Fifth Sunday of Lent

Ezekiel 37:12-14 | Romans 8:8-11 | John 11:1-45

By your help, we beseech you Lord our God, may we walk eagerly in the same charity with which, out of love for the world, your Son handed himself over to death.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

The essence of God is his longing, his desire to both create and then to bless and enrich and care for what he creates.  The interesting thing about our humanity is that we have a strong, strong drive inside of us to be connected to one another, to be in relationships.  We also have a deep desire to do some kind of work, to be engaged in something that’s creative, that gives us a sense of joy when we accomplish it, and there’s something also about human nature, is that it longs for a kind of — I don't know how to say it but a sense that all is well and all will be well.  We long for one another.  We long for effective accomplishments.  We long for peace, and the God who placed those longings in us is wise enough to know that he wants to be the one who enables us to accomplish them.  And so he left us with a kind of need for him, because his deepest desire is union, communion with his people.  He wants to be in our life, not just interested in it but dwelling in it.  

Those first two readings so clearly and powerfully describe the relationship that God has always wanted with his people.  “I want to enter into your life and bring you out of a place of darkness, a place of no life, a place of death.  I want to lift you out of the places you find yourself in where there’s no hope, no direction, no enthusiasm for anything.  I want to bring you into the fullness of life.”  And he knows that we need to understand, and he teaches us over and over again, that that goal of being alive is not something we can accomplish, nor should we think we’re supposed to accomplish on our own, but St. Paul’s letter to the Romans talks about what it is that God has promised so this thing called life can be something we experience.  It’s about the spirit of God.  The spirit of life, the spirit of light and truth dwells in us.  It’s like it’s not something we learn at one time and take it in and say, “Oh, now I’ve got that.”  No, it’s an ongoing, dynamic, intimate relationship that we’re made for, that we need to believe in and trust in to sustain us.  It’s not something we get sort of a — I don't know — instruction manual.  We study it, and then everything works.  No, it’s nothing like that.  It’s so much more mysterious. 

When we look at these Sundays of Lent, it’s so clear what they’re trying to focus on: the key message of Christ, the key essence of what it means to be human and a deep understanding of who God really is.  Those first two Sundays of Lent describe, first, the humanity of Jesus.  He’s like us, gets tempted like us, has weaknesses like ours, and then we see in the next Sunday that he’s more than just a human with human weaknesses.  No, he’s a God filled with a mysterious, mystical power that can transform a human being from darkness to light, from death to life.  He resonates this force, this light, this life, and then we recognize so clearly that this is a gift that God longs to give to everyone.  It’s not deserved.  He describes it in many ways, but in that third Sunday, he reminded us that it’s like flowing water.  It’s like this thing that quenches a thirst that’s deep inside of us for meaning, purpose, for hope, and once we understand and drink of this indwelling, mysterious presence of divinity offered to each and every one of us, we begin to see what’s real.  And then we begin to live a life that is full, and this Jesus had the power to do that.  It’s so interesting that he always was trying to convince people, still trying to convince you and me that we should trust in this power.  It’s available.  It’s real, but our tendency always, like Adam and Eve, is to go back to self-centered autonomy.  “I’ll do it.  You teach me what life is like, and I will achieve it.”  We waste so much time trying to do that.  We don’t really surrender to the fact that there is no way we can accomplish what he’s promising unless we open ourselves to it as a gift, unmerited, unearned, just simply given.

So let’s look at the details of this wonderful story about — I think the miracle that climaxed everything that Jesus was trying to say — he hid most of his miracles from those who weren’t present at the time, because he was afraid and knew that the more he did miracles, two problems would crop up.  One, people would accompany him just for the miracle of healing.  The other was he’d get into deep trouble with those who were in conflict with his teaching.  It gave him authority that frightened the institutions that ran the temple, and so he knew doing miracles that were really spectacular were difficult for his ministry.  In other words, it put him in great jeopardy.  He could be killed.  He knew that, but the frustration of that truth and his inability to convince his disciples was such a tension that he must have really struggled with it.  And what we see in this story is that he comes to a point, I believe, in his life where he’s saying, “Look, I don’t care what it’s going to cost me.  I don’t care if I’m going to lose my life over this miracle, but I’ve got to convince my disciples, before I leave them, that I am who I say I am, and the power I have is awesome.”  It can do anything if you allow it to work within you, but most especially it can give you this thing called life, meaning, purpose, understanding that there’s something about me that’s important.  There’s something about my being here that’s effective, and I’m in it, and I feel good about it.  Things feel like they are the way they must be.  That’s the feeling life that only God, I believe, can give us through his miraculous, indwelling presence.  And so he took a chance, and of course it was kind of the reason his ministry ended so abruptly.  The healing of the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus was more than the church could handle, but the reason he took the risk was he wanted people to understand and believe.  It’s so interesting.  He realized that even the closest friends he had still didn’t believe in him.  He’s been with them for three years, and he said, “I can do anything.  You know that.  I can bring life to people.  I can bring sight to the blind, freedom to prisoners.  That’s my work.  That’s what God has empowered me to do, and I can do it.”  And they didn’t yet really believe it, because when he said to them clearly, “Look, Lazarus is dead.  I know that, and I know that I can bring him back to life, so trust me.  We’re going to go there and bring him back to life,” and all the disciples seemed to be worried about was, “Okay, let’s go, because it will probably mean the end of everything.  It’ll probably mean that we’re all going to die.”  That’s what Thomas predicted, the doubting Thomas.  “It’s all over, folks.”  But what happened when he did arrive and said, “I’m here.  Don’t you believe I can do what I can do,” when he saw them weeping and wailing and in fear, it perturbed him.  It made him sad.  He wept, and it was not over Lazarus, I don’t think, even though that’s the tradition.  Why would he weep over someone he knew he was going to do such an incredibly marvelous thing for?  Why would he feel sad when he was manifesting the greatest asset that he was there to bring to the world, life over death?  No, I think he was perturbed because of their lack of faith.  They didn’t yet believe.  It’s funny.  When those who did really finally see this, the words that the scriptures say was not that they believed, they believed, they believed.  No, it was they began to believe in him.  What a resistance we have to believing in who God really is and what he’s really doing and what he can do and what he longs to do for us.  That’s the challenge of this whole season of Lent, to get ready for the most awesome miracle when Jesus died and then came back and did his most incredible, marvelous work.  Death was destroyed.  Life was restored.  

Father, your gifts are so beyond our imagining, so wonderful in a sense, so longed for, in another sense, that it’s hard for us to grasp how generous you are and how awesome the gift is when we receive it.  Bless us with belief and faith.  Even though we can’t see or feel what’s truly happening, we know that within everything there is this plan that you bring us all to a place where we can see and be all that you want us to be.  And we ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.