In the face of death, even people of faith can feel helpless, bereft and alone. The great moral philosopher who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes tried to assuage our fears and calm our sorrows when he said, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven; a time to be born, and a time to die.” He went on to list a number of other things that find their place under heaven and in the scope of time, but few resonate more with us than the fact of birth and death. We can joke about death from a distance – as in nothing in life is as sure as death and taxes – but when death comes home to roost where we dwell, it is another thing altogether. And yet I have seen great beauty in a person dying and much consolation after death for those who remain behind. Much of that is due to what Jesus said and did for those who have come to follow him.
Now for any of us who have experienced death up close – and that would surely include all of us at some time – there are deaths that seem more – shall we say, reasonable – than others. Those deaths that follow a long, full life, for instance. Of course, there is always sadness in loss. The person who dies after several decades of a loving and productive life leaves a hole that collects our tears and grief. There is consolation in the reflection on a good, long life for sure, but there is sadness nevertheless. Often the death of an aged person carries with it the passing of an era, the last member of a generation. Such loss reverberates with the deep emotion evoked by the psalmists as in “Lord, you have been our dwelling place/in all generations./Before the mountains were brought forth,/or ever you had formed the earth and the world,/from everlasting to everlasting you are God. In God’s great repository of time we find our place, and we grieve when one who has lived a long time finds her or his place no more.
But there is sadness of another kind when death strikes “out of season.” When death comes violently or suddenly to someone whose days seem especially cut short. Someone who never had a chance to realize the potential we would have ascribed to him or her. It’s not only the good who die young, but when someone young dies – when there seems no appropriate “season” to accommodate the passing – the “sting” of death, as Paul calls it, is ever more sharply felt. Such a death, we can assume, was the death of Jesus’ friend Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha. Lazarus was one of Jesus’ best friends as John’s Gospel presents the story, and he appears to have been a relatively young man who succumbed to a serious but unidentified illness.
Jesus knew that Lazarus was ill; his sisters had summoned Jesus to the bedside. They were confident that Jesus could heal him, prevent his death. But in the story Jesus seems to treat the request offhandedly, as if he doesn’t really care if his friend dies or not. But then the narrator brings us in closer for a deeper understanding. We must remember how symbolic the Gospel of John is and how there are always layers of meaning to communicate more clearly, if not always simply. Jesus tells his disciples, in effect, that he did not hasten to Lazarus’ side so that he might bring his friend back to life after death, thus revealing the glory of God. John wants us to know that Jesus is the true Messiah and that in his flesh abides the Word of God incarnate.
But that doesn’t help the characters in the story. We are the ones who benefit from the narrator’s side comments; the characters in the story live their lives in their moment as we live in ours, not always understanding the greater truths that sustain us. Like God’s peace, the deeper meaning of the reality of death often passes our human understanding. Thus, Jesus comes to show the way.
In the story real human emotions arise. Mary and Martha are confounded, even angry. “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died,” Martha laments. How often have one of us muttered such regret when we feel that proper medical procedures or other kinds of care might have prevented death from happening. Now there’s no second chance. It’s all over.
In the face of such real human emotion, John tells us, Jesus wept. That seems a bit strange when he has already told his disciples he plans to bring Lazarus back to life. Why weep? One of the more plausible explanations – and biblical scholars have proposed any number of reasonable ones – might be that Jesus weeps over the stranglehold in which death holds us mortals. As inevitable as death is – no one to our knowledge who has ever lived has escaped it – we are often not ready for it or prepared to accept it as part of life. We live life as if we might avoid death and that those we love might be with us always. But is it not understandable that we cannot think otherwise in the face of the deep love we hold for one another and the sadness that grips us in anticipating the loss of the ones we love?
But it is precisely in these moments of thought and feeling that today’s story of the raising of Lazarus can speak to us about the mystery of life in God. The story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead is a culminating moment of much that Jesus has been about as teacher and healer in God’s name. He himself said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even thought they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Martha believed the commonly held tenet of her Jewish faith that maintained that on “the last day” everyone who had died would come back to life. That would be a sign that the Messiah had come. But Jesus says something else. What Jesus says is that the time of resurrection has already begun, that he is the Messiah, and that those who find life in him will never die. They have already died and risen to new life.
They will “die,” of course, as we often refer to people “passing” from this life. But when people pass they move from one place to another. In the case of life and death they cease to be present in one life – the life of the flesh – but they assume a new life, a life that continues in the spirit. For us who remain behind, of course, there is sadness and loss. How can that not be? But part of our consolation must also be that in the life of faith our beloved ones pass on to another life which has had its beginnings even with us, a life of eternity begun on earth and continued beyond into places and time not held by our seasons, but eternal in the heavens.
The promise of Jesus in the story of the raising of Lazarus is that true resurrection takes place in this present world – the world we already know – when we take upon ourselves the gift of faith with which God blesses us. Resurrection, then, begins before what we call death. That death is already a second death, if you will, for in being born to Christ we have already died to this world and all that binds us. Remember those wonderfully powerful words with which Jesus frees Lazarus: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
In the face of death, Jesus unbinds us and lets us go. In the face of death, Jesus opens us to new “life.” But what does he mean by life? Jesus never gives us what we might call a definitive definition, but we are helped by such words as he says later in John’s Gospel: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Such words declare that the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ carries with it the assurance of life eternal. But such life comes from more than “knowledge” of God; it comes from faith and trust that in God as we know God through Jesus Christ we find a life that is different in kind from what we know only in our days on earth. That beyond our days as mortal beings we will find a life that continues the best of what we have known but will be even more and of a nature we cannot know now.
I have seen the beauty of dying in the person of one who anticipates going home – or is it coming home? – to that faith-filled reality. And I have seen the consolation of those who mourn in their assurance that the ones they have loved are now held in a peace beyond their understanding, embraced in God’s eternal care. May that assurance be ours today as we remember all the saints who have graced our lives in the light of God in Jesus Christ. Amen.