April 3, 2014
Part of the additional heartbreak in the tragedies we have seen in the lost jet from Malaysia and the town swept away by mud in Washington State comes from the ambiguity, the lack of resolution. As much as our imaginations can conclude that people are gone, never to return, another part of our imagination works to conjure their re-appearance. CNN and other news agencies endlessly interviewed one woman whose fiancé was on the Malaysian flight – for weeks she imagined him and the other passengers as captives held by terrorists. She was sure, then, that he would return.
Our Gospel today allows us no ambiguity. Jesus waits to visit Lazarus because Jesus wants us to confront the definitiveness of death. A part of us thinks that Jesus is using poor Lazarus to make another point, but the death of Lazarus is like the deaths we all face. Jesus makes no exception for Lazarus because Jesus knows exceptions are rare and death universal.
So Jesus wants to bring us to a special place. He wants us to face grief. Lazarus’ sisters are bawling their heads off; in the end, Jesus bawls his eyes out, not once but twice. “See how he loved him,” the crowd says. Because love is at the heart of grief. And the meaning of our love for each other raises the very question that Jesus wants to answer over poor Lazarus’ dead body.
What does grief feel like? I think it has two components. One is sheer absence. We cannot believe that one who has been part of our lives will be there no more. I hear the Irish have a saying that the dead visit us three times in our dreams. This reflects the incredulity we have: how can my husband, my wife, my child, my parent, simply not be there anymore? They made up my world; they made up the world.
The second part of grief is a consequence of the feeling of absence. We feel as if part of our selves are being torn away. Death unmasks the illusion we have that we are totally contained individuals. When someone I love dies, part of me dies because I am not myself without them. My self flows beyond me to the deepest connections that I have. It flows backwards to my parents and siblings, and it flows forward to my children and friends. Death shows just how radically incomplete we are.
When Jesus tells Martha and Mary that he is the Resurrection, Jesus wants to deal with these two components of grief. If you relate to me, I am eternally present to you, and you are eternally present to me – I am Resurrection and Life. There are no boundaries to this relationship, not the boundary of death. In our relating to God through Jesus, time becomes relative and irrelevant. God holds us in the eternal relationship that God is. And because, in Jesus, we are related to God and to everyone else in relationship with God, Jesus completes our lives beyond anything we can fully imagine. If death can feel like severing, Jesus’ presence feels like entrance into unlimited fullness, unending connectedness. His life makes us whole, and brings us into the wholeness of life.
The great prophets imagined the Exile like a valley of dry bones; God can bring it back to life by the blowing spirit that made creation to begin with. When we have the Spirit of God, the Spirit that Jesus breathes out upon rising from the dead, then the issues of flesh, of limitation, of brokenness become irrelevant. “We are not in the flesh, but we live in the Spirit of Christ.” Jesus is getting us ready by raising Lazarus from the dead. “Come out, Lazarus. You are just a shadow of what I am going to do.”
Jesus calls for them to untie, unbind, Lazarus. His bonds were burial cloths. Our bonds are mental, emotional, cultural – we’ve just resigned ourselves all too often to the materialist, Stoic view of death: it’s part of nature, we have our years and then it’s bye-bye. Jesus is saying to us: look at the faces of Mary and Martha as they see Lazarus return to them. Look at how they are connected to each other. Can’t you see their love, their need, their hope? God can see these too – they are in all of us – and, in Jesus, God wraps them with the unending life that they deserve.