Our Gospel today (John 11:1-45) illustrates how Jesus deals with our very human desire to avoid death. You can hear and see me give this Homily on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmChB3Wskds
First the disciples, then Martha, and then Mary, had all assumed that Jesus would want to prevent the death of his friend Lazarus. Both the women use the same phrase : “If you had been here my brother would not have died.” The words and actions of Jesus show us that he has a very different agenda, although he expresses it in rather puzzling ways. He talks of how easily one stumbles in the dark, implying that the disciples have once again got things wrong, but that if they follow him, who is not natural light but spiritual light, to the grave of Lazarus they will see things differently. As St Paul says in our 2nd Reading, (Romans 8:8-11) our interests are in the spiritual not the unspiritual. Later, we get one of the most famous passages in the Bible, often read at Funerals but also easily misunderstood : “I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
There are two important things to notice here. The first is fairly obvious, that when Jesus says those who believe in him “will never die,” he is not talking about physical death. All of us Christians are quite clear that believing in Jesus doesn’t stop us from dying. Indeed, one of the signs of a faithful Christian is their willingness to die if it is necessary. So, we get the great Martyrs actually rejoicing that they have the privilege of dying publicly for the Lord, and we have many many other Christians quietly accepting death as a falling asleep in the Lord. It does worry me how many people, including many Christians, are almost obsessed with staying alive, demanding that the Doctors do everything they can to prevent their death, or the death of a loved one, often leaving the poor Doctors feeling they have failed if their patient dies. As someone in my late 70’s, I have made it clear to my next of kin that I do not want to be kept artificially alive. Of course, aided by ordinary medical treatments, I may live into my 90’s, but not by people spending extraordinary amounts of money on artificial ways to keep me alive, whilst people in poorer countries die much younger because they do not have modern medical facilities. We must not make the mistake of those in our Gospel, who think that Lazarus should have been helped by Jesus to stay alive.
To accept, even welcome, death is a very hard thing for most of us to do. We may talk about taking up our cross and following Jesus, or like Thomas in today’s Gospel speak of being prepared to die with Jesus; but once faced with the possibility of death most of us become almost obsessive about staying alive, and even more obsessive of keeping our loved ones alive. I know someone whose elderly relation died peacefully in his late 80’s sitting in his favourite armchair. She couldn’t stop talking about what a tragedy this was. I wanted to tell her that we should rejoice that he died so easily and without pain. What we should dread, indeed what I dread, is not death but the process of dying.
The second thing to notice from the “I am the Resurrection” proclamation is that Jesus doesn’t promise to give what we call “eternal life” to those who believe in him. He doesn’t say “I give you life,” rather he says, I am life – “I am the Resurrection and the life.” ; so eternal life is union in and with Jesus, not something he gives us as if he were separate from us. We also need to remember that this life in Jesus is something we are drawn into, not just after we die, but now in the present. Indeed, in the great sixth Chapter of St John’s Gospel, Jesus says this twice. First “Anyone who believes in me has eternal life.” (v.47) and then, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” (v.54) Lazarus then is raised from the dead, not just to give him renewed physical life, for we know that he will be bound to die sometime in the future, but as a sign that God defeats death by drawing us into a different kind of life, which will be provided in and through Jesus’ death and resurrection - which is coming up soon after this Gospel passage. Indeed note, that when Jesus rises from the dead, he leaves his grave clothes behind in the tomb, whilst Lazarus comes out from the tomb still bound in his grave clothes, and Jesus says ‘Unbind him, let him go free.’ thus anticipating the Resurrection.
This wonderful idea that eternal life is life in and within Jesus who is in and within God is also illuminated in today’s Gospel by the shortest verse in the Bible. The words are “Jesus wept.” What illuminates this even more is that earlier in the Gospel where people are “weeping” over the death of Lazarus, the original Greek word is different and perhaps means the conventional weeping of mourners. This weeping of Jesus on the other hand uses a different Greek word, which means something more like he “shed tears.” And indeed, it is preceded by the statement that “Jesus said in great distress, with a sigh that came straight from the heart, ‘Where have you put him?’ The point here is that this shows us how human Jesus was. Despite his absolute belief that those who are one with him have eternal life, he is still moved to tears, moved from the depths of his human heart, by this death. This shows us how God chooses to enter completely and utterly in and through Jesus into every part of our human life even the saddest moments. St Paul expresses it well when he writes to the Philippians. (2:6-11) It’s part of the passage we will hear next Sunday. “His state was divine, yet Christ Jesus did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave and became as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.”
It points us on to his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Thursday night, and every part of his suffering on the Friday as he was tortured and then made to carry his cross, and then nailed to the cross itself to die in yet more agony. The gift of eternal life when we are drawn into union with him comes to us because he has drawn himself completely into union with us. This is God’s way of defeating death, through death itself.
Comments