March 6, 2008
Treat
Lent 5A Jn 11.1-53
“I am the resurrection and the life” (Jn 11.25).
When Jesus heard that his good friend Lazarus had died, he treated us to the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” It was also, of course, the answer to one of the oldest of the trite trivia questions.
But on this same occasion, Jesus also treated us to the knowledge that in one way, at least, he’s not all that different from us. It’s called grief. It’s universal. It’s rock-bottom human stuff. His friend died. It broke his heart. We’ve been there and done that.
And there’s even more. In this gospel story of John’s that surrounds this short verse, this mutual, affirming identity, there’s enough distancing mystery to last a lifetime, and there’s nothing if at all trivial about it. Jesus not only weeps when he is saddened, but in short order, he overcomes it. And he doesn’t resort to Ms Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-step grief recovery process, as grand and nourishing as that is.
He just raises his friend from the dead. And in doing so, he also treats us to the knowledge that in another way, at least, he’s so radically different from us as to make us give up altogether. And then, as if all this is not enough, he adds a by-the-way — “I am the resurrection and the life.”
And we Christians can take that reality to the bank along with the grief.
I find it well at times like this to remember that our faith is a corporate faith. We affirm a first-person plural creed every time we get together. The God in whom we profess belief is present in the entire gamut of our experiences as well as in the experiences of others with whom we share and from whom we learn. This corporate faith is sustained, informed, and inspired by Holy Spirit, by God’s very special agent and presence of community. The God I don’t believe in, the God I do believe in, the God filtered through my experience and yours would unlikely be identical to or maybe even analogous to the God affirmed by the community. Yet this God is the same God as Jesus’s God who, when asked, turns Lazarus out of the tomb and unwraps him to start his new life and give this traumatic story a more or less happy ending.
It seems important to me to remember that when Jesus weeps on this occasion, it may not be so much out of his love for Lazarus, as the Jews presume, but out of his possible sorrow for their indifference to the life that is present in their midst. His life. Himself.
“I am the resurrection and the life,” he says. So it is with life, the Life that is Jesus, the Life that Jesus is. This life, as John Evangelist understands it, is eternal life. Whatever else that means, it is never satisfactorily defined quantitatively. It is not a matter of time on end. For it is quality time, not just chronology, calendar time, but special event, turgid-with-meaning kairos fat time. And it is not just one-way time. It is two-way time, give and receive, blesséd time.
For it is time that consists not only of receiving God’s love and justice as it is present in Jesus then and there. It also consists in accepting our own role as missioners of love and justice in the world for Jesus in the here and now. And here’s the knockout punch — we, too, are resurrection and life as those through whom Jesus confronts and engages this world of neighbors with whom we are made whole and share his redemptive grace.
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