Through the Graveyard to Easter
March 9, 2008
Last Sunday morning, my last morning in Jerusalem, I attended early service at a local congregation with Casey Walker’s brother, who is a student at Hebrew University. From the church we walked to the Old City, passed through the ancient Damascus gate and walked the narrow stone streets of the Muslim and Christian Quarters. We bought warm bread from a streetside vendor, had a cup of coffee at the Notre Dame guesthouse. Toby left to get back to his college, and I walked along the walls of the Old City, until I reached the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Beyond the wall a little road winds through the Garden of Gethsemane up and over the Mount of Olives. If you stay on that little road for two miles, you’ll come to the little village of Bethany, home of Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha.
It’s almost Easter, but we must walk a rough road over these next two weeks to get there. It’s almost Easter, with its “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” and its Easter Lilies and its empty tomb, but we must walk through the graveyard to get there. As I stood there last Sunday at the wall of Jerusalem, looking up the Mount of Olives towards Bethany, graves are about all you can see. There alongside the wall lie the great broken stones of the Jerusalem Temple, destroyed in 70 AD. The Jerusalem side of the Kidron Valley from the city walls down is filled with the Muslim graves...little stone graves as far as the eye can see. The Bethany side of the Valley is filled with Jewish graves...tens of thousands of them...white and hard and cold...stretching all the way to the road to Bethany.
It was impossible to stand there and not to think of Ezekiel, who said: The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’
We’ve got to walk through the graveyard to get to Easter morning. It stretches out before us, and as we head into the toughest of all seasons, there’s no avoiding it. As we testify and again witness our Savior’s death, we face the ways that death has invaded our own lives. Many of you have been touched by death’s cold hand. Death has taken away someone you love. Death reaches its icy hand for us all. As we walked those blessed roads where Jesus walked in Jerusalem, the City of Peace, just a few miles away over 100 people were being blown apart by rockets and exploding bombs and bullets. Just this week gunmen burst into a seminary in West Jerusalem and cut down young men in the prime of life. Jerusalem is no stranger to hatred, religious intolerance, and violence...and neither are we. The last days of Jesus’ life, the way of Suffering, the Via Dolarosa, the path of the Cross, is just ahead of us. The darkness of those stories is enough to make us quit right here and now...to hole up and not come out of hiding until we hear the trumpets of Easter.
Perhaps that’s why the lectionary today offers up stories of life and hope...the Valley of Dry Bones rattling to life...dead Lazarus is called back to life. As we begin this walk through the graveyard of Jerusalem, and the graveyard of our own lives, let’s hold onto one another’s hand, looking to Jesus and telling every resurrection story we know. Today we share the story of Lazarus. May what Jesus did for Lazarus be a sign of what God will soon do for us all.
Bethany was a dangerous place for Jesus to show his face. Last time he came that close to Jerusalem, the religious leaders stirred up a mob to stone him. Jesus and his disciples slipped away into the wilderness...that’s where they were when word came: “Your friend Lazarus is sick.” They hung around a few days, and the balance on which Lazarus’ life hung shifted, and he was gone. Death was on everyone’s mind. Lazarus was dead. Jesus had just escaped death in Bethany, and aimed to go back there. Thomas could only sigh and say to his buddies, “Let us go too, that we may die with him.” By the time they arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been in the tomb for three days.
For Jesus, facing down a crowd carrying stones was nothing compared to facing those two women whose brother had just died. Martha met Jesus as drew near to Bethany. “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died, and even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”
Jesus said: “Your brother will rise again.”
“I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said: “I am the resurrection and the life; those who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die" (John 11:25-26.) “Do you believe this?”
"I am the resurrection and the life." Not "I will be" but "I am"--right here, right now--resurrection and life for anyone willing to believe that it might just be true. Broken, shattered believers through the ages have hung onto this promise like drowning men hang onto life preservers. These words have saved some of you who are here this morning. These words have been the last shred of hope for some of us, the tree branch to which we clung, suspended above the endless chasm. If these words are true, then even death cannot separate us from the love and presence of Christ. Martha was the first to grasp it. She grabbed the branch as it flew by, and held on with all her might.
