On Lent 5, we
hear about Lazarus.
His story
falls on Lent 5 because in John’s Gospel,
this is the tipping point.
Raising
Lazarus pushed Jesus’ opposition
over the edge into a murderous plot.
This is the
point at which they realized
what a revolutionary change Jesus
was ushering
into the world.
What do you
suppose life was like for Lazarus
before he fell ill?
Scripture
doesn’t say.
So it
probably wasn’t remarkable.
It was
probably typical – an ordinary life.
I asked a
friend this week, “How are you?”
He answered
honestly. He said “Mixed.”
His life was
somewhat afflicted but generally ok.
That’s how
life usually is.
That’s how
Lazarus’ life was.
Then he got
seriously sick and life was a lot worse.
So his
sisters sent word to Jesus.
They wanted
him to come and heal their brother.
They wanted
him to restore Lazarus from illness back to his mixed life.
Sigmund
Freud said the goal of psychoanalysis is to cure mental illness
so the patient can resume a life of
“ordinary misery.”
Mary and
Martha wanted Jesus to restore the balance,
to put Lazarus back the way he was.
That is what
a lot of our religion is for.
We have
gotten used to life as it is,
settled into our ordinary misery,
and when that balance is threatened
we want Jesus to set things back the
way they were.
We don’t
harbor much hope that things can be dramatically better
than they have always been.
We are a bit
like the righteous pagans
in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dante had
the greatest respect for the virtues
of great pagans who lived before the
time of Jesus.
They were
good. They were even noble,
but in the Divine Comedy, Dante
consigned their souls to limbo
– neither the punishments of hell
nor the joys of paradise.
The
righteous pagans had lived and died without any concept of heaven,
no idea that union with God is
possible,
no hope to see the beauty of the
divine and be lost
in wonder, love, and
praise.
So Dante
relegated them to limbo, the mixed state,
because they failed to imagine
anything better.
I don’t know
where righteous pagans go when they die
and neither did Dante
but he was making this spiritual
point:
It is very
hard to achieve what we cannot first imagine.
If we cannot imagine that life might be
utterly new,
if the best we hope for is the way
things were,
then we erect a barrier to what
Jesus wants to give us.
So Mary and
Martha called Jesus to come quick
and set things back the way they
were.
But he
didn’t do it.
He waited
for two days until Lazarus had died
and all hope to put things back the
way they were
was gone.
That’s when
Jesus arrived with something better.
He replaced
Lazarus’s ordinary life with a miracle.
What
happened to Lazarus after that?
We don’t
know for sure.
His name is
not said again.
But there
may be an answer – at least a theory.
No one knows
who wrote the 4th Gospel.
Tradition
gave it the name of John,
but it pretty clearly wasn’t John
the Son of Zebedee
and brother of James.
We don’t
know who wrote the 4th Gospel,
but there is a respectable group of
scholars
who think it was Lazarus.
It may be
that the mystical Gospel,
the loftiest poetry and the truest
knowledge of Christ,
came from this man who had seen the
other side.
We don’t
know that.
But I cannot
imagine that Lazarus resumed his ordinary life.
From that
day forth, he knew the life giving power of Jesus
-- not as an idea, but an
experience; not a theory, but a fact.
Lazarus knew
what Paul meant when he said,
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new
creation.
The old has gone. The new has come.”
But is that
what we want?
The
self-help books and the psycho-pundits on the talk shows
all have techniques to tinker a
little with our lives
-- countless ways to make a little
adjustment here
or there so we might,
with luck and hard work,
make ourselves 3%
happier --
but without changing anything too much.
On any given
day, 3% happier may be
about as much as we think like we
can stand.
So we pray
for that, and many a time
that’s what Jesus does for us.
“I’ll have a
Grande grace, Pike Place, not bold,
with
room for cream.”
But
sometimes Jesus may have a venti grace in mind
and our cup won’t hold it.
We need a
different cup.
Jesus wants
better for us than we want for ourselves.
Jesus wants
better for us than we can imagine,
but it’s natural for us to be afraid
of it.
Room has to
be made to hold so much grace.
The ordinary
things that make is feel safe,
the things that give us our hints of
well-being,
have to fall away to
make room
“for the glory which is yet to be
revealed.”
Holy Week is
the story of that falling away.
It is a
story of death – like the death of Lazarus
– the kind of death that opens the way to new
life
– not to old life refurbished,
buffed and refinished
– but utterly new life –
a new creation.
This makes a
difference for how we understand
what happens in our life all the
time.
It changes
how we understand what is happening
when the ordinary things that make
is feel safe,
the things that give us our sense of
well-being,
fall away.
And that is
all the time.
As Joni
Mitchell so wisely said,
“Something’s lost and something’s
gained
in living every day.”
When life is
falling apart,
in big ways or in little ways,
how do we understand it?
It’s hard to
lose the things that make us happy
-- jobs, homes, people, relationships.
Even though
he knew about resurrection,
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus
because the Lazarus who
came out of the tomb
would not be the same
man who went into it.
Even Jesus
missed the old Lazarus.
So
naturally, when we lose what we love, we grieve.
But we do
not suffer without hope.
Peter says,
“After you have suffered for a
little while.,
the God of all grace who has called you
to his eternal glory in
Christ
will himself restore
you, support, and strengthen
and establish you.”
Paul says,
“. . . (T)he sufferings of this
present time are not worth
comparing to the glory about to be revealed .
. . .”
There is a
Zen adage that goes,
“The barn has burned.
Now I can see the moon.”
That’s a new
meaning for a barn burning.
When the
barn is burning in our lives,
we do our best to put out the fire.
But when the
barn has burned, we look for the moon.
When Lazarus
has died, we look for the resurrection.
When we lose
the things that make us happy,
we look for the glory of Christ to make us ecstatic.
