Fourth Sunday in Lent

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

The Gospel of the Lord.

What would it be like to be Lazarus, do you think? What do you think it would be like to be Lazarus, to be someone who died and, by this worldly time, had been dead for quite some time, four days? What would it be like to have died and then to come back to life, to have had that experience?

I know two people in my life who have had what sometimes is called a “near-death experience,” except in their cases they call it a “death experience.” Both of these people—whom I trust absolutely as truthful people—were pronounced clinically dead in a hospital and then woke up, came back. They had an experience of death; they had gone and come back. And they had a story to tell, a very interesting story. I remember one of those stories I found out because I was in a group of people, and we were talking about death and what comes after death, and somebody said, “Pastor, what happens after you die?” And I said, “Well, I don’t really know. I have never really experienced it.” And one woman spoke up and said, “Well, I have.” Believe me, everybody paid very close attention to what she had to say.

It excites the imagination, doesn’t it? People, when they tell these stories, they get written down in books, and those books sell very well. We’re very fascinated, we’re very curious. If not more than a little afraid, we are certainly curious. But one of the things I can tell you that everyone who has this sort of experience seems to say is that “No longer will I ever fear death again.” “I’m not afraid of death anymore.” For people like this, death has become part of their experience. They live now with the experience of death. Death no longer seems a monstrous, completely unknown thing, but has become a manageable and imaginable thought. They now have a relationship with death, and that relationship is okay.

Not to say, of course, that death is not traumatic. Death is traumatic. It hurts, it always hurts. It always surprises people, I think, that in this passage in the Book of John, where Jesus is coming to Bethany and planning already to raise Lazarus from the dead, he weeps. Jesus knew he was going to raise his friend. Right? So why is he sad? It is because, I think, death is traumatic, no matter what, even when you know it’s going to be okay.

Somebody attending a funeral that I did some years ago came up to me and said, “Well, the person who has died is in heaven so we should be happy. Right?” And I looked at her and I said, “Well, I hope that when I die somebody will be sad.” When our loved ones die, it hurts; it hurts, even if we know that they are okay. Separation hurts, even if we know that it’s going to be okay.

I weep every time at a funeral—at least on the inside, if not on the outside. I try very hard not to cry at funerals. The last thing in the world that people need is for me to be reduced to a puddle of tears while I’m trying to lead a funeral. But I find myself identifying with the pain that people experience. I hear the stories of the person who has died: what they meant to other people, how they lived, who they were. And every time I’m faced with the overwhelming reality of death, the “no-more-ness” of it all, no more, no more—no more hugs, no more candy dish, no more rides on the bike, no more—I think then, of course, of the death of those whom I have loved and have died. And I think of my own death. And I anticipate a little bit the death of everyone whom I share life with now. Jesus wept because he took death seriously. And death hurts.

John doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the death of Lazarus. It’s not a pleasant picture, this scene in Bethany in the tomb and outside of the tomb. Lazarus has been dead for four days, and the stone gets rolled away. And how does it smell? Martha says, “There’s a stench”; it smells like rotting flesh. And then Jesus calls forth Lazarus, and Lazarus appears. And how does he appear? Well, he’s all bandaged up. He’s bandaged on his hands and on his feet, and even around his face. He looks like a mummy. It’s horrific. It’s the stuff of horror movies. It is the sight and the smell of death. And it can be overwhelming and terrifying. We dress it up nowadays with embalming and beautiful caskets. But the truth is ugly. That glorious body that ran and jumped and skipped as a child, those eyes that were bright, those hands that were so capable, that head so full of knowledge, are all decomposing, returning to unconscious matter.

This scene blurs the boundary between life and death, and that is a little unsettling. Jesus and Lazarus both cross the boundary line. Lazarus has crossed over, and Jesus goes in to get him. What is this about? What is it about? Well, some people say, “Well, it’s about power. It’s about power. It’s about Jesus having power over death.” It’s kind of a wow-whee thing. “Wow, Jesus can do anything!” Well, if it’s about “Jesus can do anything,” then all miracle stories are exactly the same, and Jesus might as well leap tall buildings, levitate, and pull a rabbit out of his hat. Jesus is reduced to kind of a superman. No, the story is not about that Jesus could do it. It’s about what he did in particular.

Sometimes people interpret this story in relation to another passage in the scripture where Jesus says, “Well, you have seen the great works that I have done. Greater works than these shall you do.” And they then deduce that if we had faith, if we only had faith, we, too, could raise the dead; wouldn’t have funerals anymore, the idea that Jesus came to overcome death, the fact of death. But Jesus didn’t come to overcome the fact of death. Lazarus certainly died again. And Jesus didn’t raise everybody from the dead—just Lazarus. So if Jesus came to eliminate death, he seems to have failed. But Jesus did come; Christ did come to eliminate the terror of death, or, as Paul says, “the sting” of it.

Can you imagine living like Lazarus, beyond the fear of death? In our funeral ceremony, at the beginning of each one, we proclaim that we are baptized. We are baptized into Christ’s death and into Christ’s resurrection. And what that means is that our lives are lived in the context of Christ’s death and his eternal life, both.

Christ raising Lazarus gives us a picture, an imagination. Christ doesn’t destroy the reality of death in raising Lazarus, but he gives us a new imagination. Christ is not just able to give life. Christ is the personification of life itself, the life of the world, the life that makes us all alive, the life of God. But more than that even, Christ is not only Lord of life, Christ is Lord of death, so that death is not too far away for Christ to come. And Lazarus is a picture not of someone who escapes death, because he does die again, but Lazarus is a picture of someone who is alive in a new way. And death can no longer have the same power over him that it once had.

What would it be like to be Lazarus? I don’t know for sure, but I imagine. I imagine that Lazarus became more alive than he had ever been before. I imagine that Lazarus was less afraid, more aware, more engaged, with a whole new sense of what matters and what’s important in life, because he’s already experienced death. And I wonder if Lazarus can be, not literally but figuratively, I wonder if Lazarus can be for us a picture of what life in Christ could be like.

Amen.