The Fifth Sunday in Lent-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
Lent 5A
March 26, 2023
“The core theme of [today’s gospel]—even
more than Jesus’ love, compassion, and vulnerability—is the defiance of
death. Jesus does not just raise Lazarus
from the grave; he mocks the grave in his almost blasé attitude toward the last
enemy. He…waits two days before setting
out for Bethany, refusing to let death set his agenda.”[i] I read these words in one of my lectionary
commentaries early in the week, and all week, I’ve been pondering that one
phrase---how Jesus refuses to let death set the agenda.
It’s not surprising, considering this is
John’s gospel. John gives us a Jesus who
is “large and in charge.” John makes no
bones about the fact that Jesus is God incarnate, and it is the gospel that
most emphasizes Jesus’s divinity. Throughout
John, Jesus offers 6 or 7 signs (depending on which biblical scholar you talk
to), which are stories of Jesus’s miracles that follow a predictable pattern, and
the purpose of these signs is to reveal God’s glory and to testify to Jesus’
identity as the Son of God. Our story
for today, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, is the last of the signs in
John’s gospel, and it leads to a pivot toward Jesus’ death on the cross. Over and over again, the gospel of John
emphasizes that God has a plan that Jesus is working to fulfill, at a
particular time, and the Jesus in John’s gospel is completely unflappable (even
into his death).
So, of course, John’s Jesus doesn’t let
death set the agenda.
But I’ve been thinking about that all week. What does it mean to not let death set the
agenda? