When I was a teenager in Vermont there was a family down the road from us with three children roughly my age, and my brothers and I became good friends with all of them. We shared their taste in books, movies, and music, and our families both had reputations in town for being not quite normal, them on account of being Jewish, and we--Californians. And so on the weekends and after school one or more of us was usually to be found over at their old white two-story house by the crossroads of the village. We loved their father, brilliant psychologist with a gray beard and a hearty laugh, but their mother was a mystery to us. She often seemed overwhelmed by the presence of so many children in her house and would become silent and withdrawn, as if bearing a deep, unspoken grief.
Over the next several years, her sadness turned into suicidal depression. She made several unsuccessful attempts, so nobody was surprised when my mother got a phone call one night, the summer before my senior year in high school, telling us she had taken her own life. She had been missing for several days when news came from a motel in a town 50 miles away. She had checked in for a week, hung a Do Not Disturb hanger on the door, and swallowed a bottle of pills. The motel manager found her when the housekeeper noticed the smell.
The next day I stopped by the house on my way home from school to say hi. The younger brother was there and we talked a little. His father had taken him and his brother and sister along when he’d gone down to identify the body. I must have looked surprised at this because he said, “I’m glad I went. I needed to see her and say good-bye. I had to know that she was really dead.”
My friend was describing an experience our society does its best to avoid. The modern hospital and mortuary industries keep us insulated from a reality our ancestors all knew well—from the instant we exhale our final breath we begin to decay. We leave it to others to tend to the dead, and this spares us having to see the bodies we love beginning the process of dissolution. This may be a mercy, but it also may prevent us from reckoning wholeheartedly with the finality of death. We rush the body off to the crematorium and we hurry our emotions along to positive thoughts about how “he’s in a better place now.” We have to sneak off to grief counselors and support groups because the people around us do not hold a place for mourning. We get a few days of “bereavement leave” and then we’re expected to move on and get back to work.
But the bible does not shy away from death. The vision of Ezekiel begins with a great valley full of countless human bones, old and weathered and dry. The gospel begins with the news of Lazarus’ death and Jesus’ resolve to go to Judea, in spite of the threat of assassination. With these readings we are coming to the end of Lent, a season that began on Ash Wednesday with the remembrance of our own mortality, and climaxes on Good Friday, Christ’s own confrontation with the shadow of death that looms over all of us. In the church we create a visible sign of his entry into this struggle by veiling the figure of Christ the King that hangs above the communion table.
John’s Gospel shows us two sides of Jesus as he approaches the final conflict. On the one hand he is fully in control, knowing exactly what’s going on and what he’s supposed to do. If it is God’s will that Lazarus should die so that Jesus can give us an unmistakable sign of his glory, so be it. He will even play a little cat-and-mouse game with his disciples about it. On the other hand, on his way to the tomb he meets the dead man’s grieving sisters, and he is stricken with the loss of his friend and Mary and Martha’s innocent faith in his power to save. Jesus weeps.
The raising of Lazarus is a sign that we too should believe that Jesus Christ is resurrection and life—the gift through whom the Spirit of God reverses the finality of death. But Lazarus has been granted only a reprieve—he will die again. Jesus has done something miraculous for him, bending time backward, if you will, so that the decaying corpse is once again the living, breathing man. But this mighty work is only a sign, only a gesture in the direction of what God will do for Jesus, and through him for us, beginning in him the recreation of all things for a fullness of life that is eternal. Through his resurrection Christ will transform death into a gate that leads us into oneness with the creative energies of God, with all that is and ever was and ever will be so that we are an integral part of the unfolding mystery of existence in God.
But to do this he must pass through that gate himself. He must come face to face with oblivion, and surrender his body to the powers of disintegration. He must pour out his blood onto the earth, and give over his Spirit to God; he must go cold and be laid by those who love him in the darkness of the tomb. He will do this because we must, because he weeps with our grief and suffers in our agony. The image of Jesus that hangs above our altar is veiled, in preparation for his suffering and death. It is a figure of the risen Christ who rules forever from the cross, the One who humbled himself in love and went obediently to death, for which God raised and exalted him as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. But we have obscured him, because we are not ready for that yet. There is a journey we must make with him, the journey to the tomb, where women take him, weeping.
And yet there is another image of the risen and glorified Christ over there, one that is never veiled, though we will see it soon stripped bare and desolate. It is the table itself, the altar of Christ’s sacrifice, which is also the supper table where Jesus sat and broke bread with his disciples, including the one who would betray him.
The church teaches that the risen Christ is also ascended, and so pervades all creation. And yet we who have faith in his name, who gather weekly to praise his resurrection and to commune in his body and blood, are, in a privileged sense, his risen body. We are a body animated by his spirit of love for all persons, even those who are unloved as a matter of general principle. We are a body alive with hope for the healing and rejuvenation of the world, the breaking through of God’s peace into places of division and violence, the rolling down of God’s justice where there is exploitation and despair. And we are also a body that has died with him, that is willing to surrender its material form to the processes of disintegration, to be scattered as grain upon the hillsides for the love of God and of our neighbor.
By his grace we do this in hope, trusting in God’s word to us through him, a word that says “Come out!” “Come out of the tomb! Come out of nothingness, come out of futile striving after what is doomed to perish and decay! Come out and be freed from Death’s bond, for I have recreated you, though you do not yet know it. Death is not the final word. Come out and see, for I will show you—I will go myself and lay down my life for you. I will go into the tomb in your place, and I will set you free forever.”
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