THE POWER OF NEW LIFE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Texts: Isaiah 43: 16-20; John 11: 1-44
Depending on who’s counting, there are eight -- or nine, some say even twelve -- gates to Jerusalem’s Old City. Five of the eight gates built in the sixteenth century by Suleiman the Magnificent, the first Ottoman Turkish Emperor still exist. The Golden Gate, the oldest of the extant gates in the Old City, was constructed in the sixth or seventh century on the site of a much older gate close to the Temple Mount. Because both Jews and Christians believed that the Messiah would come through the gate at the end of the age, Suleiman ordered that the gate be sealed to prevent such a return.
In order to understand this, you need to know that Suleiman was the man who believed that building a gate with the images of four lions -- called the Lion’s Gate -- would protect him against being devoured by lions foretold to him in a dream. More than 150,000 Orthodox Jews and Crusaders paid dearly to have their tombs in front of the Golden Gate waiting for the day of resurrection when the Messiah would come in glory.
Bethany, the village where Mary and Martha lived with their brother Lazarus, was just on the other side of the Mount of Olives, about a mile east of the Old City. There still is a traditional site marking the cave where Lazarus was supposed to be entombed, which was a place of great veneration in ancient times. There are a few ruins, but mostly it is taken up by modern suburban Jerusalem and Israeli settlements because the Israelis have moved the border between Israel and Palestine as far east and south about five miles so that it encompasses Bethany and northern Bethlehem.
The writer of John’s Gospel was not content with just putting down stories about Jesus as in Mark or even establishing a definitive history as Luke’s Gospel claims to do, but constructed a theology of Jesus the Christ as the Son of God. John’s Gospel is, without a doubt, the most coherent of the Gospels because it approaches the questions of Jesus and his identity from an internally consistent point of view.
Each story in John’s Gospel is written so that the denouement is the logical conclusion. The raising of Lazarus is no exception and is the linchpin that leads to the Pharisees deciding that Jesus must die. As expressed so well by Caiaphas in Superstar, for the sake of the Nation, this Jesus must die, must die, must die, this Jesus must die.
Writers have tackled the story of Lazarus from other perspectives, ranging from the nihilist Andreyev who portrayed Lazarus as coming back from the grave with the empty eyes of one who has discovered that there is nothing on the other side, to Sonja’s reading of the story in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment offering Raskolnikov the hope of redemption.
In the movie version of Kazantzakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ, the raised Lazarus is murdered by zealots because they are afraid that this deed will make people come to Jesus not as an anti-Roman patriot but as the incarnation of God’s love. Lazarus has also been presented by poets as resenting his awakening from “nature’s peacefulness” in the German Rainer Maria Rilke, searching for faith in May Sarton, searching for redemption in William Butler Yeats, finding that life is as difficult as death in Spanish poet Nicanor Parra and Hungarian poet Agnes Nagy, and as a sign of hope in a fractured nation by Punjabi Jasbir Ahluwalia and Egyptian Badir Al-Sayyab. But the oldest images of Lazarus come from the Roman catacombs, where artists pictured John’s story on the stone sarcophagi that held the bodies of early Christians.
At first it seems to be a strange story. Jesus waits until he knows Lazarus has died; he says that the purpose of Lazarus death is to show God’s glory. But then he weeps. Did he weep for Lazarus or for the sadness and grief he saw around him. Don’t we often get a tear when we see the sadness and grief of others? It’s a normal emotion. How many times have you been to a funeral and found yourself holding back the tears because of the grief of those you care about rather than because of the death of someone you knew only tangentially? More than once, I imagine. Rather than looking at this story with our modern eyes, let’s try to see it from the perspective of the writer and the readers of the early communities of faith.
Almost all the early church commentators, like Origen of Alexandria, saw the Lazarus story not only as a precursor to the resurrection, but as a particular comfort to them during their time of persecution. When Origen was seventeen, his father Leonides was martyred in 202. He declared that he wanted to follow his father; however, his mother hid his clothes until he calmed down so he would have had to go out in the nude. Fortunately for us, when he finally got his clothes back, he began to write commentaries rather than getting himself martyred. Origen gives us window on how the early church read this passage.
Jesus waits until Lazarus is dead. Not just possibly dead, but really dead -- four days dead. Imagine what a semi-tropical climate does to a body in four days. No wonder that the sisters tell Jesus not to go in. “…but he stood straight, filled with that gesture which rose in him so heavily, and heavily he raised his hand -- (no hand ever was raised more slowly than that hand)/until it stayed and shone in air,” as Rilke pictured it. This is the image on the sarcophagi -- Jesus with his hand in the air, saying, Come forth!”
Lazarus was the inspiration that kept an early church alive during the dark days of Roman persecution; Lazarus was like us, a human being, not so Jesus, who had the aura of a god. Lazarus had died and he lived again -- just as the early Christian believed we would. Just as with the early Christians, we need not fear death. We can live in courage; we can live in the faith that death is not the end for us, just as it was not for Lazarus. Ours is the faith that gives us hope, that gives us strength, and that gives us love.
Let us come to God in prayer: You, O God, who offers us your promise that love is as strong as death and that love can overcome death be with us in our lives so we may show others your promise. In the name of he One whose love overcomes death, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.