Dead King Death

Propers: The Fifth Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A colleague of mine in seminary used to wax philosophic about how the difference separating humans from beasts was our understanding of death. We are dominated by our mortality in a way that other animals simply are not.

Put a pig in a pen, he would say, and feed that pig and clean it and keep it safe, but every morning sharpen an axe in front of it while looking it right in the eye—that pig won’t care. That pig has what it needs for the day, and worries not for tomorrow. Yet do the same to a man: house him, feed him, care for him, but every morning sharpen an axe in front of him while looking him right in the eye—that man’s soul will be filled with dread. And in time that dread might well drive him mad.

A less macabre example might be the family dog. As we grow we start to ask who we are, what we want out of life, and what our place in this world ought to be. We have to grapple with maturing, aging, and eventually dying. It niggles at us. The Germans call it weltschmerz, “world-pain.” But none of that bothers a dog. A dog is happy simply being a dog, not a care in the world as to its age or its purpose or what it wants most out of life. A dog knows its own nature, and is content.

Everything that lives in this world dies. Yet humans experience the dominion of death in ways that our fellow creatures do not. And this anxiety dogs us from cradle to grave. We have to get good grades to get a good job to earn a good salary. We have to plan for the future, for we know our time is short. And fear of this motivates so many of our sins. We try to buy youth, for example, in our clothes, in our cars, in our hair dyes and wrinkle creams and little blue pills. It’s all denial.

And we hoard things: money, possessions, properties, and in times of crisis, apparently, food and soap and guns and toilet paper—as though these will make us safe. As though if we just buy enough, consume enough, possess enough, time will pass us by. Natural disasters won’t occur. Viruses will ignore us, because we’ve bought all the right things. It would be laughable if it weren’t so damn dumb.

This is why a culture of consumption is a culture of death. Not just because it ruins the environment and victimizes the vulnerable, but because we waste our whole lives chasing after lies and junk. And at the end of it all, the only thing we have to show for it is a house full of stuff we didn’t need that our children now have to sort through and throw away.

But we all buy into it—don’t we?—because it’s familiar. Because we’re used to it. Because it’s the devil we know. And a world in which death is the final arbiter of all things is a world in which violence, dealing death, is the measure of greatness. And so we wage wars, to stimulate economies, so that the rich get richer and the poor get screwed. And all of our movie gods and rock stars and political princes live like they’re immortal, like they’re forever young. But they’re not. And deep down they all know it. But they keep acquiring more, because they’re too afraid to stop.

Jesus shows up this morning and throws a monkey wrench into the whole works. For three and a half years now He’s been wandering the Galilee, coming down into Judea, roaming out amongst the gentiles, healing the sick and feeding the hungry and occasionally raising the dead—quietly, privately, secretly. But now He knows His time is short. Now He knows the great battle is at hand. And it all comes to a head with the sudden death of His friend.

Lazarus, Mary, and Martha are siblings. They have a nice little place about two miles outside of Jerusalem. And when Jesus visits Jerusalem, as He does several times a year for the high holy days, He often lodges with them. They’re His friends. They know Him. They might even be from the Galilee, in which case He could’ve grown up with them. So when Lazarus gets sick, a sickness unto death, they send for Jesus, for they know what He can do.

When Jesus first hears of Lazarus’ illness, He tarries for two days before heading out. And at first blush this might seem callous, yet when He arrives, they find that Lazarus has been dead for four days. Even had Christ and His disciples set out immediately, they would not have made it in time. And Jesus knew it. Lazarus and his sisters must be people of some prominence, for the whole region appears to have come out to mourn—including crowds from Jerusalem, the capital city; if not the Big Apple, surely the Big Fig. And Jesus sees them mourn, and weeps.

How providential that we read this story now, when we too see our lives disrupted by disease, and dare to wonder: Where is God? Is this His punishment, His wrath? Is He powerless to do anything about it? What is God’s relationship to death? Yet here is God in Jesus—for what God is in His eternity, Jesus is in time—and He weeps. He mourns. God does not will this calamity. God is not insensate to our tears. And so, with a loud voice—the same Voice that called time and space into being—Jesus calls out, “Lazarus, come forth!” And the dead man gets up.

Mark you, it has been four long days in the Mediterranean heat. The body has begun to decay. He stinketh. And indeed, in the folklore of the region, it was often held that the soul, the life and mind of a man, might linger for three days after death. And so “four days” means that he is well and truly dead, dead in body, dead in soul. When we read these miracles we may be tempted to think, “Oh, they didn’t understand biology. They didn’t understand cell decay.” Horse apples.

They understood the things of life and death better than we ourselves. They butchered their own animals, cared for their own elderly, buried their own dead. They knew what four days in the desert does to corpse. They knew it was impossible for Lazarus to just get up again. And yet at the Word of the Lord—the Logos, the Reason, the meaning behind it all—Lazarus comes forth. And the entire dominion of death is revealed to be a sham.

They all go nuts, of course. I mean, who wouldn’t? This was no quiet family miracle, no resuscitation of someone maybe close to death or on the edge. This was a pile of rotting meat made back into a man before all the wide and wild eyes of Judea. This was a slap in the face to our whole worldview, the throwing down of God’s gauntlet before the unholy trinity of the devil, the world, and the flesh. In this one act, this one word, Jesus upends everything we think we know of life, death, and reality.

No more does death have dominion. No more does fear need hold us sway. For if God can raise up the dead with a word—then everything we know is changed. And the powerful have no power. And the wealthy have no wealth. And the violent have all been revealed for the impotent fools that they are.

I wish I could say that this miracle transformed all of our hearts and minds. But really it just scared us out of our wits. For we have spent thousands of years in thrall to death. And if this Man can just dismiss it with less than a wave of His hand—! My God, who is He? My God, what is He?

And so we will try to kill Him. We will try to reinstate the dominion of death by all the hellish means at our disposal: by the lash, the thorns, the nails, the spear. We will pour into Him all of our hatred, all of our violence, all of our satanic worship of death, and we will crucify this Galilean who dares upset the order of things and raise Him high upon the Cross for all the world to see and despair! See, see that He is dead! See, see that death is king!

O, Lord, we are such fools. Yet O, Lord, You love us so. In His infinite wisdom, infinite compassion, Jesus will take all of our violence, every lash, every cut, every blow, and absorb it all within Himself. And there He will drown it in the ocean of His love. And when we cast Him down into the depths of hell, the kingdom of Hades, the dominion of death—there He will conquer. Not as an army over the foe, but as light conquers darkness, as day conquers night, as shadows evaporate before the rising of the sun.

And there will be no more darkness, no more dying, no more hell. They have been broken with a word, with a life, with a gush of blood and water.

Someday you will die. And all you have accumulated, all you have consumed, will pass away, rotting in the tomb. But all you have given, all you have loved, all you have shared, will shine like gold in the hearts of God’s saints. And when even your body and soul have decayed—then you will hear the clear, commanding call of Christ: “Lazarus, come forth!”

And the dead man will get up.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.