5 Lent A

The gospel lesson for the 5^th Sunday of Lent (John 11.1-45) illustrates every minister’s nightmare of being late for a funeral. I had a funeral myself yesterday as I write this, and all the night before I had tossed and turned with dreams about being late for it. Though the morning was filled with the usual pastoral crises and difficult logistics, through a grim determination practised in many years of ministry I managed to be ready on time. And then my driver failed to show on time, so I was late for the funeral anyway. The nephew of the deceased, reading from John 11 in the service, remarked how fitting it was that the reading should be about Jesus being late for a funeral.

Martha is disconsolate. Have you ever had to deal with grief like this that is at least in part a result of your own incompetence? Jesus mutters some palliative sop about the resurrection to deflect attention away from himself—that seems pretty much what the doctrine was invented to provide—and Martha replies by trotting out the standard theological take on the resurrection she had learned in Sunday school. Blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t help, she says. She doesn’t feel comforted. Her grief is raw.

Thus far the encounter between Jesus and Martha replicates a lot of the pastoral encounters with which we are too painfully familiar. Our incompetence leaves a cloud of unrequited grief in its wake. It happens to the best of us.

But fresh light shines into the scene when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection”. Two things are interesting here, both of them central to the Gospel of John. One is the boldness with which John has Jesus repeat the “I am” phrase he uses elsewhere (I am the bread, I am the light, etc.), betraying the depth to which God, whose name is “I am” (Exodus 3.14) is fully present in Jesus.

The second is what is often called John’s “realised eschatology”—resurrection is not just something for the end of history, as Martha had been taught, or even something that has to wait for after we die. It is a new way of life that Jesus lived, a way of life that embodies God. The Word became flesh in what Jesus did. We can at least say this confessionally, as proclamation, as John does. As Willi Marxsen says in The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus was resurrected long before he died. The same is true for the ordinary believer who puts flesh on the Word of God through discipleship. Faithful discipleship makes what is hoped for a present reality. This is “realised eschatology” as the discipleship of the people of God. Those who take the wisdom of God (the logos, in Greek) as the shape of their own lives (John 1.12), as Jesus did, become, like him, sons (or daughters) of God, born not of a human father but with God as our father. Or, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus, we are born again. These images coalesce into one vision that interprets the meaning of resurrection in the Gospel of John. Resurrection is a way of life, life that abides in the presence of Christ as Christ abides in us in our discipleship, and so we abide in the presence of God. This is bodily resurrection; it is a matter of the whole person and what the whole person does in history. The gospel that defines eternal life as knowing God and knowing Jesus Christ (John 17.3) affirms that eternal life is realised in life as it is presently lived, the re-born life, the life of the resurrection. Life is not a waiting room. Life is not an ante-chamber to the real action. This is where th language of our funeral services needs to change. Life doesn’t start for us as our friends retreat to the bun fight after the service at the crematorium. William Stringfellow (Instead of Death) said nothing new happens when the undertaker calls that had not already happened on the day of his conversion.

The idea of “resurrection now” as an experienced reality for the born-again disciple interprets the Lazarus story. The Lazarus story never hit me so powerfully as when the gay comedian Peterson Toscano performed at our church here in Cardiff. His show had been built around his own closeted struggle as a conservative evangelical trying to be straight—he’d spent several years in a church-sponsored community dedicated to converting gay men to heterosexuality. During the course of the show, in a parody of preaching on this text from John that began with hilarity but gradually took on increasing gravity, Peterson, with spine-chilling drama, called to Lazarus in the voice of Jesus, “Come out!”. The command was spoken with electric energy, and, for some in the audience, as I learned in conversations in later months, life changing. This was, as H. A. Harrison called it, “true resurrection”. No wonder it is the resurrection of Lazarus that gets Jesus into trouble with the authorities in the Gospel of John. The mandarins of social stability want mechanical conformity and feel threatened by individuation and liberation. This is the conflict in our own world that the Gospel of John wants us to think about. The courage to say “I am” should have primary place in our discipleship and not be isolated in the person of Jesus. Tillich called it the courage to be. This is the kind of life-transformation that is the heart of Christianity. Paul said, if this never happens, then our faith is futile and our preaching is in vain. If it is only for the closeted life of social/political conformity that we live, then we are of all people most to be pitied (John 15.14, 19).

This sense of the Lazarus story opens up when we learn its origins in an early version of the Gospel of Mark. To help understand its place there I’d like to sketch a brief analysis of that gospel’s construction. Mark starts out with the baptism of Jesus, which is linked through various verbal connections to the crucifixion (the splitting open of the heavens and the splitting of the curtain; the declaration of the voice from heaven and the centurion that Jesus is the son of God), giving us something like Paul’s association of baptism with the experience of dying and rising with Christ. In a sense, Mark can be said to be about baptism from start to finish. At mid-point James and John ask Jesus if they can sit at his right and left when he comes into his glory (Mark 10.38-40a). Are they willing to be baptised with the baptism that Jesus himself will undergo? At the end of the day those who are found at the right and left of Jesus in his glory are the two thieves crucified alongside him.

The aspirations of James and John represent the aspirations of the reader, the catechumen for whom this text was written as a way of exploring the nature of the Christian life. The gospel is a manual for those who would be baptised. It tells their story. The figure of a young man is woven through the story who represents such readers. He is the rich young man whom Jesus loved who cannot give up his wealth to follow in the path of discipleship. He is the young man stripped naked the night Jesus is put on trial. Remember that the baptised would have been stripped naked before coming into the water at the time Mark’s gospel was written, and in baptism we are under trial just as Jesus was. The young man at the tomb dressed in white is the baptised, the only witness to the resurrection because he has died and been reborn with Christ.

Helmut Koester in Ancient Christian Gospels shows this story of Lazarus was originally part of this string of references to the “young man” theme in Mark. Clement of Alexandria had a copy of Mark which contained a story that became lost in the version we know. The story comes following Mark 10.34:

There was a certain woman whose brother had died….Jesus stretched out his hand and raised him, grasping his hand. And the young man, looking at Jesus, loved him….they went into the house of the young man, for he was rich.

The Lazarus story in John brings with it this fabric of meaning woven through the Gospel of Mark, a meaning that centres on the experience of conversion, transformation, baptism and resurrection. The Church, with its small-minded, nervous focus on nailing down what actually happened to Jesus on Easter, as in N. T. Wright’s big book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (the title betrays his attempt to distance himself from Marxsen’s book, The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth), too often blocks the path of truly discerning this central Christian mystery as something that happens to us. For the orthodox, it’s all something that happened miraculously to Jesus, no thanks to Richard Dawkins. It has very little to do with the life of the disciple, unless the life of the disciple is limited to wonder at the working of big miracles and never grasps the invitation to live as Jesus lived and do what Jesus did, reborn to live, as he did, as God-bearers to the world. It’s a pity that at Easter the pressure of a stiff orthodoxy stands so strong that many preachers feel condemned in their efforts to proclaim this liberating gospel of resurrection that lives at the heart of Christian faith.