Jesus said: I am the resurrection and the life
9 March 2008
The last miracle, the last sign, had to be that of raising a man from the dead. St John announces at the very beginning of his Gospel that the Word is life, and that life is the light of men. Jesus, the Word Incarnate, the Word made Flesh, tells his disciples that whoever hears his word and believes in him will have eternal life. He says it with clarity, he says it with precision: no one can say that they had not been told: Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and is now, when the dead will hear the voice of the son of God and those who hear will live…The hour is coming when all who are in the tomb will hear his voice and come forth.
There has already been one illustration of the gift and power of the Christ to bring life in the face of death. He has said to a father, mad with grief that his child is sick and at the threshold of death, Go, your son will live: and it is at the very moment that these words are spoken by Our Lord Jesus Christ, we learn, that the official’s son begins to recover. Now that sign, the sign of the restoration of health to the dying, will be surpassed and fulfilled in the raising of Lazarus from the dead.
Dead he certainly is: four days dead, with a stench to prove it; or, as Martha says – Lord, he stinks. It can be no other way. Jesus says to his disciples, Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, and I go to wake him out of sleep. The evangelist uses the disciples’ lack of understanding to make sure that we do understand. They think that Lazarus is only resting, or lying in the fitful wakefulness of the fever and delirium, and so Jesus tells them plainly – and we listen in – Lazarus is dead. This is the last time, until Easter Day, that St John speaks of the disciples as a group, and we leave them mired in one misunderstanding after another. Does Thomas mean that they will go to Bethany to die with Lazarus, or with Jesus? In either case, he is mistaken, for Lazarus will live again, and Thomas cannot yet die with Jesus: it is Jesus who must die for his disciples.
When does Lazarus die? It must be in between the time that Jesus hears the news of his illness, and the time, two days later, that he finally arrives in Bethany at the house of Mary and Martha. Why does Our Lord do this? Why does he wait? It cannot be for any hardness of heart, any want of compassion, any failure in humanity. Far from it. St John’s account of the whole story of Lazarus contains the most poignant examples in all of Scripture of the full humanity of Jesus: he weeps, moved by grief at the death of his friend, and by pity for his sisters, and moved too, perhaps, by the frailty of mortal man and the inevitability of death. No, he delays so that he can use the death of Lazarus to elicit a response of faith: faith in Himself as the one who is the resurrection and the life. It is when Jesus invites Martha to move beyond her general profession of faith in the general resurrection on the last day, to a confession of faith that Jesus is the resurrection, that Lazarus is restored to life. Some writers on this text have suggested that the reason why Our Lord says, emphatically, Lazarus, come out, is that, had he not so limited the power of his command to one person and one person only, all the tombs would have been opened, and all the dead would have been raised. Instead, the power of death is broken over just this one individual, this one corpse is raised.
Lazarus is revived, not resurrected, and he will die again. We may question what manner of gift it is that Jesus gives him. Lazarus – we can presume with some degree of confidence – is a young man, in the prime of life, who has been afflicted with a violent and sudden illness; this is not an instance of that which is all too common in our world with its confused and frightened attitudes to dying and death, the resuscitation of a person of great age who has reached a natural point of departure from this world to the next. Nevertheless, we might well agree that Lazarus did not meet his return to this world, with the certainty of having to undergo death a second time, with unambiguous gratitude and joy. All that the Scriptures tell us is that the Jews plotted not only to kill Jesus as a result of his raising of Lazarus, but that they sought also to kill Lazarus himself. The reason is the same in each case: they understand that this is the sign that will bring others to faith in Jesus; and they understand too that in Jesus, God and the reality of God has come into the world, doing away with their system, their religion, and their power. Types and shadows have their ending.
