“Lazarus, come out”
Passion Sunday marks the beginning of what I like to call deep Lent in reference to an older term, Passiontide, where already there begins to be a more intense focus on the meaning and purpose of Christ’s Passion. The Cross is veiled in Passiontide. Why? Because we see, as it were, but in “a glass darkly”. We are like the mother of Zebedee’s sons. We think that we know what we want but in truth we don’t. We enter into the Passion of Christ so that we may be called out of our ignorance and folly and into what God seeks for us, the redemption of our humanity in and through the Passion of Christ. Our Lenten meditations this year have been on the Scenes of Bethany, looking at the significance of Bethany in the pageant of Lent and now especially in terms of the Passion of Christ.
We go up to Jerusalem by way of Bethany. Luke names it as the place of departure for Christ’s Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem and the place of our Lord’s Ascension; the place, in fact, of the comings and goings of our salvation. Bethany presents, as well, the very character of our Christian lives in the forms of loving attention to God’s Word and Son and loving service in the Body of Christ. The work of Martha’s hands finds its true meaning in the collectedness of Mary’s heart.
John tells us that Bethany is the village of Mary and Martha; that Bethany is where Christ raised their brother Lazarus from the dead; and that Bethany is where Mary anointed Christ’s feet with the oil for his burying. The Passion and the Death of Christ, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ, and our life together in Christ are purposefully and profoundly signified in the scenes of Bethany. In short, Bethany plays the fugue of our salvation in the interplay of action and contemplation, in the counterpoint of Passion and Resurrection, the cross and the glory.
Bethany, quite simply, is the place of the preparation for the Passion. There we begin to see the point of the Passion. The point is the Resurrection in and through the Passion. The Resurrection is present in the Passion. Easter is not some sort of fairy tale ending to an otherwise tragic story, any more than our spiritual life is merely the icing on the cake of our everyday lives, something nice, perhaps, but not essential, an added dimension, an afterthought, as it were. No. It must be the essence of our lives if it is to be our life at all, the “one thing needful”.
Bethany is the place of the wake of Lazarus. We come to the wake of Lazarus in Bethany to learn the meaning of the Resurrection in and through the Passion of Christ.
The Gospels record three resurrection miracles of Jesus. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell of our Lord’s raising the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue. Luke alone tells of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. John alone tells of the raising of Lazarus. All three raisings from the dead have this in common. They are all resuscitations. They are all a return to this present natural existence and not its elevation to spiritual perfection and fulfilment. They are each returned to life. But they must each die physically and actually again. And yet, they are raised to life again for a purpose.
In these resuscitations, we learn who is the truth and the end of our life, both now and forever. They serve to point us to the true Resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ whose Resurrection is the hope of our resurrection to the life that shall not end. That holy hope grounded on that holy fact becomes our life. They show us that our life now as well as then belongs to the Resurrection of Christ. In this sense, they are indeed resurrections. Christ is their life and ours, now and not just at the end of our days.
The most poignant and the most dramatic of these resurrections is surely the raising of Lazarus. Why? Because he is, quite literally, the most far gone. After all, Jairus’ daughter had only just died when Christ was called to her bedside. Christ has compassion on the poor bereaved widow of Nain at that moment when the funeral procession is carrying her only son out of the city on the way to the graveyard. But Lazarus has been dead and buried four days already. We come to his wake, which in warmer climates follows, it seems, rather than precedes the burial for the reasons which Martha voices. Lazarus is so far gone, that, as she says, “Lord, by this time, he stinketh”. That’s pretty far gone!
Lazarus is truly dead and buried. But “that they may believe that thou didst send me”, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, “Lazarus, come out”. And the dead man came out. Now that’s some wake!
The whole moving scene shows us our Lord’s Passion and his Resurrection. He comes to Bethany after Lazarus’ death, knowing already that Lazarus had died, but not knowing what the effects of that death will mean. Just so, he goes to Jerusalem knowing that he must die, but not knowing what the experience of that death will be.
He goes free willingly. Here he enters freely into the pathos of that deeply moving scene of grief. Their grief becomes his. Their sense of an absence where there was once a presence becomes his. He identifies with them in their sorrow. He is “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” and upon seeing where they laid him, behold, “Jesus wept”. He weeps for his friend, “see how he loved him”. And yet, we, too, are his friends for whom he weeps “sweating, as it were, great drops of blood” (Luke 22.44) as Luke describes Christ’s agony in Gethsemane. His crucifixion is the price of our redemption. See how he loves us! He wills to bear not only our deaths, the separation of soul and body, but also the meaning of death, our self-willed absence from God which results in the sense of absolute dereliction, the sense of being utterly God-forsaken.
He bears this in his love for the Father. The Passion of Christ is his love for us in his essential love for the Father. Everything is gathered into that love and in that love is the meaning of the Resurrection. “I have power to lay down my life and to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10.18). The freedom of the Son’s sacrifice is his love for the Father. The Resurrection flows out of that love to become our life now and at the hour of our death.
“I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10.10). What could be more abundant than the life of the Resurrection made known in and through the Passion, the life which has gathered death into itself and made the tomb a womb of new life, the super-abundant life of our redemption? Christ calls us out of death, out of the tombs of our sins. He calls us into the life of his Resurrection. He calls us into his presence. “I am the resurrection and the life”(John 11.25). It is his word to us at the wake of Lazarus in Bethany.
No doubt, there is much about our lives that, in a word, ‘stinketh’. There is our selfishness, our meanness, our indifference, our despair, our anger, our perversions, our destructiveness, the murder in our eyes, the violence in our tongues, the lust and greed in our souls, the adulteries in our hearts; in short, the long, sordid tale of our miseries and our wickednesses. In some way or other, we are all, like Lazarus, pretty far gone. Yet we enter into deep Lent, into the Passiontide of our Lord, so that we may be called out of those familiar graveyards, that we might hear Christ’s words as words of forgiveness, “unbind him, and let him go”, and so let go of the grave clothes of our sins. We are called out to walk the way of the cross in Passiontide and especially Holy Week. What is that way except the life of the Resurrection moving in us through his Passion?
We walk the way of the cross, not that we may stink the more but that our lives may become a “sweet-smelling savour” through the sacrifice of Christ. When Mary of Bethany anointed the feet of Jesus, “the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment”(John 12.3). We are given this holy time to be raised up like Lazarus in and through what Christ has suffered for us. We are called to “come out” that we may “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us and hath given himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour” (Eph.5.2).
We are bidden to come out of ourselves and into the presence of Christ. Our liturgy is the life of the Resurrection. It shall sustain us through the Passion from which it flows. We come out but only if we heed Christ’s call to us even as he called to Lazarus,
“Lazarus, come out”
Fr. David Curry
Passion Sunday, 2016
Sermon as part of the Lenten Series
“Scenes of Bethany”