Sermon for All Saints & Souls, St Mark's Newnham, 2019
"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died"
They’re living in a space between two worlds, longing, and in many ways preparing, to move into a more realised obedience of God’s call over their lives, but simply unable to engage with it fully. Perhaps like me they feel called to be a priest but can’t yet preside at the Eucharist, for example; there are so many things that we long to do and be, that cannot happen until God has, literally, ordained us.
Our readings, and the feast of All Saints, lead us into a strange place of in-betweenness. All Saints and All Souls travel together like two fractious companions. The annual day for the church to rejoice in the communion of saints, the believers who have gone before us and make up the great cloud of witnesses in heaven, seems a little mismatched with the day of solemn commemoration for the dead. We’re dwelling in a space where we long for something that we sort of know, but don’t yet see. It’s a space where pastoral care is paramount; There is a fracture between life and death, between death and resurrection and that fracture is mirrored by our gospel and epistle for the day.
The gospel reading asks questions, questions that lurk deep in the heart of people of all faiths and none: If God is truly good, why does he allow death and suffering?
It’s all very well for Jesus to raise Lazarus, but where was God when this happened to my family?
The passage we heard from John’s Gospel comes at the end of a long narrative. Jesus knew about Lazarus dying and chose not to hurry on to be with him, proclaiming that Lazarus’ illness wouldn’t lead to death but to the glory of God and the Son of God. Then suddenly he announces to his disciples ‘Lazarus has died, and I am glad I was not there, so that you might believe’.
Poor Mary and Martha, putting all their hope in Jesus getting there and doing something, anything, before it’s too late, …have four days of mourning, dwelling in that ‘too late’ before he comes. Just before the passage Martha proclaims to Jesus that she believes in the resurrection, but that doesn’t stop her from declaring the pain of her Lord not showing up earlier along the lines of: ‘Lord, if you had been here on time, none of this would have happened’ and she’s right, and so are the crowd, in fact, Jesus himself said so to his disciples, No one is denying that Jesus can do something here and so the scene is a painful tension between grief and anticipation. In that moment, in that chasm between life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus encounters human grief, and, encountering it, wades deeper and deeper into it until… “Jesus Wept".
Jesus weeps and those around him first see love, not power. That self-emptying love of one who knows that he can change what’s going on, but first steps down into the pit of brokenness and grief, and I wonder whether it’s here that we first see the depth of the Gospel message, and the Glory of God, in this passage. Here in Jesus’ tears there is a profound intimacy that is often outshone by the miracle, the famous sign, that follows.
Then of course the extraordinary happens, Jesus calls into Lazarus’ tomb with a simplicity that matches his demand for the lame man to pick up his mat and walk: “Lazarus, come out”.
The passage we heard from John’s Gospel comes at the end of a long narrative. Jesus knew about Lazarus dying and chose not to hurry on to be with him, proclaiming that Lazarus’ illness wouldn’t lead to death but to the glory of God and the Son of God. Then suddenly he announces to his disciples ‘Lazarus has died, and I am glad I was not there, so that you might believe’.
Poor Mary and Martha, putting all their hope in Jesus getting there and doing something, anything, before it’s too late, …have four days of mourning, dwelling in that ‘too late’ before he comes. Just before the passage Martha proclaims to Jesus that she believes in the resurrection, but that doesn’t stop her from declaring the pain of her Lord not showing up earlier along the lines of: ‘Lord, if you had been here on time, none of this would have happened’ and she’s right, and so are the crowd, in fact, Jesus himself said so to his disciples, No one is denying that Jesus can do something here and so the scene is a painful tension between grief and anticipation. In that moment, in that chasm between life and death, faith and doubt, Jesus encounters human grief, and, encountering it, wades deeper and deeper into it until… “Jesus Wept".
Jesus weeps and those around him first see love, not power. That self-emptying love of one who knows that he can change what’s going on, but first steps down into the pit of brokenness and grief, and I wonder whether it’s here that we first see the depth of the Gospel message, and the Glory of God, in this passage. Here in Jesus’ tears there is a profound intimacy that is often outshone by the miracle, the famous sign, that follows.
Then of course the extraordinary happens, Jesus calls into Lazarus’ tomb with a simplicity that matches his demand for the lame man to pick up his mat and walk: “Lazarus, come out”.
Hollywood zombie films can only dream of what happens next, the four-day-dead Lazarus comes out bound in grave clothes, his face covered. Jesus commands him to be unbound and let go.
To an outsider, this gospel passage is chaos, we probably can’t imagine the nervous anticipation as Lazarus emerged from the tomb, swaddled in smelly linen bandages, …but its contrast with the picture of the Bride of Christ, the New Jerusalem, resplendently clothed and preparing to meet her eternal bridegroom, is quite poignant. Lazarus emerges to meet his maker wrapped in clothes that symbolise death, the New Jerusalem descends having been dressed as a bride to meet her spouse at the start of something new. And it’s this something new that we now long for. The passage in Revelation marks the final, eternal realisation of our greatest desire, our purpose, our design, if you will. Our final vocation is to worship, to be face to face with the Lord, to embrace his Glory that first embraced our humanity.
So how do we live, as Christians, in this chasm between our long-anticipated, eternal encounter with God, and the chaos of the world in which we live. We cannot sit back in our Cambridge bubble and ignore the events unfolding around us in the world. Somehow, like the first disciples, like Martha and Mary, and like those at the open day yesterday, we’re living between two worlds. We’re caught in a gap between earthy, broken, often wretched humanity and the abundant, joy-filled, worshipful, eternal encounter with God that we long for.
We commune with each other, knowing that before us, and indeed after us, are saints, believers, in their multitudes, all of whom worshipped, or will worship God in this space and, more broadly, on this earth. We come knowing that our praises echo, in a small way, the praises of heaven.
So how do we live, as Christians, in this chasm between our long-anticipated, eternal encounter with God, and the chaos of the world in which we live. We cannot sit back in our Cambridge bubble and ignore the events unfolding around us in the world. Somehow, like the first disciples, like Martha and Mary, and like those at the open day yesterday, we’re living between two worlds. We’re caught in a gap between earthy, broken, often wretched humanity and the abundant, joy-filled, worshipful, eternal encounter with God that we long for.
We commune with each other, knowing that before us, and indeed after us, are saints, believers, in their multitudes, all of whom worshipped, or will worship God in this space and, more broadly, on this earth. We come knowing that our praises echo, in a small way, the praises of heaven.
Here, in this moment, in this fracture between death and new life, Jesus joins us as we are, Jesus weeps alongside us, Jesus shouts into our tombs of human frailty “come out”, Jesus calls us to prepare ourselves for what is to come.
Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.
He will dwell with them, and they will be his people,
and God himself will be with them as their God.
