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“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
There are moments in our Holy Book when someone just tells the truth, hard and hurtful as it may be. Nathan confronts David, who had committed adultery and murder, and Nathan—whose name means “he gave,” or “gift”—Nathan gives the gift of harsh honesty directly to his king: “You are the man,” You are the one who did these things. Jesus confronts Peter after the resurrection and does not gloss over Peter’s betrayal. The two friends have a hard talk.
But what can compare to this rebuke: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”? Imagine: you arrive to find your friends gathered together, staggering together under the crushing weight of grief, and (worst of all) united together in the awareness that you, you did something, or you left something undone, and now there is a body count.
Is there a more human complaint than this? It strikes a bell deep within the human spirit, the truth of this complaint, the raw yet solemn power of it, and the human choice to place this complaint firmly at God’s doorstep. Even if God is making something new, even if Jesus is even now about to do something glorious, it seems that almost all of us want to say this, at least once in our lives: If you had been here, none of this would have happened.
Lord, if you had been here, thousands would not have died in this pandemic.
Lord, if you had been here, we would not have lost everything we know and love.
Lord, if you had been here. If you had been here. If you had been here.
But you weren’t here.
The raising of Lazarus is one of the optional readings for funerals, and that has always struck me as an odd, but also brave choice. It is odd: nobody expects our beloved dead to rise up from their coffins during a funeral, and so it is clear, it is obvious, that we cannot read this as a literal story. So this means we are expecting funeral-goers to be a little far along in biblical interpretation. We (rightly, I think!) want people to use their imaginations, to wonder about the faith, to reflect on symbols and metaphors, to wrestle with God a little bit. When my mother died, her body stayed in her coffin all the way to the end of the funeral. It is still there even now, nearly a quarter century later. So the Lazarus story, whatever it might mean, is obviously not a description of what God literally will do at our own graves, any more than the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel is a newspaper article about an historical event. So, it is an odd choice for a funeral, this text.
But the raising of Lazarus is a brave choice, too, for a funeral reading, or even just as our Good News today. This bizarre story pushes us to really, really reflect on our faith, and it introduces us to two brave women confronting Jesus. And then the story confronts us with Jesus responding to these brave women with powerful emotion. He weeps, yes. He is moved perhaps to pity, and sympathy. We can imagine that he was pastoral with his friends, gentle, sweet yet also strong, the ultimate hospital chaplain. But that’s not all that’s going on in Jesus, here in this little suburb of Jerusalem, surrounded by human grief.
Jesus is “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” we hear today. Another English translation has Jesus deeply “troubled,” but no English word fully satisfies the demands of the Greek word here, which is ἐτάραξεν, etaraxen. It means Jesus was moved perhaps in a sorrowful way, but it also may imply that he was angry. Anger, we know, is one of the deeply human responses to death, particularly untimely death.
But why was Jesus angry as well as sad? His anger could have been sparked by more than one thing. Maybe he was angry at Mary and the others for their lack of faith. Or maybe, one biblical scholar suggests, maybe he was angry at “the prince of death,”* who of course has lost the battle with Jesus even before it begins, but nevertheless has torn this community into pieces with grief and sorrow. Jesus weeps, and this rightly moves us in turn: it isn’t just process theologians who want to see deep human emotion appearing on the face of God. Do you care, God? Do you? Because if you care, then where were you? If you had been here, he would not have died! Seeing Jesus respond to all this with a mixture of sorrow and anger strikes a chord in us: it feels right.
And then, when Lazarus finally comes out of his tomb, we see that he is still wearing his burial wrappings. We are meant to notice that this key detail makes the raising of Lazarus different from the resurrection of Jesus: Jesus emerges from the tomb without his burial linens, which stay in that dark cave of death, folded up, no longer needed by the risen Lord. But Lazarus will die again: he keeps his burial linens, because he will need them for his second death. So we see that this is not just a simple and joyous story of a brother being raised back to life and returning with stunned relief to his family. The story is strange, and vaguely sad, throughout, and even our Lord has complicated feelings about what he sees. He is upset and “troubled” even as he brings life from death. “I AM the Resurrection and the Life,” he says to Martha, correcting her assumption that life will emerge from death only at the end of all things. No. It emerges now. Here and now. There is resurrection and life now.
But…what about those troublesome burial linens? Even in the face of resurrection and life, these linens continue to cling to Lazarus. Jesus tells bystanders to help Lazarus out of them, but the bands of cloth nonetheless follow Lazarus all the way out of the tomb. There is no simple happy ending here. Some people ruefully say that Lazarus is a man most cursed: for he has to die twice. His raising up by Jesus also proves to be the last straw for Jesus’s opponents, who are deeply upset by this event and redouble their efforts to stop Jesus, and to kill him. Even before all this happens, the disciples correctly see that returning to Judea is a dangerous idea.
The skies above all these events are troubled, dark and foreboding with threatening storm clouds. All is not well.
But “I AM the Resurrection and the Life” — that is not just a statement, it is a title — I AM the Resurrection and the Life is here with us, in all the dreadful storms of life. He brings life from death right here, right now. He joins us in our sorrow and our outrage over the works of Sin and Death, the terrible destruction that they cause on the face of the earth. He is our comforter, yes, but he also is our guide, our lifegiver, our savior.
Jesus knows that the burial linens of Lazarus cling to us, too. When we are in church together, in one room, we see these burial linens in the form of white robes worn by our lay and clergy leaders. These are the white garments of baptism, garments rightly worn by all the baptized, not just the few who stand up front from time to time. Baptism is always about life in the midst of death, a watery rescue and a drowning, the rainbow and the flood, our life together and our death with Christ as his Body.
It is this dual identity, this life-death reality, that marks us as Christ’s own forever. We stand courageously, then, at the graves of our friends, at the bedsides of those who are sick, or (these days) simply on a zoom call allowing our anxious friends to see our little rectangular images, so that they can know that we are here for them, for each other. We raise our kids and check in on our aging parents in a time of upheaval and sickness and death; we read the news and fill out our census forms and vote in a time of massive unemployment and economic freefall; we plan for safety and security in a time when there seems to be neither. We pray. We breathe. Like Martha, we let God hear our anger, our grief, our exasperation. And God in Jesus can take it, God can hear it, God can even share in our frustration and outrage about all the hard things that are happening.
In all of this, in all we do, in our prayers, in our breathing, in our concern one for another—in all of this, we recognize the Resurrection and the Life, right here, right now, looking to us in the graves we dig for ourselves, and the graves that are dug for us, and crying out to us, “Come out of there! Come out!” We come out into a world of life and death, and we know, like Martha we know, that I AM the Resurrection and the Life will be with us always, until that day when there are no more burial linens and we are all gathered around the table of the Living One.
***
*Raymond Brown, The Gospels and Epistles of John: A Concise Commentary (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1988), 64.
Preached on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year A, in online worship at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Burke, Virginia, March 29, 2020.
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45