5th Sunday in Lent

 

John 11:1-12:1

As those of you who read the eBlast well know, I love this story.  I love it so much, literally this is my favorite chapter in the whole bible.  And I am luckily that this is one of the very few stories in the bible that appears in the lectionary twice.  Here and every 3^rd year on All Saints Day.  But still, that is not nearly enough.  I could preach 50 sermons on this story, 100 even.  But today is special, because today may be the only time when I am bold enough to read the whole story in worship.  Because this year, we are in the wilderness.  This year, we have the time and the space to read the whole thing and to sit with the really big stories and the complicated and messy business of salvation.  This year, we get to hear the whole truth.  All 58 verses.  And like Nicodemus at the beginning of our Lenten journey, I am willing to wager that most of you have never heard the whole story, most of you have never had the opportunity to read all the way to the end.  And you have missed out, because the end of the story is why this story really matters.  The end of the story is the point of it all, of the whole bible really.

But John is thoughtful, and an unbelievably good story teller, so the end doesn’t matter without the beginning.  And some other year, I promise I will tell you more about the beginning, about the theology of Jesus waiting, and about what it means that we have a God who grieves with us.  But not today, not in the wilderness.  Today what matters most to know from the beginning of the story is that Jesus loves these people, all of them Mary, Martha, Lazarus, Thomas, even their friends who end up betraying him.  Jesus loves them and not in some sort of a passive, we should love everyone, absence of hate sort of way.  Jesus has a real deep emotional relationship with the people of this community.

And that’s what controls the story.  In the beginning, he really tries to be cool about this situation, he tries to embody his role as a divine part of the Trinity in this moment, he tries to be the one in control.  But ultimately he fails, miserably.  I mean it’s a good effort, he holds it together for 30 verses, he makes past the disciples, he even makes it past Martha, managing to have a proper theological conversation with her while still playing the role he is meant to play, Be the Son of God, Be the Messiah.

And then Mary comes, and he completely loses it.  Now, big emotional displays make English speaking people very uncomfortable, so we have taken them out of our bible.  Instead, we prefer to say silly, generic things like, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”.  But the Greek here is so much stronger, in other places these same words are translated as “Overwhelmed, terrified, enraged, trembling, roaring, or melting down.”  And the word for weep here, this is not some dignified tear sliding down your cheek, its means to wail.  All these words are loud.  Because Jesus is profoundly effected by his love for the people in this story.  And so all his decorum, all of his divine grandeur crumbles in this moment.  And Jesus does the most human thing imaginable and joins with others in weeping at the tomb of his friend who he loves who has died.

But Jesus then does a lot more than weep, he does a lot more than simply share the grief of his friends.  He acts.  He defies the stench of death and releases Lazarus from the tomb.  And the weeping quickly turns to joy.  With Lazarus’ friends literally losing him from the binds of death. 

And on All Saints Day the story ends here with joy and resurrection.  But I am sorry dear people, this is Lent, and the wilderness demands more from us.  This time we have to keep reading.  Because the story isn’t over.  And when we read on, we learn that this joy comes at a terrible price.  Because in the very next verse, some of the people who are there at the tomb, go and tell the officials what Jesus has done.  And this is the final straw.  When the officials hear about this latest act, they decide it is time to arrest Jesus and put him to death.  Within weeks he is dead.

In a very real way Jesus trades places with Lazarus in that tomb.  In order for Lazarus to live, Jesus must die.  And so knowing full well the consequences, a weeping Jesus chooses to save the life of a friend that he loves.  And this same Jesus, who loves us and calls us his friends, makes this same choice for us.  Jesus weeps so that our tears may be wiped away and Jesus dies so that we might live.

But it doesn’t happen quite right away.  Jesus flees to the wilderness first.  It is a clever sort of bookend to our own wilderness journey.  5 weeks ago, Jesus begins his ministry by going out into the wilderness, and today he ends it by coming back.  Our story actually ends today with Jesus returning from the wilderness at Ephraim to Bethany, to Mary’s house. That night she will anoint his feet, preparing him for burial just like she had for her brother.  And the next morning, when he wakes up, it is Palm Sunday.  Lent is ending and Holy Week begins.

Today we learn what Jesus already knew, that sometimes the only way out of the wilderness is death.  But not your death.  Because Jesus chooses you.  Because Jesus loves you. Because Jesus weeps with you and for you.  And because Jesus acts, for you, just like he does  with Lazarus.  Jesus dies so that we might live.

And in doing so he opens to us a whole new world of transformational love.  The world tells us to weep, to rage, to hate, to burn, to strike.  But Jesus tells us something else.  He tell us to rise with in love, to loose the bonds of death from ourselves and our neighbors.  And so this day we spend one last week in the wilderness so we too can prepare ourselves to rise.  We sit for one more day, we pray, we sing, we feast blood of the lamb.  We gather strength for the journey ahead.  Because next week we called to march.  To declare Jesus the king, who dies for us and to follow him forth into the world of costly service to that leads him to the cross.  Amen.