Ezekiel 37:1 – 14 Psalm 130 Romans 8:6 – 11 John 11:1 - 45
We see the pictures of the devastation – earthquakes, tsunami, nuclear disaster! – in Japan and hear the cries, “Jesus, if you had been here, my loved one wouldn’t have died!”
Or watch the funeral of a young soldier, killed in Afghanistan.
“Jesus, if you had been here, my loved one wouldn’t have been killed!”
Or go home to an empty house, feeling simultaneously the silence and the memories of fifty years.
“Jesus, if you had been here, my loved one wouldn’t have died!”
How do we reconcile today’s Gospel lesson with the realities of our experience? If Jesus can raise Lazarus, what about fixing all these other things?!
The raising of Lazarus is small comfort in the midst of all the calamities of our world!
It might leave us wondering: where are you Jesus?!
It might leave us wondering: does God play favorites?
What does one have to do to get coinage with Jesus? To have him come to us and say, “Show me where you’ve laid him.” “Roll away the stone.” “Unbind him.”
The writer Annie Lamott reflects our own sentiments when she comments, “I don’t know why God won’t just spritz away our hardships and frustration!”
After all, we have expectations of God!
As Eugene Peterson wryly observes, most of us consider God not as a deity to be worshiped, but as a trusted and valuable assistant.” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, p. 124) “That was your job, Jesus!
These global catastrophes are not going to look very good on your performance review!”
Ours is a culture that assesses blame – a modern, more secular version of the sentiments we heard expressed in last Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus was asked: “Who sinned, this man or his father, that he was born blind?!”
We assert:
- it’s not my fault I burned myself with that coffee while I was driving – Starbucks shouldn’t serve it so hot!
- It’s not his fault he got in trouble at school – those other kids led him astray!
- How were we supposed to know that was a bad investment? No one told us!
I can imagine it now: Mary or Martha calling Jacoby and Myers to see about filing a lawsuit against Jesus for wrongful death: If only he had been there, Lazarus wouldn’t have died!
Our litigious culture and our tendency to want to attribute blame, I think, creates a lens which causes us to focus on the wrong part of this Gospel story: it’s Jesus’ fault! “If you had been here…” we hear, admonishment in Mary’s voice.
George Everett Ross, clergyman and author, observes that, after more than thirty years of ministry, he has come to recognize that “there are two kinds of faith. One says ‘if’ and the other says ‘though.’ One says: ‘If everything goes well, if my life is prosperous, if I’m happy, if no one I love dies, if I’m successful, then I will believe in God and say my prayers and go to church and give what I can afford.’ The other says ‘though’”: ‘though the cause of evil prosper, though I sweat in Gethsemane, though I must drink my cup at Calvary – nevertheless, precisely then, I will trust the Lord who made me…’”
How do we move from the “…if-faith…” to the “…though-faith…”?
Not “…if you had been there…” but “…though you were not there…”?
Perhaps we should step back from the text a bit, and remember instead, that John also tells us that “Jesus began to weep.”
Jesus began to weep.
Imagine!
This is a God who is not at far remove!
This is a God who is vulnerable!
This is a God who is so close to us that he feels pain!
- Maybe he’s weeping out of grief for his friend.
- Maybe he’s weeping because his compassion is so great that he feels the pain of Mary and Martha as they grieve their brother.
- Maybe he’s weeping because already he sees his own fate, and the shadow of the cross which awaits him.
But he’s weeping!
His friend has died – and Jesus cries.
Here is a God who loves us enough to weep with us!
Can we put ourselves there, alongside a Jesus who cries with us in our tragedy?
Might the knowledge of that love help us to respond differently to the news of the devastation in Japan? Or Afghanistan? Or our own lives, our own losses and griefs, fears and anxieties?
What does it tell us about Jesus, this man, this God, who loves us enough to weep with us?
Reinhold Niebuhr points out that most of us experience life as a struggle between love and chaos, and how it is through Jesus that we discover that love at the center of things guarantees victory in every apparent defeat.
Through Jesus we discover that love at the center of things guarantees victory in every apparent defeat.
Even death.
Even death.
Just as Jesus’ footsteps have taken him this morning to Bethany, for the raising of Lazarus, and will then take him on to Jerusalem and his death, we Christians are nearing the end of our Lenten journey.
It is a journey that challenges us to find the love at the center of apparent defeat.
It is a journey that challenges us to move from “…if-faith…” to “…though-faith…” moving as we do into the solemn days of Holy Week, and the despair of Good Friday where we will witness another death.
Will we find Jesus there?
Not just the Jesus of the story – but JESUS!
Jesus.
More importantly, where will we be? Will we be there?
Not as observers – but will we be THERE?
As participants?
“…though he be crucified…”?
Will we be weeping?
Because it is his love for us – and our love for him – that guarantees victory in every apparent defeat.
Even death.
Amen.
Rev. Caroline, I loved this sermon. Thank you so much.
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