Year A
John 11:1-53
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
The “Breath” That Brings Life
Imagine yourself in Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest National Parks in the US. Definitely a beautiful place but also dangerous especially in the summer when the sun can press its heat relentlessly through your skin to the muscles, organs, and bones of your body with the dry winds that can take your breath away. As you are hiking, all around you, you notice bones, bones dried and parched by the sun and wind; the bones of those who have succumbed to the dry, hot death of the desert. You are alone, weary and hot, hungry and thirsty. You begin to know you need help as you start to dream of the shade of a tree and a cool breeze across your hot forehead.
The prophet Ezekiel knew he needed help. After the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 587 BCE, he imagined Israel in its captivity and exile as dry bones strewn in a desert. Hopelessness and despair was everywhere. The people had lost heart, suffering a death of the spirit, a living death in exile in a foreign land. He began to dream of a time when the cool refreshing breath of God, the Spirit of God, would breathe life back into the bones. After all, God had promised to help. And God said to Ezekiel, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. “Thus says the Lord God: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live.” This breath is the spirit of God, the life giving Ruach, breath God breathed into the first human in the garden, in the beginning.
This same breath moves forward in the Lazarus story to help. The name Lazarus, from the Hebrew Eleazar means “God helps,” or “God has helped,” or “one whom God helps.” The story of Lazarus, as John tells it, is a story of illness and death, of burial and resurrection. Told as a sign of Jesus’ power and compassion; it includes the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Yet, at the heart of this story is the message that Jesus is doing God’s work of helping. In raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus did a wonderful thing for all concerned. The tears of mourning are turned to tears of joy. Tragedy becomes triumph. Death is turned back and Lazarus rejoins his family and friends.
And if we only see this story as a remarkable success story for Jesus, we have missed its purpose. You see, John’s gospel has a kind of internal pattern or movement, the design of which is to set out a succession of signs or miracles that increase in power and marvel, from the first sign of the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, through the healing of the blind, culminating in the raising of Lazarus from the dead. John’s aim is to point to Jesus as the Messiah. To prove in a most impressive and awesome fashion that Jesus is the Christ of God.
The most important words Jesus speaks in this story are not “Lazarus! Come out!” as dramatic as they are, but rather “Whoever believes in me, though they die, yet shall they live.” And this is good news for all of us because while this is a story about other people who lived long ago, it also involves us. For we can be confident that our faith will be tested by death—the death of someone we love, or death in a situation that shocks and dismays us. Like the shock and fear of the pandemic we are experiencing right now; a situation that is changing our whole world. No one welcomes death in any form. The finality of death deepens the grief of Mary and Martha and their disappointment that Jesus does not arrive in time—“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Yet, it is in this death, we see the power of the resurrection. Death is overcome. Jesus truly is “the resurrection and the life.” As Christians, we believe in the power of the resurrection, having been formed in a tradition in which birth, life, death and resurrection are experienced and preached year after year. Resurrection and life are central to the meaning we make for our lives even informing our sense of Christian vocation. Paul points this out to us as he challenges us to use these days of Lent to prepare for the coming resurrection of our Lord. He says in the Roman’s passage, “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 flesh is not a contrast between body and soul, or 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 conduct our bodily life. When “the Spirit of God” dwells in us, we become expressions and instruments of God’s grace and peace. The question for Paul was not has the Christian received the Spirit but rather, do we use ourselves and our resources to love God, care for our neighbor and God’s creation. In this respect, resurrection confronts us as an urgent call, beckoning us to pray for the power of the resurrection in the lives of persons and communities bound by the graveclothes of war, genocide, poverty, disease, fear, abuse and oppression. This call seems even more urgent today. Releasing persons from the clutches of death is urgent and it demands something of us, as it did for Lazarus’ community. Jesus urged those who were alive and well, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
We need help and God helps, and we help too! Our efforts are a part of God’s plan. The Holy Spirit lives within us and God needs our help. For those whose lives we may touch, right now at a distance, what we do may be a matter of life and death, death and life, as in the story of Lazarus. At the conclusion of the story, 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. We, who have been already raised from the dead, are called to be witnesses of this reality. By the power of Christ’s resurrection and the Spirit that dwells in each of us, we can trust the promises of God to be true, and bear witness that the Spirit has already blown into our mortal bodies. We can testify that God’s power is already here in the world.
God’s Holy Breath gives us hope today and always, no matter what our world may throw at us. “Thus says the Lord God: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live.” Lent is a time of affirming that our life according to the flesh is dead and that new life and peace are available even now through the Spirit of Christ. To use T. S. Elliot’s poetic words, we proclaim “the vanished power of the usual reign.” The ashes of lent symbolize the death of the usual reign, the death of “living according to the flesh” because “Those who believe in him, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
The old has passed away yet, it still seeks corners of refuge in us. We can find ourselves sometimes torn between the old and the new. When, from the depths off dryness, we cry to God that we are cut off and all hope is lost, are cries are contained within the trust and hope found in the resurrection that God hears us and will come. God desires more for our life than a “valley of dry bones “or tombs filled with stench. God brings life! God helps by breathing the Holy Spirit into our bodies so we may become instruments of change and resurrection in our world today. May we feel the cool breath of life across our hot foreheads today and always.