Some people become angry at the doctors

            that have been caring for their loved one,

convincing themselves that with better care

            things could have been different.

 

Some people become angry at themselves,

            blaming themselves for letting their loved one down.

 

Some people become angry at the person who has died,

            furious with them for leaving like this,

            for depriving them of the future that had been planned together.

 

Some people become angry at God, or at their friends or family,

            desperate for somewhere to direct the blame for the loss they have suffered.

 

All of which can seem quite negative,

            as if these feelings of anger are something to be avoided,

            or to be ashamed of, or to feel guilty about.

 

Which is why I find it so helpful and interesting,

            that the character in the Lazarus story who exhibits anger,

            is none other than Jesus himself.

 

When Jesus sees Mary and the other Jews weeping over Lazarus’ death,

            we are told that he was greatly angered, greatly agitated. (v.33, 38)

 

Some Bible translations have tried to downplay the extent

            of Jesus’ emotional response to the death of his friend,

                        and our own NRSV describes him as being

                        ‘greatly disturbed’, and ‘deeply moved’.

 

But whilst some may not like to think of Jesus

            exhibiting raw anger in the face of death,

the reality of the words that John uses here to describe Jesus’ response

            are more indicative of uncontrolled anger than anything else.

 

And it’s not just Jesus,

            some of those around him are angrily looking for someone to blame,

and so they say loudly, with accusation in their voices,

            ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man

            have kept this man from dying?’ (v.37)

 

Anger is, it seems, part of the human response to death;

            it is an appropriate and natural emotion

                        in the face of tragic loss.

 

The next stage of grief which Kübler-Ross observed

            is that which she called bargaining.

 

She sees this as a helpful stage

            in the process of moving towards acceptance,

            and says:

 

            ‘If we have been unable to face the sad facts in the first period,

                        and have been angry at people and God in the second phase,

            maybe we can succeed in entering into some sort of an agreement.’[3]

 

She uses the example of a teenager,

            who has been told that they cannot spend the night at a friend’s house.

 

Initially they may be angry and stamp their feet,

            or lock themselves in their bedroom,

            temporarily expressing their anger towards their parents by rejecting them.

 

But then they have second thoughts,

            and coming out of their room they start volunteering

                        to do tasks they’d never normally do,

            in the hope that if they are especially good this week,

                        maybe they’ll get what they want next week.

 

And maybe we’re not so different in the face of death:

            we construct deals, or ultimatums,

            and address them to God, universe, and ourselves.

 

‘If only this… then that…’ is the pattern.

 

            If only I can have another year with them,

                        then I’ll be a better person…

 

            If only the doctors could have done things differently,

                        then they’d still be with me.

 

            If only you’d been there Jesus,

                        my brother would not have died.

 

So says firstly Martha (v.21)and later Mary (v.32).

            If only, if only, if only…

 

The bargains and the regrets intermingle in the mind of the bereaved,

            and we imagine a world where reality is different,

            and we construct scenarios that would bring that world into being.

 

Kübler-Ross notes that

            ‘most bargains are made with God and are usually kept a secret’[4]

And she suggests that they are usually motivated by quiet guilt.

 

Where Martha and Mary are different

            is that they speak their bargaining aloud:

they offer to Jesus the their wish that the world was different,

            and he receives their plea,

offering them comfort and compassion,

            as they move towards acceptance of their brother’s death.

 

But there is another difficult stage yet to speak about,

            and that is the stage Kübler-Ross identified as depression.

 

For many of us, the experience of staring death in the face

            creates within us a void of emptiness that simply will not leave us.

 

So great can this void become

            that our own existence ceases to matter to us in any meaningful way.

 

The Psalmist in the Old Testament,

            knows this experience well.

 

In Psalm 130 he says,

            ‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. 

                        Lord, hear my voice!

            Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!’

 

And we meet this uncontrollable sadness in the Lazarus story,

            and again it is Jesus who embraces his humanity most fully.

 

In what is known as the shortest verse in the Bible,

            John tells us that ‘Jesus began to weep’ (v.35).

 

He is overcome by sorrow and sadness

            to the point where uncontrollable tears from a grown man

            is the entirely appropriate response to the death of his friend

                        and the grief of all those who loved him.

 

But it’s not just Jesus who weeps,

            Mary does so too, as do Lazarus’s other friends (v.33).

 

The adage that ‘big boys and girls don’t cry’,

            is one which, it seems, can be set aside

            in the face of the depression of bereavement.

 

But eventually, says Kübler-Ross, if the grieving process is healthy,

            the depression can begin to lift, and give way to the final stage,

                        which is that of acceptance.

 

She says that if a person has enough time,

            and has been given some help in working through the other stages,

they will reach a stage where they are accepting of the reality of death,

            neither angry nor depressed.

 

In the Lazarus story, Martha seems to be moving to this stage

            by the time they come to open the tomb where they have laid Lazarus.

 

Some time has passed,

            and she is concerned that the body will already have started to decompose. (v.39)

 

She has, to some extent at least, come to accept the reality of her brother’s death,

            and recognises the natural processes at work

                        in a body that has been laid in the ground.

 

And then,

            and then…

 

Up until this point, this has been a story of death much like any other.

            The stages of grief are all there,

                        the characters all behave as they should,

                                    including Lazarus, whose life has ended.

 

But then, the most unexpected thing in the world happens,

            and Jesus calls Lazarus back from the grave.

 

The point of the story suddenly comes into focus:

            Is death the end?

                        Does death get the final word on life?

            Mortal, can these bones live?

 

Yes, it seems that they can!

            In this story, at least, death is not the end,

            and it does not get the final word on life!

 

It is at this point that the story of the death of Lazarus

            stops being a carefully observed study on grief,

and becomes something else altogether.

 

It becomes what John intends it to be within his gospel:

            a sign of the kingdom of God.

 

It is a story that reveals something profoundly important to us,

            about the nature of the new world that is coming into being,

                        through the person of Jesus Christ.

 

The point of the resurrection of Lazarus

            is that when God is involved in the story of someone’s life,

            death is never allowed to have the final word.

 

This has been true in the story of Lazarus’ death,

            it will be true in the story of Jesus’ death,

            and we are invited to realise that it will be true for us also.

 

The calling forth of Lazarus from his tomb

            prefigures Jesus’ own dramatic desertion of the grave

            later in the gospel story.

 

Just as Lazarus died, so Jesus will die,

            and so, I am afraid to say, will each of us, in our turn.

 

Symbols of death are all around us as I speak:

            From the cross on the wall behind me,

                        to the bread and wine before us on the Communion Table,

            bodies break, blood is spilled,

                        and mortal life comes to its end.

 

It’s not always recognised these days

            that death is at the heart of the Christian faith.

 

We tend to devote far more time focussing on life in all its fullness,

            than we do confronting the reality of death.

 

And in this, of course, we mirror the world around us,

            which consigns death to the specialists,

            and dangles the goal of eternal youth before us all.

 

As seventy becomes the new fifty,

            we pursue the dream of health and activity into old age,

            and we deny to ourselves the truth of our own mortality.

 

It was once the case, before modern medical advances,

            that death was a regular reality for all people.

 

Death occurred primarily in the home,

            and it was not unusual to sit with the body of a family member who had died.

 

These days, we confine death to the hospitals,

            and many of us have never been with a dead body.

 

Within the medical profession, death has become the great enemy,

            to be avoided at all costs.

 

And we focus our energies on keeping people alive,

            even sometimes beyond the point where death would be more appropriate.

 

Christianity, with its focus on death at the heart of its faith,

            can bring a different perspective on death,

            which we can offer as a prophetic witness to the world.

 

And that perspective is this:

            Death is no longer the mortal enemy of humankind.

            Death’s power over people is broken,

                        because in Christ we find the hope of resurrection;

                        in Christ we find the promise and hope of eternal life.

 

It’s important that we don’t confuse ‘eternal life’ with ‘living forever’,

            they aren’t the same thing at all.

 

‘Eternal life’ is a quality of life that endures beyond the grave,

            and it comes as the gift of God, given through Christ Jesus.

 

‘Living forever’ is simply an attempt to deny the mortality of humanity,

            and is ultimately always going to founder in the face of death.

 

Even Lazarus, called forth from his tomb, would die again.

            And it may well be Lazarus about whom Jesus has to scotch the rumour

                        that he is going to live forever,

            in the last few verses of the gospel (21.21-24)

 

The Christian doctrine of resurrection is not, contrary to popular opinion, 

all about the afterlife; 

and 'eternal life' can't simply be reduced 

to ‘pie in the sky when you die’. 

Rather, they are about living the eternal value of each day, 

so that all that is good in life is not lost.

 

Eternal life is eternity in each present moment,

            it is, as William Blake put it:

 

To see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.[5]

 

God is love, and God is eternal,

            and at our life’s conclusion all that we have ever been,

                        from young child, through strong adulthood,

                        to infirmity and helplessness,

            is swept up within the love of God

                        and held in God’s eternal loving embrace.

 

This is the Christian perspective on eternal life,

            and it is Christ’s gift in the face of death.

 

It is no coincidence that so many Christians in the medical profession

            are so involved in palliative care and the hospice movement.

 

In Christ we are enabled to face death without fear

            because we know that it does not get the final word.

 

And so back to Ezekiel’s vision, where we hear the word of the Lord

            to those who have been taken hostage by the power of death,

            and it is a word that echoes down to our own age with startling clarity:

Mortal, can these bones live?

            Is death, ultimately, all that there is?

            Is all lost, in the face of death?

Mortal, can these bones live?

 

There is a west African proverb,

            which says that when an elder dies a library is burned.

But that is not the Christian perspective,

            because within the love of God in Christ,

                        nothing that is good is ever lost,

                                    each moment is of eternal value

                                    to the Lord of all eternity.

 

Mortal, can these bones live?

            Yes, we may answer, they live eternally.

---

[1] C S Lewis, A Grief Observed

[2] On Death and Dying, pp.35-36.

[3] On Death and Dying, p. 72.

[4] On Death and Dying, p.74

[5] Auguries of Innocence