Lent V

The Gospel text appointed for today is none other than the 'raising of Lazarus' in John's Gospel. Jesus calls out: "Unbind him, and let him go!"

Powerful words. And they contain much of what our tradition has found curious and blessed and powerful in the person of Jesus over the centuries -- the power to bring life out of death.

Equally powerful words we must contend with in the story: before Jesus gives the word of Life here, he is greeted with the frankly resentful, sorrowful, puzzled words of Lazarus' sisters, Mary and Martha, his friends: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." A rebuke, indeed. And, the honest voice of one who calls out of the depths of despair and grief (the Psalm today is Psalm 130, 'Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord...').

'If you had been here...' makes me think of all the ways in which I reduce God to a question of magical thinking in the world -- a presence to be summoned by my own will, or by arranging certain words or physical items in certain ways, absent sometimes and present by whim (God's whim and my own). An old, pejorative image here was the puppet-maker God, who dances us around... and it would seem as if I sometimes make myself into the puppetmaster, and God is a puppet whom I animate sometimes with my own desires -- my pleas, really. Nothing in that puppet relationship, wherever I'd see God or myself, is lifegiving. And, it makes a strange, manipulable idol out of God and devalues the human person made in God's image.

Another text we are given today points ahead to the Easter Vigil: the famous story from the book of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel: the Valley of the Dry Bones. The prophet has a dream in which he sees an ancient battlefield, historically known to him, and mourns the devastation wrought by war and the sheer weight of time: the valley is filled with dry bones. He hears the voice of the Lord ask him in the dream: 'Mortal, can these bones live?' He knows the divine presence well enough simply to answer, 'O Lord God, you know.' And then the voice tells him to prophesy to the scene of devastation, to the bones themselves: bring the word and the breath of life here, O Mortal Prophet. And, these bones shall live.

In that story, the 'bones' are an explicit symbol for the whole nation, the 'people of Israel,' and the vision comes to Ezekiel at a time of great uncertainty and devastation in their history. Can there be life here? O Lord God, you know. No, O Mortal: you know, too. Prophesy to these bones: speak the word of Life, constantly -- the Word of Life I give to you, constantly. Become this Lively Word in the world... and these bones shall live.

Ezekiel knows these bones are a symbol. And, we are not told in John's Gospel what happened to Lazarus later on, a question that occupied much adolescent thinking at a point in my life. What was dinner like for Mary and Martha with their fresh-from-the tomb brother? 'Pass the salt, please, Lazarus...'

In John's Gospel, Jesus 'does' things as signs that he is who He Is: the Word of Life, the Word made flesh -- beginning with that water-into-wine showiness at a certain wedding, prodded by his mother to get going, and continuing through mirroring back her life to the 'unclean' woman at the well, offering her water that never fails to flow, to restoring the ability to see to someone who had been blind his whole life. Lazarus is raised, 'that the people may believe.'

Believe in the power of God to bring life in the desert, in the valleys of our devastation. Still, now. Not because God wills life 'now' for some and not for others, but because it is in the nature of God to will life, to restore things and heal them and bring them to wholeness -- in our limited sense of time, and in the sense of time-outside-of-spacetime we call 'eternity.' Always.

God is not a character in a drama, puppet or puppetmaster. This is what God is: wholeness and healing. The ancient word for that is 'salvation.'

Jesus points to and embodies this wholeness, always. 'Prophesy' this -- which is to say: embody this in the world. No easier for us amid the outbreak of a plague than it was for Ezekiel. But, what would speaking the (socially-distanced!) breath of Life into the world look like right now? For the Word of God is always the word of Life, and Health, and Healing, and Justice. It calls us into the way of Being that is how the creation is intended, making all too plain the ways in which we are so out of kilter with this Way.

Go, be a prophet. Raise the dead, yes, but speak a word of Life first to yourself, and those near you. Let your own heart and home be a place of rebirth and healing. Mortal, can these bones live? Yes. Lord God, you know. Yes.