Lent 5 Parish Eucharist at St John the Evangelist, Wroxall
Readings: Ezekiel 37: 1-14; John 11: 17-45
Today is a kind of gear-change. Last Sunday was generally kept as Mothering Sunday. Next Sunday we are into Holy Week, when the going gets tough. Passion Sunday, as today has been called for sometime, helps make the adjustment. The events leading to Jesus’ crucifixion, are inexplicable, and ‘non-trivial’, as we sometimes say when we want to underline the importance, the seriousness of what we are talking about.
Non-trivial indeed is this morning’s gospel, taken from John the Evangelist, your Patron Saint: the gospel that in so many respects is different from the other three. Here, as with other miracles (or ‘signs’ as the author prefers to call them), in St John’s gospel we get fewer of them, and they are carefully debated, either afterwards, as with the healing of the man born blind, two chapters previously (John 9), or beforehand, as with the raising of Lazarus. Under the surface, it is about four friends, Martha, Mary and Lazarus who are brother and sisters, and who live in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem – and Jesus. He was to visit the sisters (as we have been told John 11:2), when Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume (Jn 12: 1-8). There is a similar episode in Luke (10:38-42), where Mary sits and listens to Jesus teaching, while Martha is rushing around doing the house-work. In the opening part of this chapter, Lazarus is only ill, and Martha wants him to come and heal him. Jesus delays for a couple of days, but eventually decides to go.
When he arrives, he discovers that Lazarus is already dead. There follows a searching dialogue between Jesus and Martha, who scolds Jesus for not having come sooner. Jesus, however, puts the spot-light not on Lazarus, who is in the family tomb, but on Martha’s faith. The main drama at this stage is coaxing Martha into a more profound faith, as she now encounters the full force of Jesus, not as a friend, nor even as a teacher or a healer, but as someone who has the power to raise from the dead: ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11:25). He has already said, ‘I am the bread of life’ (John 6:35); ‘I am the light of the world’ (John 8-12), and ‘I am the good shepherd’ (John 10:11). But this is much more. Having got thus far with Martha, Jesus now shows the full extent of his humanity by weeping (John 11:35), knowing Lazarus to be dead, and seeing the palpable grief of his two sisters. Then he shows the full extent of being the Son of God, by raising Lazarus from his tomb, with those crashing words ‘Unbind him and let him go’ (John 11:45).
We know very little about Lazarus, which is a shortened form of a common Jewish name, Eleazar. He is a sort of anonymous person, with the same name given as in the story told by Jesus in Luke’s gospel about the rich man and the very poor man, Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). But here he is, an anonymous friend of Jesus. He is not raised from the dead in order to show some impact, to hit the local headlines – news bulletins and all. He is raised in order to enliven faith because we stand in the position of Martha. We are the ones who are impatient for Jesus to come and solve our own little problems – in her case, a brother who was at first sick, and then dead, and apparently beyond hope. We are the ones who will, if we are honest, project onto Jesus, or the Church, the Bishop or the Vicar, or some political figure, our own frustrations about the understandably difficult aspects of life today. ‘Why can’t “they” do this/that/or the other?’ And the ‘they’ is always someone or something else, for which we appear to have no responsibility whatever.
We are Martha – and Lazarus is whatever we want raised. (Not salaries, sorry! There is no pay in the Kingdom of God – only the reward of having believed in spite of all the forces to the contrary.) KAIROS encourages us to think the unthinkable: that is what we are asked to do. It is always good for the Church to be up against it, because that is when God reveals new inner strengths. But we have first to go through that purging process which Martha experienced, of confrontation and searching dialogue: her rebuke to Jesus for being late takes her through various stages, to the point where instead she says, ‘I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’ (John 11:27).
This great confession of faith has a dynamic quality – Jesus is ‘coming into the world’ (Jn1:9). In John’s gospel, there is often a sense that God’s work in Jesus in ongoing, as the Spirit leads us into new truth, day by day. Therefore, the kind of faith Jesus calls forth is a faith that is open to new possibilities. We do not know exactly when and where Jesus will come to challenge, heal or raise us. But we believe and trust that whatever happens, he has a non-trivial message - the words of eternal life.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
