Month: June 2021

Lazarus, come out

This would have been the week of ‘last Chapels’, a time of reflection and an attempt to gather up, in my own poor fashion, the meaning of Chapel in the educational life of the School. I want to think about an extraordinary scene in John’s Gospel about Jesus’ engagement with our humanity at times of death; his encounter with us as mourners.

It is the scene of the raising of Lazarus (John 11.38-43). It is the last of three occasions in the Gospels where Jesus meets us as mourners. There is, first, the story of Jesus’ raising the daughter of Jairus who has just died. Talitha cumi, “Little girl, I say to you, arise,” Jesus says in the face of the sceptical ridicule of the attendants (Mark 5. 35-43). It is one of the few Aramaisms, words in Aramaic in the Gospels but then translated into Greek.

There is, secondly, the wonderful story of his encounter with the Widow of Nain on her way in grief to bury her only son. We are meant to feel her grief, her loss, and the way in which the community grieves with her. Yet “do not weep,” Jesus says to her and then to the young man, he says, “arise.” He sat up, we are told, “and began to speak.” And in a marvelous touch, Luke tells us, Jesus “gave him to his mother” (Luke 7.1-17). The story identifies the active principle that moves in all these encounters. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is only on that basis that Jesus can say to her, “do not weep,” meaning, ‘don’t always be weeping’. The divine compassion shown through the humanity of Christ grounds our life in God’s life and as such we are not simply defined by suffering and death, by grief and sorrow. Instead through suffering and death we participate in God’s own life. Such is the meaning of these encounters.

The raising of Lazarus takes place in the context of Jesus with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. An intriguing story, it names the divine reality of the triumph of life over death for us as resurrection. Jesus says explicitly to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life,” radical words which belong to the deep insight of the religious and philosophical traditions in their Christian form. God is life and that life is made known in all of its wonder and mystery in Christ. Lazarus has been dead four days, as Martha points out, saying that “by this time there will be an odor” (or as the King James Version more graphically puts it, “Lord, by this time he stinketh”!). All of these encounters are emphatic about the reality of the body and death. All of them show Jesus not just as another mourner. He is with us in our griefs – they are not denied any more than death is denied – but death is overcome. The Resurrection of Christ testifies to the radical nature of human individuality in and through suffering and death. These stories show us the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in the love of God. That alone changes everything and sets us in motion towards one another in knowledge and love.

(more…)

Print this entry