Death Is Encompassed by Another Kind of Life

5 Lent a        April 6, 2014

Ez. 37:1-14     Ps. 130 

Rom. 6:16-23    John 11:1-44     

Lectionary Link

  One of the teaching tools of Jesus that are found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke is the parable.  In the Gospel of John, we no longer find the use of parables; we find long discourses of Jesus.  A parable is a story that is used to teach something in an indirect way.  One could say that the Gospels are parables too since they use stories about Jesus and dialogues and discourses of Jesus to teach lessons which are less about the actual time of Jesus and more about the issues of the early churches in the time after Jesus has gone.

  The writing context for John’s Gospel is significantly different than the contexts that are evident from Matthew, Mark and Luke.  In John’s Gospel, casting out of demon is no longer a method of folk medicine.  In John’s Gospels the miracles have become presented as signs in stories for discourses which teach the basic theology of the church of John’s Gospel.

  Today, we’ve read the story of the last sign, the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.  And so here we are at the 5^th Sunday in Lent and we get to preview Easter in the Lazarus story of John’s Gospel.  John’s Gospel presents some elevated roles for women.  According to the Gospel of John Mary Magdalene has the most profound and first encounter with the risen Jesus.  According to the Gospel of John, Martha of Bethany, who gets some bad press as a non-contemplative busy body in another Gospel, Martha of Bethany is the one who hears first the most profound declarative statement of Jesus about the resurrection.  Jesus said to Martha, “I am resurrection and I am life.”  In the same story the disciples are presented as dull literalists thinking that when Jesus used the word “sleep” he meant sleep instead of “death.”  It is interesting to note that women are presented as those who understand the inner meanings of the heart, while the male disciples are often presented as the literalist clowns.

  John’s Gospel story of Lazarus presents a response to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke.  When the leper Lazarus is in paradise with Abraham and the rich man is in Hades separated by an unbridgeable chasm, the rich man asks Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his family.  Abraham said, “If they don’t believe the Moses and the prophets, neither will they believe even if someone comes back from the dead.”

  Do you see the obvious meanings of the Lazarus story in John?  It is evidence that not everyone was convinced or saw the resurrection as a valid reason for belief.  After the Lazarus story, we are told that some Jews believed in Jesus, but we are also told that other Jews saw this raising of Lazarus as something that was too much of an attention-getter and that it would bring the Romans down upon the Jews in a harsh way.  The resuscitation of Lazarus from the dead was reason for the Jewish authorities to plot the demise of Jesus.

  The Lazarus story in John’s Gospel has multiple functions including harmonizing it with the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.

  Miracles have been a major problem for our scientific age.  We live in an age where we have been taught to believe in a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.  This closed system has allowed us to discover and develop scientific laws to describe consistent and repeatable occurrences in nature.  So, the alchemical changing water to wine, the suddenly healing a lame person and blind person, the walking on top of the water, the change of weather at personal command, the making of enough food for 5000 people out of five loaves and two fish, and the opening of a grave to bring a dead man back to life; these accounts to say the least, blow our scientific minds.

  They also blow our moral minds too.  Why do the needy conditions occur in the first place? If a miracle happens, why couldn’t a previous miraculous prevention of the need in first place have occurred?   Why did so few people have access to the few miracles?  Why did not the miracles become the obvious gift to give to the church to use them to completely heal all of the hurt, the disharmony and all of the death in life?  If food could magnificently be multiplied then why keep it to happening in just one event?  What makes the starving people with Jesus in the wilderness that day any more important that starving people who exists in our world today and who have existed throughout history?  How many of us do not have graves that we want to be robbed of some important people whom we have lost? What is the purpose of tantalizing us with the resuscitation of one dead man?  What is the purpose of tantalizing us with such miracles if they are only to accompany the ministry of Jesus and a very few chosen disciples?  It almost seems like a cruel use of the very notion of “miracles” if we truly think about the logical consequences.

  The writer of John’s Gospel already understood this dilemma and so the word Sign was used and the Sign is the marvelous event which signified the presence of Jesus Christ as triumphant for us in surviving all of the great dilemmas of life.

  When is Christ with us and how can we experience Christ being with us?  We can know Christ as the uncanny in the trivial bothersome events of life, such as running out of wine at a wedding.  We can know Christ in the various conditions of sickness.  Jesus is the Way.  Jesus is the one who heals our lameness so that we can walk in the way.  Jesus is the Light and Truth.  Jesus is the one who heals our blindness so that we can see with wise and honest perspective.  Jesus is living bread; Christ as Eucharistic bread is the unifying and constituting liturgy of the church. Jesus is the Life.  With Jesus Christ, we have found the healing of death.  The story of Lazarus is a sign of Christ’s presence with us even when his comfort seems delayed.  The way in which death is healed is that it is truthfully presented as a one-time event. Death is redefined and made different by understanding that it is only one event which is minimized by everything that happens before and after the event.

  The scientific closed system of the natural world is opened up by a new birth into the parallel world of the Spirit.  The natural cause and effect is totally turned on its head, not in a literal way but in the truly uncanny world of art, faith and the experience of the sublime.

  If we can find a way to coexist, with minor frustration, disease, natural disasters, blindness and infirmity, hunger and thirst, and to co-exist with death, then we have found an abundant life, we have found an encompassing way to live.

  This is the encompassing life of faith to which the writer of John’s Gospel invites us.  This Gospel invites us to not pout in literalism and wonder why we don’t get miracles that defy science.  This Gospel of John invites us to the experience of the Risen Christ, who accompanies and encompasses all of life in such a way that the only way to show this wonder is to tell us “great sign” stories.  Because people who live by faith can come to live by this “jaw dropping” “O my God” wonder of the Holy Spirit encompassing all of our life.

  The Gospel of John reminds us that the Gospel is about a new birth, a new seeing, a new way of living which encompasses and ultimately heals everything, including death.  We can be in the place of Martha today to hear again these ultimate words of health and salvation:  “I am the Resurrection and the life.”  May God help us to access and live within this life today.  Amen.