“A Weep of Faith”
John 11:1-44
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
4/6/14
One can read the account of the death and resuscitation of
Lazarus as a kind of summary of the Gospel according to John. This story either recapitulates or
foreshadows the basic affirmations and the overall proclamation of John’s
entire work.
To illustrate what I mean, back in the fourteenth verse of Chapter
1, John writes that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen
his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”
In Chapter 11, Jesus echoes John’s early commentary when he
says, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so
that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
In the story of Lazarus, John invites us to witness the
Word Made Flesh striding toward two different tombs in the glorious grace of
timeless resolve and perfect Love. The
first tomb does not belong to Jesus, but John connects the tombs intimately and
inextricably. And he connects them not
only to each other, but also to the very beginning of the Father’s primordial
intent, and to the Son’s experience along the way.
Let’s walk back and forth with this story a little more.
The very first words of John proclaim that “In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him…What
has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
When Jesus says to Lazarus’ grieving sister, Martha, “I am
the resurrection,” he makes this claim because he is also the bright light of
“the life” who is coming into the world, for the world.
Another central concern of the fourth gospel has to do with
acknowledging Jesus’ identity. In John,
believing that Jesus is the Word Made Flesh constitutes the essential
tenet of the Christian faith. So every
moment of life, every experience of joy and pain is a chance to deepen in
transforming belief. However, for the
fourth evangelist, belief is not a “knowledge is power” thing. Belief reveals and connects us to the
capacity to love as we are loved.
“Just as I have loved you, you should love one another,”
says Jesus in Chapter13. “By this
everyone will know that you are my disciples,” that is to say: ‘that you
believe in me.’ So, for John, to believe
is to love, and to love is to experience and to share the promise of “eternal
life.”
It is the entombed Love within all humankind that Jesus
comes to resuscitate. And Martha makes a
valid observation. When love dies and
begins to decay, it turns foul with the stench of selfish apathy and fear. So, Jesus invites her back into the
liveliness of love. “Did I not tell
you,” he asks, “that if you believed, [if you loved me,] you would see
the glory of God?”
With the same compelling grace the risen Jesus calls Peter
out of his own tomb. Three times Jesus
asks, “Peter, do you love me?” This is Jesus’
vividly loving way of asking, ‘Peter do you believe in me?’
In John’s gospel, when John the Baptist first lays eyes on
Jesus, he surprises his own disciples by blurting out, “Look, here is the Lamb
of God!” Expecting a charismatic,
political messiah who will recruit, motivate, train and lead rebel fighters
against Rome, John’s followers whisper, “Where are you staying?”
What they are asking is: ‘Where’s the camp? Where do we meet to train the guerillas?’
“Come and see,” answers Jesus.
Nathanael asks Philip if anything worth paying attention to
can come out of Nazareth. And Philip
replies, “Come and see.”
When Jesus treats a Samaritan woman with the redeeming Love
of kindness and respect, she hurries back to her town to tell her neighbors,
“Come and see.”
In John 11, Jesus asks where they have laid Lazarus’ body,
and Mary and Martha turn to him and say, “Come and see.”
Hearing those loaded words of invitation, Jesus realizes
that he faces a turning point. At this
moment, as the misty genesis of creation opens toward a decisive revelation of
eternity, Jesus stands on a kind of cosmic fulcrum when past, present, and
future begin to coalesce.
This “twinkling of an eye” moment happens within the limits
of Jesus’ own natural life, and beside a stone tomb – a place of clock-stopping
finality. But it is a holy and eternal
moment that happens outside of time, as well, because to enter that moment with
full surrender and intent means to act with both pre-historic and apocalyptic
creativity. To come and see at
this particular moment, to speak and act in the called-for manner of Love, will
demand from him a leap of faith, and a commitment from which he cannot turn
back. To utter life-restoring words into
Lazarus’ tomb will reveal that spirit and matter are one – just as the Word and
Flesh are one – just as the Father and the Son are one.*
Jesus knows that to take this step will seal the certainty
of his own tomb, because the Caesars, Pilates, and Caiaphases of the world –
those who separate matter and spirit, and who enjoy the wealth and the power
defensible only by regarding matter as profane, as nothing more than material means
to material ends – they will not tolerate anything or anyone who challenges
their privileged authority.
