St. John’s Lutheran Church
3 November 2024 + All Saints
John 11:32-44
Rev. Josh Evans
It’s a well-known story,
often summarized with the title “The Raising of Lazarus”
without a second thought.
Start reading the actual story,
and you’ll quickly realize:
This isn’t so much about the raising of Lazarus –
which only takes up two short verses at the end –
but the death of Lazarus.
A point the writer of the fourth gospel makes abundantly clear:
“Lazarus is dead,”
Jesus matter-of-factly announces to his disciples before they even get to the tomb.
“He has been dead four days,” Martha reminds us at the tomb –
long enough that, as the King James Version so eloquently puts it: “He stinketh.”
And even after being raised, Lazarus still is identified as “the dead man.”
Here is a story that confronts death,
head-on.
Here is a story that gives us permission to weep,
as Jesus himself weeps –
as Jesus, so overcome with emotion, breaks down and cries
for Lazarus, his friend.
“Where have you laid him?”
Jesus is here to pay his respects,
to visit his friend’s grave,
as any one of us might do.
The focus here isn’t so much the raising of Lazarus,
as it is the death of Lazarus,
the mourning of Lazarus.
***
“When did you first know about death?”
asks Cole Arthur Riley in a chapter simply titled “Mortality”
from her book Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human.
“If there was a singular moment when I first became aware of my own mortality,”
she writes, “I cannot recall it. I remember the first funeral I attended – the first time death got close enough to mean something. But learning about my own temporality? It was unremarkable.”
And she proceeds to ponder:
“What does it mean that the day we discover death itself is immemorable to most of us? Are we in denial from the start, learning to look away from this shared fate?”
Our liturgical tradition hardly lets us look away.
Each Lent, we begin with that peculiar ritual
of marking our foreheads with ashes,
reminding ourselves and each other that we are human, mortal, finite.
At the other end of the year,
All Saints reminds us yet again of the truth of the refrain we sing:
“All of us go down to the dust” –
as we assemble altars of remembrance with photographs
and speak aloud the names
of our beloved dead.
It’s a reality especially impossible to ignore
for a congregation whose place of worship
sits on the grounds of a cemetery –
with loved ones buried a short walk away from where we now sit.
“To lose someone is to lose a world,”
Riley writes,
“Everything that remains in their absence so too is altered.
The familiar becomes strange.
Even those who are ready to pass may still weep at death’s door.
Death hurts.
We don’t have to pretend otherwise.”
When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping,
he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.
Death hurts.
Jesus began to weep.
We don’t have to pretend otherwise.
***
What a gift:
This story
on this All Saints Sunday.
What a gift:
This particular Jesus from the fourth gospel
who experiences the same kind of grief as we do,
who weeps for death itself.
See how he loved him!
For all the death,
for all the grief,
for all the tears,
the story doesn’t end there.
In the midst of doubts and derision, questioning his capacity to heal,
of accusations and laments that he didn’t come sooner,
of his own tear-clouded eyes and the literal stench of death,
Jesus marches right up to the tomb –
he goes to where the death is –
and cries aloud:
“Lazarus, come out!”
Here is a story that confronts death
head-on.
And here is a story that speaks into death
with a word of life:
Death be now,
but never last.
***
A tomb once sealed with a stone.
A weeping Mary.
A disciple called by name.
If it sounds like another story…
it should.
Mary Magdalene thought death be now –
end of story.
Early on the first day of the week,
while it was still dark,
Mary came to the tomb
to grieve for her friend:
“Tell me where you have laid him!” (Sound familiar?)
Called by name – “Mary!” –
she runs from the tomb,
unbound by the weight of death-be-now,
freed to proclaim death-never-last:
“I have seen the Lord!”
Death is no more the last word of Lazarus’ story
than it is the last word of Jesus’ story –
and our story.
Death be now –
and so we weep, fully and honestly –
but never last –
and so we trust –
in a God who weeps with us,
a God who does and will wipe
every
last
tear
from our eyes.
Alleluia. Amen.
