5th Sunday of Lent: Cycle C 21-22

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 that 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.

This set of readings is the end of the five most important gospels, I think, that we have in order to ponder and understand who we are in this life with God.  We saw Jesus work out his humanity in that first Sunday, and then there was the revelation that God in a human being becomes light, and a person filled with God is enlightened and brings light into others.  And then there was a beautiful image of forgiveness in the woman at the well where her sins didn’t limit in any way, shape or form God pouring his life into her like life-giving water.  And then there was the man born blind, and it’s about the presence of God in our lives where this inner life becomes a beacon for other people and opens our own eyes to see exactly who we are and why we’re here.  And then the whole notion comes together of all these images.  It comes together in this one image of this miracle, incredible miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  

So it’s all about us understanding the indwelling presence of God.  What’s it for?  What does it do?  It brings life, but the greatest of all mysteries that God wants us to ponder and finally surrender to is the life that we’re promised only comes after death.  Life he promises only comes after death.  And what does that mean?  Well, somehow the things in life that cause death, let’s call it sin, lies, pain, suffering that comes to us, those kind of things that are really frightening to the human spirit, and we tend to blame God for them.  And we say, “Why are these things happening to us?”  What we’re not understanding fully yet, until we embrace this fullness of who Jesus is, the best clue we have to who we are, that we have a journey, a way, a process to go through, which is surrendering our way of seeing, our way of knowing the life, of knowing life, of all the illusions, let go of all the lies.  If we do that, we can enter into life, and one of the biggest lies that we can get caught up in is somehow misunderstanding the role of God in our life.  What’s he here for?  Most of us say, “Well, he’s a lover.  He’s a God who’s come to save me.  He’s going to bring me into life.”  So that means that then, when things are difficult for us and we struggle with them, where do we turn?  We turn to God.  “God, help me please.  This is killing me.  This is destroying me.  This thing happened to me or may happen to me, and I need your protection.  I need your care.  I need your power in me over the evil that is in the world so I’ll be immune from being harmed by it.  I won’t be harmed.”  And Jesus listens to that plea, and as a lover, human, fully-human lover and also a divine lover together, because God gave into this man Jesus such compassion and understanding for people.  He has to teach us this lesson that’s in this gospel so powerfully presented.  

He has a friend, Lazarus, and he is going to die.  And so typically, just like you might call to God, if someone you know and you love is dying, “Help them please, God.  Don’t let them die.  Heal them of whatever it is that’s killing them.”  If it’s not a disease, if it’s a problem of some kind of harm that was done to them that robs them of life, whatever it is, “God, take it away.  Take it away.”  And so they sent word to Jesus and hoped he would come to heal Lazarus so he wouldn’t die — he wouldn’t die.  And we begin to feel something in this story that, “wait a minute.”  If Jesus is saying, “No, I’m not going to go.  I’m going to stay here and wait, because this death that Lazarus is going to go through is not simply about him dying.  It’s about something I need to reveal to everyone, and it’s one of the hardest things that I can have —” It’s one of the most difficult things I think Jesus must have felt that he had to do when he had to teach people that, in order to find the life that God promises you, God is going to ask you to die to something.  And it’s going to feel like a real death.  And so the story is unfolding, and you see that he gets to Martha and Mary, and the two of them say the same thing when they greet him finally.  They say, “If you’d have been here, my brother would never have died.”  And I don't know if I can capture what I feel is in that statement, but it’s something that I’ve said a million times to myself.  I’ve heard people say it to me.  “If God is who God is, if God is the God that’s going to take care of me, my baby is not going to die.  He will not let that happen.  How can he let something like that happen if he’s the loving God.”  Or the stories I’ve heard of people who’ve been abused and hurt and harmed by situations in their life where they’ve been treated so badly and scars are so deep, and they ask me, “Why did God allow this to happen to me when I was a child, when I was innocent.”  And the answer that comes is not very comforting initially.  It’s because — the answer is going to be because that is what had to happen in order for life to enter into you.  That had to happen in order for life to enter into you. 

