Year A
John 11:1-45
The Rev. Denise Vaughn
Our Journey to Bethany
Most of us here today have experienced the death of a loved one or a friend. When this happens, it can be a very painful sometimes devastating experience. Even though death is inevitable, each one of us at some point in our lives will face the reality of death, when someone we love dies, we experience its pain and it takes time to heal the wound called grief. No one welcomes death in any form. In fact, death is often an object of fear and dread but hidden in the experience of death is a longing for new life therefore, for those who die in the Lord death can be a blessing in disguise. In each of the lessons today we encounter a different form of death and we see how death paradoxically leads to hope, resurrection and new life.
In Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, we hear one of the most famous and imaginatively dramatic readings in all of Scripture, one that has captured the imagination of readers for centuries. When reading these verses, it’s impossible not to envision a desert scene with bones and skulls lying in disarray as far as the eye can see. There are more than 80,000 references to this biblical passage found on Google alone. This includes drawings, paintings and illustrations from as early as the third century. In one illustration painted in 1372, the Lord is depicted as a young man leaning down from heaven directing Ezekiel’s actions. Ezekiel is an old man preaching to bodies rising from wooden coffins and to the bones on the ground.
God gave Ezekiel many visions or dreams and messages so the people of Israel would have hope that one day they would leave Babylon and return to the land of Israel. This vision helps us today to see that God not only gives life but restores life, that death will not have the last word, even when all signs of life have been removed because our God is the Creator God of life, its origin and its goal. Apart from this passage, the Old Testament is largely silent regarding any blessed afterlife for the dead and this account may be the earliest appearance in the Bible of what became a central belief for both Judaism and Christianity: the resurrection of the body.
As our journey through Lent draws nearer to Easter, it might be valuable for us to consider what dry bones are represented in our own spiritual lives, and how we can learn from the lonely and dry periods of our spiritual journey? I would imagine each one of us has experienced what many like to call the “dark night of the soul” when doubts, hopelessness, depression, fear and anxiety show up in our daily lives. Certainly hopelessness and despair were an everyday experience for the people of Israel at the time of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Maybe God’s question to us this Lent is, “What can our spiritual dry bones teach us? What would we find out about our spiritual maturity if we examined them? Would we show a deficiency of study, reflection, prayer, or a meaningful relationship with God? These are all things I continually work on because God continually challenges me to read the bones and then offer then up to God for restoration and resurrection.
Paul, in the Epistle reading from Romans, challenges us to use these days of Lent to prepare for the coming celebration of the resurrection of our Lord when he says, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life.” Paul’s contrast between Spirit and the flesh is not an attempt to put our bodies to the side and only concentrate on the inner life of faith-as important as that is; Paul’s point is that life “in the Spirit” refers to the way we are to conduct our bodily life. When “the Spirit of God” dwells in us, we become expressions and instruments of God’s grace and peace. For Paul, it was simply a given: to be a Christian is to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
The question was not has the Christian received the Spirit but rather, does the Christian use their life and their resources to love God, care for neighbor and care for God’s creation. Paul reminds us of our new relationship with God when he says, “They had turned away from the flesh and were now “in the Spirit.” God’s Spirit dwelled within them and the benefits of the indwelling Spirit is new life to believers. This power of new life is the same power that was present in the Resurrection, raising Jesus to new and eternal life. But, according to Paul when we live to the flesh only, it means death. Death in this sense means to be alienated or separated from God because of our sin.
Earlier in the book of Romans Paul writes, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sin is when we turn away from God and what God wants for us and this can cause hopelessness, anxiety, fear and despair. Sin can leave us feeling terrible about ourselves and our life. But, a life turned over to a forgiving God, a life living in the Spirit can resolve these inner conflicts and turn our despair into hope, and into a life of peace with God. This emphases, carries us into the very powerful story of “the raising of Lazarus” where the tension between hope of resurrection and the finality of death is to help us recognize that our world is not as it should be. This tension invites us to consider the possibility of resurrection in the lives of the many persons and communities that need God’s presence; those who need God’s help and need to hear the message of resurrection for their lives. Lazarus means “God helps,” or “God has helped.”
At the heart of this story of illness and death, of burial and resurrection, is the message that Jesus is engaged in God’s work of helping. Lazarus is raised from the dead to show us death does not have the final word and that Jesus is the giver of life and in his life, death, and resurrection, the resurrection of the dead is assured to humanity. The core of John’s gospel is that God in love comes to us to restore us to God’s self. In Christ, we are invited to partake in God’s love, and to commune and live with God. We see this love of God in Jesus’s earthly life. His journey to Bethany is his life mission; a mission to participate in the pain of the world and to transform it. Jesus embodies God’s love, a life giving love and when we follow and love him, we are invited into this life.
Our discipleship becomes a journey to Bethany like our Lords journey because participation in the pain of the cross, take up the cross and follow me, brings the delight of God’s eternal life for all who believe. The Holy Spirit within us is the one who lovingly accompanies us in our journey and brings us to God’s own life and then, God expects our help. Our efforts are a part of God’s plan. For those whose lives we may touch, what we do may be a matter of life and death. Yet, God’s life giving action is not dependent on our faith, whether that of Mary, Martha, Lazarus, or the on lookers, but it calls it forth. At the conclusion of the story, we learn that many who accompanied Mary to Lazarus’s tomb also believed in Jesus. Not only can new life come out of death, so can the faith that leads to eternal life, a blessing in disguise.
As this season of Lent draws to a conclusion we are invited today to examine our dry bones, and to offer them up to God for restoration and resurrection. We are invited to remember that the benefit of the Spirit living in us is new life. When “the Spirit of God” dwells in us, we become expressions and instruments of God’s grace and peace in our world. God wants our help to bring life, hope and resurrection, so may we become the instruments of change and resurrection that God calls us to be in our world today.