John 12:20-23
The story of Lazarus only appears in the Gospel of John. Martha and her sister Mary believe in Jesus’ divine power to heal the sick. They summoned Jesus to cure Lazarus, who had been very ill. But Jesus was delayed. Both women express disappointment in Jesus for allowing Lazarus to die because he had not come quickly enough. By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been dead and entombed for days. The women do not expect what will happen next. Martha suggested that Jesus could still act on Lazarus’ behalf, but she does not fully believe this.
Surprise!
Lazarus walks out of his tomb when Jesus calls, “Lazarus, come out!” Lazarus walks out of the tomb wearing his funeral bindings. Jesus declares, “Unbind him and let him go.” Jesus’ power proves to be greater than even his best friends and supporters dared to dream.
The Resurrection of Lazarus foretells Jesus’s coming Resurrection. For those present, “Come and see” becomes a sign through the living body of his friend for whom Jesus wept. Perhaps he also wept knowing his coming arrest, humiliation, and execution were near. Perhaps he wept for the grief of his friends whom he seemed to have failed. In John’s Gospel, the moment Jesus wept stands as a moment when Jesus is truly human and truly divine.
This story also transitions the reader from Jesus being among his followers to when he is turned over to the authorities. His threat to Jewish hierarchy and Roman authority has been fully realized. However, his teachings of the limitless mercy of God and how God loves the world will live through the Gospels. Love wins. Death is not the punctuation that completes a thought or sentence. Death is a comma, and Christ still speaks.
How many of us have known the apparel of the grave? Jesus tells us not to be afraid. The shrouds of anxiety and fear that we feel eat at our hearts. The separation from those we love brings grief so great that we question our faith. We emerge from the coronavirus pandemic, and our instincts inform us to forget. Our anxiety for our safety and the safety of our loved ones has passed. Not unlike those who survived the Spanish Flu after World War 1, our minds bury the consent fear we universally endured.
Our minds seem to have erased the history and impact of the Spanish Flu Pandemic. I knew people who had lived through that time, but no one ever spoke of that time. My Grandmother lost her sister in that pandemic. She grieved that loss but never spoke of how her sister died. I do not recall any mention of that horrible time in history books. I only became fully aware of that early 20th-century pandemic when the COVID-19 Pandemic was compared to the Pandemic one hundred years before. The similarities startled me.
The “strips of cloth” that bind us — illness, age, feelings of hopelessness and loss — feed fear and, for many, feed isolation and inflamed addictions.
My Grandmother, Alice Maxwell-Dedes, feared hospitals. She was born in 1876. In the nineteenth and early 20th centuries, hospitals were places where people went to die. Bacteria had not yet been understood. Pasteurization was not available to the general public until the 1920s. Viruses would only be identified with the invention of the electron microscope in 1931, eleven years later. Penicillin would not be available to the public until 1945. The introduction of a vaccine for Tuberculosis in 1941 would eradicate that disease, and the sanitariums would soon disappear. I lived with my Grandmother until she died in 1961. Her peers were survivors from a time that we have collectively forgotten. Science and medicine outpaced many common and deadly illnesses. Today, we even have vaccines for some cancers.
Every new vaccine was embraced as a “scientific breakthrough.” I recall lining up in elementary school to swallow the new polio vaccine from tiny, pleated paper cups. We drank that as if it was communion. It was like a secular communion merging science and medicine, and I considered it a miracle; I knew people who survived and were crippled by Polio. Doctors and medicine worked as the hands of God in our lives. I think of the call of science and medicine as if it were the call of Jesus, “Lazarus, come out.”
A long time ago, in a far-off land, Jesus stood outside a tomb and called out, “Lazarus, come out!” God still speaks to us today, calling us out from our tombs of despair, denial, and death to new life here and now.
How do you participate in what God is doing today, in your midst, when God brings new life in the face of illness? How are you “unbinding” and “letting go” those who have been put at risk of infection and possible death?
We shared this recent pandemic across nations and continents. We shared the crisis with families and communities. Many people remained closed up in their homes for years, anxious and afraid. Now, we “unbind” one another from anxiety and dread by visiting those bound.
There may be some standing around and watching in our midst who must decide what they’ll believe and how much they’ll believe it. How can we release the new life that God has granted, the unique experience that lies just beneath the surface of what appears bleak and beyond hope?
Martha’s faith shares a moment of grace in this complex story. How do we move from saying what we believe to giving our whole selves and lives over to transformation and the new growth that God brings? How often, in fact, do we say we believe but live as if we do not?
There are places and times when our religious imagination fails us, stops us, and refuses to move us to areas of new life and possibility. The world around us often tells us about “real life” and clashes with the gospel vision of being truly alive.
“Jesus began to weep.” Often, we fail to see Jesus’ humanity. These words suggest that he knew anger, grief, and deep spiritual pain, just as we do. He was moved to compassion and sadness even as he knew that all this had happened for the glory of God. Imagine Jesus’ tears flowing in the knowledge of the life restored for Lazarus and Jesus’ coming Passion. God speaks to us today in seeing the tears of Jesus. Perhaps he gulped for air as he wept in the same manner we do when we cry. We must allow time and room for tears. Jesus, Emmanuel, God is with us, and He weeps with us while He brings us the balm of Resurrection.
We have all experienced our Lazarus moments. We will experience additional moments of rebirth and Resurrection. All we are asked to do is love others as we love ourselves. That is the proof of our love and faith in God’s covenant. God sent his son to live among us and remain with us in our fears, grief, and isolation. These are feelings that will pass through faith and grace. Science will save us, and nature will help. We will rise. We will heal. America has had its Lazarus Moments. We come to see. When we look into the mirror, let us see our Lazarus image and the image of Christ with us and around us. All humanity may discover that we must love and bind together in a new world where mercy and the gifts from God’s grace will come.