Passiontide 2011

Passiontide 2011: Dry Bones, Lazarus: 10.4.11

Throughout Lent we have been getting ourselves in shape for Easter, thinking more about God, simplifying our lives, making sure that we’re ready to journey with the disciples through the disaster and the triumph of Holy Week. Today is the start of Passiontide as Lent intensifies. We stand a week away from Palm Sunday, from the start of the most important week in the whole of human history. Today, in our readings, we are shown exactly what is at stake in the events of the next fortnight. And what’s at stake is nothing less than whether the world will be ruled by fear or by hope, by darkness or by light, by selfishness or love, by evil, by God.

That theme, that conflict, of whether death or life will triumph, is rehearsed throughout the Bible and throughout all of human experience, and explored in the two readings we’ve just heard. One of Jesus’ closest friends, Lazarus, falls gravely ill. Messengers hurry from his sisters, from Mary and Martha, to find Jesus and to bring him back to Bethany because Jesus will make him better, will heal him, as he healed the blind and the deaf and the lame and the possessed. But by the time Jesus arrives, it is too late, much too late. Lazarus is dead. He has been buried. Already his body is decomposing in the sweltering atmosphere of Israel. And all that is left is for Jesus to support his sisters and to grieve with them. Death has taken Lazarus. Death has won, it seems. Then… 

“Jesus cried out with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out.” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

“Unbind him, and let him go.” This is what God longs for. This is what Jesus has come for, come to do, come to achieve. Let him go. Let us go. Let creation go.

Everything that holds us back. Everything that holds us down. Everything that says we are worthless, we are too old, we are too young, we are too quiet, we are too few, we do not matter. Everything that says No.

In Jesus. In Use-d cross and Empty Tomb.

Will be vanquished, swamped, overwhelmed, conquered, defeated. Love is stronger than death, Jesus proves. Life is stronger than the chasm, Jesus lives.

Nothing at all can separate us from God. Nothing at all can stop God’s love from breaking through to hold us and heal us. Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered.   

And that is the message of Lazarus- Unbind him, and let him go. Jesus says to the bystanders- Unbind him, and let him go. Unwrap the mummy from his bandages. But these words are also shouted at the powers of hell, at Satan and his army, at demons and devils and powerful humans who think that power is there only for them, at Gaddafi and Stalin and everyone who fails to see the humanity in the human beings around them. Unbind him, and let him go.

It is the opening salvo of D-Day. It is the human army gathering outside the dark gates of Mordor. It is the gauntlet being thrown down outside a towering skeletal castle. It says to the darkness ‘I am Light and I am coming’. Unbind him, and let him go.

And the words of the prophet Ezekiel have the same thrust, the same promise. Before, Ezekiel and his people had lived in Jerusalem and worshipped in the Temple where God’s presence rested, God’s people in God’s city in God’s promised land. And then came the disaster, a city ransacked, a Temple razed to the ground, a people slaughtered and the survivors taken into exile thousands of miles from home, thousands of miles from God. Now this is Ezekiel’s world.

And from exile he leads the fight-back against those who say God has been defeated, God is dead. At immense personal cost, when only a tiny fragment of God’s people stay loyal, when everything every day says that faithfulness is folly, Ezekiel holds fast. And out of that situation comes this vision. Ezekiel has seen massacres. He has seen fields laden with bodies, their bones picked clean. He knows what it is to lose everything. He and his people know what it is to be utterly lost, cut off from everything precious. From that pale world comes this vision of hope and restoration.

This time it is not about unbinding. This time it is about restoration and re-creation. This time is it about God knitting bones together and breathing life into them. This time it is about restoring a nation as well as individuals. “Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord.” God will act to restore and to rebuild. He will reach into the grave and give life where life once was. Bones will rejoin and sinews will bind them together, and flesh will pour on and skin reform, and they will live again, because of God, and only because of God.

Here we are very close to the heart of the Gospel, to everything God intended in creation, to everything Jesus comes to restore, to everything the Holy Spirit longs for us to become. We are not built for fear and trembling. We are created to live full lives with rejoicing to the glory of our glorious God. God calls us out of our tombs. God will revive our desiccated skeletons. God will breathe new life into our lungs. This is what God longs to do. And this is what he does in Christ Jesus, who is killed by dark powers and rises again in victory.

And what of us? What does this mean for us today? Two things. The first is that we need to take the next fortnight very seriously indeed. We need to keep on keeping Lent. We need to make coming to Church on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter Eve and Easter Sunday an absolute priority, so that we can truly engage with God’s salvation plan, so we can truly enter into the events of that most turbulent week. We need to be sure of what we believe and why we believe it and be ready to explain our faith to others, to tell them that we don’t go to Church because of tradition or weakness or habit but only and always because God’s love to us deserves our best response.

The second is this. Whatever grave clothes, whatever guilt or regret or injury, holds us back from dancing Jesus says; Unbind him and let him go. Jesus comes to give us life, life in all of its fullness. God’s deepest desire and longing is that whatever past hurt we bear with us we can lay it down and rejoice again. Unbind him and let him go.

Let’s pause to think for just a moment here. And let me ask you: When we were reading about Lazarus being buried in the tomb, and wrapped round with thin cloths to keep the bones together, far from the light and far from the sun, what did you think of? When has it felt like that for you? What is making it feel like that today? And in the dryness and the heat of that Valley, where the bones are scattered wide, what did you think of then? When does life feel as parched and joyless and as dead as that? In the nighttime, what is it that keeps you from sleep?

Let’s be clear. Pain and death and illness and grief and despair are real and agony. We can’t ignore them and hope they’ll go away. God doesn’t ignore them. He takes them so seriously that he beats them. God defeats them in Christ Jesus.

And we can find the strength to endure and to carry on in God’s longing to restore the scattered bones and to unbind Lazarus from his grave-clothes. Because, and this is where our faith gets incredibly exciting, it is not just a longing. It is not just a nice thing God would like to happen someday. It is an action, the action of Holy Week, of Good Friday and Easter Day.

God’s answer to Libya and Japan, to Afghanistan and Ivory Coast, to the gulag and the concentration camp is the empty tomb. God’s answer to the fear of terrorism and the fear of unemployment and the fear of illness is the empty tomb. God’s answer to the burdens we bear with us every day and the angry questions we rightly throw at him, his answer to the secrets we hide and the fears we dare not name.

To all these and so much more God’s answer is the empty tomb of Lazarus and the Valley of Dried Bones after the bones have turned back into living flesh. Above all, wondrously, amazingly, God’s answer is the empty tomb on Easter morn.

“Jesus cried out with a loud voice: “Lazarus, come out.” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”