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” This might be the most amazing statement that any of Jesus’ disciples ever spoke. We make much of Peter’s confession of faith, “I believe that you are the Christ of God.” But what about this woman’s profession?...And notice when Martha makes this Good confession–she says it before Jesus arrives at the grave of her brother Lazarus, she says it before she knows what Jesus will do, before he lifts his eyes heavenward. Martha makes this profession of faith in the very face of death, in a sea of grief and pain. Faith is believing even in the presence of trouble and heartache and death; it is not the warm afterglow of resurrection. Martha’s cry of faith might be most amazing part of this whole story. I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God... Mary joined Jesus as he moved away from the house, and her grief began to unhinge whatever it was that he had intended to say. John recounts that Jesus was "deeply moved in spirit and troubled" (v. 33.) This flat English phrase don’t begin to get at the turbulent meltdown indicated by the original language. The words used here for being “deeply moved” are words that describe the snorting that anguished animals make, they are words that refer to the explosion of a fit of anger. Jesus was agitated, beside himself, torn up in spirit at the death of his friend.
Every time I drive to Elizabethton I look at the homely little roadside marker by the railroad tracks...the one shaped like a heart, tied with ribbon that says simply “Teresa”...and I am taken back to the cries of a husband who has just learned that his wife, the mother of three children, was killed by a driver high on drugs. I can still hear him shouting “What am I supposed to do? How am I going to live without her? How will I take care of these children?” Perhaps this image gets closer to describing what it means to be “deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”
Was Jesus upset at the wailing of the professional mourners? Was Jesus angry, torn up because of the disciples’ lack of faith? Was he angry at death itself...at a loss because of the pain that sin and death had caused his friends? “Where have you laid him?” he asked Martha. “Come and see, Lord.” That’s when Jesus lost it. Verse 35, the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” Linger here...see Jesus before that tomb broken with grief.
You might be tempted to ask: “Why? What’s with all the tears? Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus, didn’t he? He knew that before he ever set out for Bethany. Why did he get so emotional at the tomb?” My wife Marcia says she always cry whenever someone else is crying...and certainly it was a day for tears. And let’s remember that Mary and Martha weren’t just anyone. John tells us that “Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus.” These people were Jesus’ family. These tears flowed because of love.
How many times have we cried out “Why did you allow this to happen, Lord?” How many times have we shouted and shaken our fists at the silent heavens over the loss of a loved one? I’ve lost too many close friends in my life. I’ve cried buckets of tears. And I’ve held onto people who have suffered staggering losses. See here that the heavens aren’t made of bronze. See how affected Jesus by our pain. See here that God weeps too. Tears and pain and suffering and death are facts of life. But Christ comes alongside us to be with us...to hurt with us...to weep with us. Jesus wept. The raising of Lazarus was an amazing event...but maybe the story peaks right here, with the tears of God.
“Where have you laid him?” asked Jesus.
“We all ran behind them until we came to the grave. There Jesus stopped. All the blood went to his head, his eyes rolled and disappeared, only the whites remained. He brought forth such a bellow you’d have thought there was a bull inside him, and we all got scared. Then suddenly while he stood there, trembling all over, he uttered a wild cry, a strange cry, something from another world. The archangels must shout in the same way when they’re angry.... ‘Lazarus,’ he cried, ‘come out!’ And all at once we hear the earth in the tomb stir and crack. The tombstone begins to move...Never in my life have I feared death as much as I feared that resurrection.”
The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
O the joy and the tears and the wonder and the fear unleashed that day. Imagine the emotional roller coaster of those days...from deepest grief to highest joy...from the tomb to the table. And then imagine the journey of the week to come. Barbara Brown Taylor writes:
“Lord, I believe, but help thou my unbelief, because I still do not want to die. I believe Jesus has power to raise the dead, only I do not want him practicing on me. I want a God who will cut my losses and cushion my failures, a God who will grant me a life free from pain. I want a God who will rescue me from death, who will delete it from the human experience and find another way to operate. What...all of us have instead is a God who resurrects us from the dead, putting an end to it by working through it instead of around it--creating life in the midst of grief, creating love in the midst of loss, creating faith in the midst of despair--resurrecting us from our big and little deaths, showing us by his own example that the only road to Easter morning runs smack through Good Friday.”
I am the resurrection and the life. Remember Jesus’ words on Palm Sunday. Remember them on Good Friday. Remember them on Easter morning. Remember them when the bottom drops out from under you and the grave opens up to swallow you or someone you love. Remember Jesus’ words as you wait for those dreaded test results. Remember them as you grieve your child, your parent, your spouse, your friend, long lost. Remember them on the way to Jerusalem. Put Jesus’ words into your heart, keep those words on your tongue, burn them into your mind, underline them in red and bookmark them in your Bible. I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live and wohoever lives and believes in me shall never die. That promise will carry us through the graveyard of Good Friday, through the graveyards of loss and grief and pain...and will bring us safe to Easter morning. I am the resurrection and the life.
