Lent 5: This changes everything

This morning we have one of the most powerful sets of readings that takes place throughout the church year. From Ezekiel we hear about the dry bones - bones that, as St. Augustine remarks, are not just dry but without hope until God enfleshes them and puts his Spirit in them: “what has been scattered is gathered; what was lifeless is sanctified; what has perished rises again.” And we find this promise to enflesh and make alive in the Spirit fulfilled with Jesus’s raising Lazarus from the dead. Both of these readings have the meaning and the power that they do though, for one reason only: that they point to the one event that changes every single thing about reality: Jesus’s own resurrection that we will celebrate Easter day. 

Without Jesus’s resurrection, we might say that when he raises Lazarus, he simply performs an exceptional miracle that makes Lazarus return from the dead for another decade or a few. Yet of course Lazarus will still die. The blind man we heard about last week, miraculous as his new sight is, will also still die. So will every person whom Jesus heals of their conditions. So if Jesus simply performed some miracles, cured some people, raised dear Lazarus from the dead. Well, Mary and Martha and their friends would sure be pleased for another few decades, as would those of the people who were cured. But what about my grandpa who wasn’t cured of his lymphoma? What about the people who died in the various plagues that we’ve had every few centuries? What about your loved ones who have died of heart attacks, of cancer, of strokes? 

Jesus does something quite curious when Mary and Martha send messages to him that their brother, Lazarus, is ill. He actually delays going to see him. He stays where he is for another two days. When he finally goes to see Lazarus you can see he’s met with pretty typical responses even from his disciples: “you can’t go to Judea, the Jews were trying to stone you already.” He replies by essentially telling them that he will not stumble or fail in his mission for he is the very light, the all knowing, all seeing, all powerful God that knows and so acts not blindly, but with perfect timing, perfect coordination of events, to bring about his desired end: in this particular case, that Lazarus’s natural death would provide Jesus the opportunity to show others who he is: the one promised by God to raise up not simply Lazarus who has recently died and is still enfleshed, but the God who can raise up dry bones: those dead in their sins, asleep, as he puts it, for thousands of years, or hundreds, or just a few. My grandpa, your spouse, your friend, your child. 

Mary and Martha catch word that Jesus is on his way and are at first, just like the disciples after Jesus’s resurrection: they are stunned, confused, likely hurt and frightened: “if you had just come when we first called, he would not have died.” In their love for their brother, they display the exact same behaviour you and I do when we see and experience our own, or the suffering of those we love: were you there, Lord, they would not, I would not have pain. The truth of the matter - as you already know - is that all of us die, all of us, this side of the grave, experience the suffering that comes from living in a world that is not yet fully reconciled to God.

So we cry out, “Where are you O Lord, why them, O Lord, why me, why, where are you, why have you forsaken us Lord.” And Christ, seeing us in this pain and anguish with our lack of ability to see him now fully; he weeps for Lazarus. He weeps for my friends who took their own lives. He weeps, as any good man would do, for his brothers and sisters who must bear through the trials of this life where we look around us and so often see dry bones: people in pain, people taken from us by disease and war, violence, suicide, old age, by death itself. 

When the Holy Spirit whisks Jesus away to the desert and tempts him to change these things in a moment; to stop them; to come now and bring all of time to completion. Jesus says, “depart from me Satan, you are setting your mind on the ways of this world. You, your military forces, your institutions of power; these finite things to which you bind yourself, I will break down. 

I alone will gather my people’s dry bones: “I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD. And you shall know that I am the LORD when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live ….” I will do this not according to your time, but to my time so that I may bring as many as want life - not just this life, but life eternal - to me. So it is that the promise God makes to Ezekiel is fulfilled: I will come to each according to a time that makes sense from a God’s eye view, in order that others might be in a place in their lives to see, hear, and turn to me. This is not just about Lazarus or the particular people that we love or about us. It is about all our dry bones that will go down in the grave, down past the gates of hell that have been burst by the only one who could break them: the God man Jesus Christ. 

Our hope is not bound to miracles. Our hope is not lost in confusion, suffering or death. Our hope is in the one who has knit us to his flesh, to his Spirit, to his own body. For he will raise us, and all whom we love, on the last day of all time and all existence. This is not a mere miracle of temporary healing; but the perfection of our humanity itself. AMEN