When Jesus speaks life into Lazarus’ tomb and shines the
light of life into the vanquished darkness of the grave, he knows that Word
will get out: Jesus is healing the wound that has separated Spirit and Matter. And when that Word gets out, then things like
poverty, epidemic disease, war, prejudice, pollution of earth, water and air,
global climate change, these are not physical, political issues at all. They are profound spiritual and moral
challenges to the very heart of creation, because the damage being done is not
simply to things of the world but to the very being of God, and
to all that God loves.
Power will react violently to such news because it cannot
carry the responsibilities of Love with humility and grace. Power will always choose the tomb, because
Power mistakes the tomb for a fortress.
Facing this defining moment of permanently altering, loving
action with and for all of creation, Jesus weeps.
Transformational moments are like that. They are grief-stricken moments of surrender
and commitment, moments of dying to self and being raised to a new life in
which God overwhelms us with our capacity for the active and vocational Love of
agape.
When Jesus says to Lazarus, “Come out!” he is speaking to
us. He is inviting us to recognize that,
in truth, there is nothing in life or death that can separate our
physical, temporary, imperfect human existence from the eternal holiness and
wholeness of God.
Within every tomb there lies not merely a soul, but a body
ready to rise.
On the other side of every failure there stands a new
person, newly animated and empowered to offer, to ask for, and to receive
forgiveness.
With every experience of grief we endure, we have the
chance to realize and to embrace anew the earthen-jarred treasure of all
relationships, of all Love given and received.
Those first steps on new feet are hard, though. Our legs remain bound and our faces
covered. We need help to shed the clingy
clothes of death. Part of the church’s
prophetic work is to teach us to help one another to molt out of our rancid
burial rags. And as John reminds us, we
do that not by casting condemnations, but by seeing through the pall of
deathliness and into the shining image of God within self, neighbor, and earth,
then offering the healing love of Christ to one another.
John also reminds us that such love begins with tears. To die to life as we knew it and to rise to
life as God offers it begins with a purging weep of faith. As I wrestled with all of this, I found
myself remembering one of those blessed and excruciating weeps of faith.
Marianne and I spent part of this last weekend at my dad’s
mountain house in Little Switzerland, NC.
It was a pre-Alaska visit with our son, Ben. His girlfriend, Elizabeth, and our daughter,
Elizabeth, were there, as well.
On Friday morning, April 4th, as I sat alone in
the main room of the house working on this sermon, a memory surfaced. I recalled another day that I sat alone in
that same room, in that same chair, and it was exactly ten days shy of eighteen
years ago.
Monday, April 15 of 1996 was my first day on the job as
pastor of my first church. Our family
had spent the previous week moving into the Cross Roads manse, but had slipped
away to the mountains for the weekend while my new congregation celebrated and
said goodbye to their interim pastor.
The afternoon of Sunday, the 14th of April, we
packed up, cleaned the house, and prepared to head back to Mebane. There were a few house-closing chores left,
so Marianne took the kids and the dog and walked them down the gravel road
while I took care of those details. I
would pick them up at the bottom of the mountain.
After completing the chores, I fell into the upholstered arms
of that old swiveling rocker and stared through the big plate-glass
windows. The still-bare branches of
hickory, poplar, and locust trees lay against the gray sky like an exquisite tatting. As I sat in that chair in that still and
darkened house, the reality of the new vocation to which I had been called, and
to which I had committed myself and my family grabbed me. It overwhelmed me. And I wept.
Actually, that understates things.
I blubbered like a five-year-old on the first day of kindergarten.
All the in-between-times had passed. All the preparations were over. The next morning, I would begin more than a
new job. I would begin a new life, a
life about which I knew virtually nothing.
‘Allen, come on out!
It’s time to love like you’ve never loved before. Believe me, you can do it. Come and see.’
The last thing I am saying is that you have to become a
pastor to experience a weep of faith.
We all have our April 14ths when we face the implications of letting
Caesar have what is his, and rendering to God what is fully and inalienably
God’s. In all things and with all
people, our vocation is to leap into life-renewing, Lazarus-raising Love.
Go ahead and shed your tears, because you and I, brothers
and sisters, even you and I, are givers, receivers, and proclaimers of the Love
that raises Lazarus.
*While I do not quote either Richard Rohr or Philip Newell directly, I am grateful to both of these teachers for helping me to understand the oneness of spirit and matter in the creation.
*While I do not quote either Richard Rohr or Philip Newell directly, I am grateful to both of these teachers for helping me to understand the oneness of spirit and matter in the creation.
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