And so Lazarus had to die in this situation, and when that death was experienced by everyone around him, there was a longing inside of so many there that said, “Where was this guy?  He healed the blind man.  Why is he not here doing the same thing for his best friend, Lazarus?  What’s wrong with this Messiah figure that we’re supposed to believe in, this loving figure?  He doesn’t seem to really care about us enough.”  And just as they’re thinking he doesn’t care, there’s this manifestation in this story of Jesus looking at all of this, and he’s deeply, deeply troubled, and he starts to cry.  Now, what is that?  What is troubled inside of him?  The word perturbed is a very interesting word.  I had to look it up in my Oxford English Dictionary, and it means not just being confused or upset but having some kind of major crisis inside of two conflicting ideas.  It’s disturbing, like an earthquake going on.  It was like — could have been this is Jesus’ humanity wanting so badly to be the person that these people needed him to be, wanted him to be, but he couldn’t be, because he was there not to reveal what a human being might want to do but what only a divine God can do in terms of seeing the future and knowing everything and knowing why does this have to happen in this way.  And no human being knows the mysterious way in which death and surrender and submission transforms not only the person but the world, which is the great mystery of suffering.  So he’s weeping and crying and feeling disturbed, and maybe he’s wondering about whether or not he was effective.  He looked at all these people.  They didn’t seem to really understand him.  His disciples, they still didn’t fully understand him.  He knew that.  He knew that, once this miracle was performed, he was going to go back to Jerusalem, and he was going to be humiliated.  And what was going to be the reaction?  Jesus knew in his gut probably that they didn’t yet fully understand who he was, and they wouldn’t understand the crucifixion until Pentecost. 

I want you to feel that human emotion inside of him.  “I’d like to fix it, but I want you to see this.  I want you to understand this, and it’s hard, and I know it’s hard.”  And so he prays out loud to his Father, which is unusual for a miracle.  He says, “Father, Father, I want you to help me do this.  I want you to help me convince these people of what this is about, and I know you’ll do that.”  And so it was almost like Jesus, the man, saying, “I’m going to turn this over to God.  I’m going to make everybody here, make them realize that I am not doing this as a human being.  I’m turning it over to God, and God is going to do this miraculous thing of turning this death of this man into something so life-giving that the only way I can show it to you and describe it to you is the very death that we’re here to mourn and to weep — think of that as a symbol of all the things that we think will destroy us — comes back to life.  He isn’t dead.  He didn’t die.  It’s like if you’ll accept the things that feel like a death inside of you and surrender to them and allow God to do what he’s doing through a death that he promises will bring life, when you can do that, you are going to experience the life on the other side of surrendering to that need that you have for a nice clear explanation of where was God when I was so deeply harmed or why would God let this happen to someone that I love so much or why would he allow me, a parent, a young parent, go through a disease where I’m ripped away from my family.  How can you ask me to do that and believe that somehow it is for life?  

Well, the witness of this moment in Christ’s life, or all of us, meaning watching it, how we watch it, has got to be to see in it the mystery that is so essential to living with the indwelling presence of God, because it’s not going to free you of everything that’s harmful or painful or confusing.  But what an incredible promise he does make, that everything that is confusing, dark, hard, difficult has within it the potential of life.  That is manifested in this miracle, but then it becomes explosive when we see Jesus on the cross with his hands outstretched horizontally, his body vertical.  We see in this crucifixion, this divinity zooming down into this heart of God.  This divinity enters, and it connects with his humanity.  And the human being filled with divinity has his arms outstretched to the world, and he’s just been treated so miserably by the world and by life.  And he’s hanging there saying, “Father, I don’t want this to happen.  Why have you forsaken me?  But I know it will bring life.  I know it will.  So forgive humanity for its doubts and fears.  Let them feel what I feel, life flowing through me so strong that I will rise and change the world.”  

Father, in this season of Lent, we have opened our heart more fully to the mystery of who you are and the plan that you have created for each of us that brings us to the fullness of life.  Open our eyes.  Fill us with an understanding of the depth of your love and your forgiveness.  Let us fill this new life coursing through our veins as we face the things that are difficult, answer the questions that are unanswerable, in a sense, by our minds but can be accepted by our heart.  It is open to the mystery of how you are our God and the promises you’ve made to us.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.