Walking with Christ Through Passiontide
13th March 2005, Parish Communion
Ezek 37: 1-14 The Valley of Dry Bones
Rom 8: 6-11 New Life in Christ
John 11: 1-45 The raising of Lazarus.
1. Last Sunday was Mothering Sunday, which is a break in the Sundays of Lent. We lighten up, relax, think about motherhood. This Sunday we are back in Lent and we enter the part of Lent called Passiontide, when we are particularly focussing on the death of Christ.
2. It is probably a good moment to stop and think – why do we bother? Even with people we know and have loved personally, people whose memories we treasure we do not really feel it necessary to spend time thinking our way systematically through the last difficult days of their lives. Why do we come, year after year, to this painful moment of remembering fear and treachery, confusion, torture and death?
3. The three readings set for this morning offer us an answer – that we believe that it is God’s will to bring light into dark places, to bring new life through death, and particularly that we believe the death of Christ is our entrance to new life.
4. The vision of the valley of dry bones in the book of Ezekiel is a classic picture of the rebirth of hope. Ezekiel is without hope for God’s people. All the hope and the joy of Israel is, in Ezekiel’s vision like a valley of dead bones. It is like a vast defeated unburied army, just memories, and with no future possibility.
5. In this vision, which came to Ezekiel in one of the darkest moments of the history of God’s people, the prophet sees God’s power to renew – he sees the bones come together and covered with sinews, and finally filled with the spirit of life. He comes to know that for God’s people there is a future as well as a past, and that God has the power to remake the people of Israel and restore them, to give them new life in the future. In Ezekiel hope is reborn, and it is this rebirth of hope which, historically, formed the foundation for the restoration of Jerusalem, the rebuilding of the temple, and in due course for the hope of God’s renewing power which Christians see answered in Jesus Christ.
6. Our new testament reading is the story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus’ friend has died, but he has died close to Jerusalem. To go to Jerusalem is death for Jesus. The disciples know this, and, when Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem, Thomas says, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."
7. Jesus goes to Bethany, and in the presence of Martha and Mary, before the people of the village and the leaders of Jerusalem, standing before the tomb in which Lazarus’ decomposing body has been laid he shouts, “Lazarus, come out!”. Shuffling and bound, wrapped in strips of cloth Lazarus appears at the exit to the tomb, and the final phase of Jesus life begins. His opponents know the time has come. Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all! 50 You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed." New life for Lazarus is founded on the death of Christ.
8. What does it mean for us to be worshippers of a God whose true nature we believe to have been revealed and whose true relationship with us we believe to have been completed in the death and resurrection of Christ?
9. One of the privileges of being a priest, and sometimes, if more rarely, one of the privileges of being a Christian friend, is that we are asked to accompany people and families through the darkest of times. It may be a beautiful spring day for us, but we are called to be with people who are living in the valley of dry bones, with past and no future, with death and not life, with despair only.
10. I do not always find that I can say, when I am with people in these dark moments, “Have faith” or with Martha "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.", or even with Christ “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” I believe it, but I cannot just say it, because it seems too glib, and it feels that I would be offering a sticking plaster, or a little bit of makeup to cover a deep and desperate wound.
11. But I do feel that I can talk of, and think about Christ’s suffering. There is so much in the blundering and bureaucracy, the pain and humiliation and betrayal, last words and final misunderstandings of the death of Christ that, almost always, I feel I can speak, a with integrity and faith on behalf of a God whose love may be incomprehensible but is never absent, and never shields itself from the pain of God’s creatures.
12. It can, I think be a problem for us that we are so familiar with these stories, that they have been, in most cases, parts of our lives since infancy, that we cannot really imagine what it would be like to live without them, and we cannot really assess the impact that they have had on our lives over the years.
13. But there, in the background, in our dark and winding paths of life there is always the knowledge of two fundamental and irreplaceable facts
a. That there is no pain, humiliation, despair, confusion or grief that we can undergo which God in Christ has not already undergone on our behalf, and known in full measure.
b. That the end and completion of all these things is a power stronger than pain, humiliation, despair, confusion and grief, in which we, with Christ, are raised to give glory to God.