Lazarus is resuscitated or revived; Jesus will be resurrected. But the raising of Lazarus does point to the raising of Jesus, and St John makes sure that we understand this in the manner that he describes the two things, both in terms of their similarities and their differences. He leaves a clue at Lazarus’ tomb: and the clue is the napkin, or, as our translation has it, the cloth. Lazarus is bound hand and foot with bandages – like any corpse – when the stone which closes his tomb is rolled away, and others have to untie them to set him free. But when the Beloved Disciple and St Peter come to Our Lord’s tomb on Easter morning, to find the stone already taken away, they find the linen cloths – the napkin, the Greek word is the same – folded up and laid in a place by itself. The risen Jesus has required no others to unbind him – in the power of his resurrection life, in the power of the divine life which he now enjoys in all its freedom and fullness, he has passed through the bandages – and passed through the great stone at the door of the tomb – of his own accord.
So much, then, for Lazarus. What of us? Each of the great encounters between Jesus and some other person or persons as St John presents them is designed to elicit some further understanding, some deepening of faith, on the part of those who hear and read his Gospel. With the woman of Samaria, we have been invited to see in Jesus the living water, the one who can quench the thirst of our immortal soul for the knowledge of truth and the experience of love. With the man born blind, we have been invited to re-examine what it means to see and not to see, and to find in Jesus that light which alone can guide us to a true apprehension of our creator and a true understanding of ourselves. With Martha and Mary, we are invited today to contemplate the only true source of life: not the multiple pseudo-realities with which the world tempts, beguiles and seduces us: not money or possessions or celebrity or being thin or having fashionable opinions or staying young or having our bodies sculpted by plastic surgeons to fool us into thinking we are staying young – in my experience nobody else is fooled – or even being cryogenically frozen so that we can be thawed out into the utopia which is always just around the corner - but only Our Lord Jesus Christ. Living water; light; life: to this great Johannine trinity we can add the experiences of learning discipleship – like Jesus in the wilderness – and seeing glory – like the disciples on the mountain of the Transfiguration – and we have the whole of our Lenten pilgrimage, which, on this Passion Sunday, enters its last and decisive phase, and which, in its entirety, serves to prepare us for the celebration of the Easter mysteries and the renewal of those baptismal vows which mark our passage from death to life in Christ.
Since I have been Principal of this House, and preached from this place, I have – I think – been disciplined about not starting my sermons with that dreadful phrase, “when I was in the parish…” and which is usually followed by an anecdote about the organist’s mistress or the verger’s cat. But I am going to break my rule today to tell you about the death of one of my former parishioners. Joe was West Indian, a Barbadian – or bajan – and like many bajan’s of that generation, he had arrived on the SS Empire Windrush, the first ship to bring immigrants from the Caribbean to England in 1948. Dapper, courteous, and always immaculately turned out for church, Joe drove buses around Reading and always wore a black tie to the Good Friday liturgy, for he was attending his master’s funeral. Faith shone from his every pore. He was sixty, or thereabouts, when cancer was first diagnosed – cancer which spread rapidly to his liver. Death came swiftly. Mercifully, Joe died in his own home and his own bed, with his wife, sons, daughters and every branch of his vast extended family represented. I was there, very nearly at the end. As Joe lay dying, he repeated, over and over again, one simple phrase – ‘raise me up.’ Perhaps he was asking no more than to be hoisted a little higher on his pillows, but I doubt it; I think the position of the crucifix on the wall opposite his bed, on which he kept his eyes firmly fixed, gave the game away. Joe was asking his Lord to share with him the gift, not of a return to mortal life, like Lazarus, but of the resurrection life, God’s life which we share, and which nothing can extinguish
Joe was at the point of death, claiming Our Lord’s promise for his own. But we do not have to wait until we are in extremis to find eternal life. In Christ – and this is the heart of St John’s Gospel – we begin to share in it now, if only we will believe in him; and if only we will come out from all the false, limited and dangerous understandings of life – which bring death, not life – behind which we shelter. We may use Passiontide, and Easter, to pray for grace to leave them behind.Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. Amen.
The Principal