Life

Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

          Preachers must choose their words carefully, especially when addressing a text like the one for today.  We’ve all lost a loved one to death.  Some of us yearned to have one more year, maybe one more month, just one more day with that person, and yet it did not happen.  The story of Mary, Martha, and their brother Lazarus can be presented in an unrealistic and insensitive manner.  Mary and Martha did get their brother back.  We don’t know how long they had Lazarus back in the family fold, but according to this story by the power of God he was raised to life again.

          That doesn’t happen for us.  Not in the literal way it is presented in this profound story.  In fact, it is cruel even to hint at it.  So the preacher must do his or her homework carefully in order to understand the meaning of this story and how it functions in the Gospel of John.

          The first question we tend to ask of this story and others like it is this, “Did it really happen?  Did a man who was dead for four days really come to life again and rejoin his family?”  That’s the way we are taught to think, using the left side of our brain, which is logical, rational, analytical, objective, scientific. That’s why some of you’re such good engineers.  You use the left side of your brain well.  Most of us are left brain dominant, and we want to know, did it really happen?   We all must answer that question for ourselves, but I can say with certainty that that would not have been the first question asked by the original hearers of this story.  Their world was pre-scientific.  They were right brain dominant, where there is mystery, creativity, emotion, and imagination.  For them, the miraculous was as common as rain falling through the windows of heaven or a lame man taking up his pallet and walking.

          This story of Jesus calling Lazarus from the tomb, from the grip of death, functions in the Gospel of John primarily to say something about Jesus, not Lazarus.  Lazarus is a prop in this story who helps reveal something important about who Jesus was.  The punch line, the driving force of the story, is not Jesus’ command at the end, “Lazarus, come out.”  No, his words to Martha back in verses twenty-five and twenty-six drive this story.  Lazarus had died.  Martha was upset, perhaps even angry that Jesus didn’t respond promptly when he received news of Lazarus’ illness.  “Lord, if you had been here,” she lamented, perhaps angrily, “my brother would not have died.” 

          Jesus then reassured Martha and revealed something important about himself with these words:

I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?

          Theologians today call this one of the I AM statements of Jesus.  Most of us read these words and miss the most important part.  Not a Jew of Jesus’ time, though.  When Jesus uttered the words “I AM the resurrection and the life,” they would have remembered back to ancient days, when their forefather Moses stood beside a burning bush on Mt. Sinai.  There God called Moses to be the deliverer of God’s people who were in slavery in Egypt.  “But who shall I say sent me?” Moses wanted to know.  Surely the people will ask, so what is your name? 

          “I AM THAT I AM,” God told Moses.  “Tell the people, ‘I AM has sent me.’” 

“I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus revealed to Martha.  John is saying here that in the person of Jesus the great I AM had come to deliver the people again.  He came in Jesus as both resurrection and life. Here’s what he said, “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  Then he looked directly at Martha and asked, “Do you believe this?”

          Today we’re asked to think differently. We are taught from our earliest days to think with the left side of our brain.  This text requires that we use the right side of our brain: mystery, intuition, metaphor, creativity, poetry.  Isn’t it true that sometimes people die before they’re dead?  I’ve seen it.  Sometimes our hearts continue to beat, we continue to function, going through the motions of life, but inwardly—spiritually, emotionally, in relation to our friends and family and work—we are dead.  The life of living is squeezed out of us by pain, disappointment, and dark clouds of depression.  Nothing is fun anymore.  Nothing is exciting.  We become entombed, “our hands and feet bound with strips of cloth,” and the joy of living dries up.  So the question of this text is this: is it possible to live again?

           Now, with your right brain, listen again to what Jesus said: “I AM the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live….”

          Can you hear the message of this text?  It is a call to life, a call to live, a challenge to engage this wonderful world God has given us and the extraordinary people around us.  This is a resurrection text for those who are dead in spirit and soul.  It is a challenge to love again, to matter again, to lift our voices in celebration of the gift of life.  It says, “Don’t give in to your tomb.  Don’t let darkness win.  A deliverer has come with resurrection power in his voice, and he says to us, ‘Come out….  Unbind him and let him go.”

          I was in a meeting Tuesday, and someone mentioned one of my favorite books, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl. It is a must read at some point in your life.  I will even loan you my copy, which was given to me by David and Karen Ivey a few years ago. Victor Frankl was a Viennese psychotherapist who was imprisoned in the Nazi prison camps.  He was in Auschwitz and three other camps.  He lost both of his parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife. 

          During his years in the camps, Frankl exercised his medical training by studying his fellow prisoners and their response to conditions in the prison camp.  He observed that under the same deplorable, dehumanizing conditions some prisoners fared better than others.  Some people crumbled immediately.  Their mental health deteriorated quickly, and they soon died.  Others facing those exact conditions continued to do their work, and some even reached out to help their fellow prisoners.  So as a psychiatrist, Frankl wanted to know why.  What enabled some not only to endure it but also to assume a caretaker role.  Here’s his conclusion.  Those who survived were driven by a deep sense of meaning.  The suffering itself, he said, was meaningless; it was neutral.  They gave it meaning by how they responded to it.  Life, he decided, is not primarily a quest for pleasure or a quest for power, as many of the great psychologist of the day were saying.  No, life is primarily a quest for meaning.  Here’s another way to say that: life is primarily a quest to live.

          Here is one of the great lines from his book:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.  (Pp. 65-66)

          That, Frankl concluded, is the function of religious faith.  Faith gives meaning to life.  When all the other stuff is stripped away, when you get to the core, the essence, faith defines us and helps us choose our response to our circumstances.

          This text, which must be carefully mined today, is more about living than it is about dying.  And by “living” I don’t mean just having a heartbeat and blood coursing through our veins.  It is about living with meaning, purpose, having something beyond you that has grasped you, something of ultimate importance to which you have given your life.  Jesus called Lazarus out of death.  Unbind him!  There is living to be done.  Unbind him!  There is a new kingdom coming.  Unbind him!  God is delivering the world from bondage.  Unbind him and let him live!

          On this Lenten Sunday morning I declare that God is still delivering the world from bondage. God is calling out those have died early, inwardly—spiritually, emotionally, in relation to your friends and family and work.  If pain, disappointment, and depression have squeezed life out of you, God’s deliverer has a powerful resurrection word for you.  “Come out,” he says.  “Unbind him and let him go.  Let him live!”  Oh, what wondrous love!

Closing Prayer 

          O Lord, unbind us.  Unbind us all from the things that are killing us.  And use us in your great Kingdom’s work.  Amen.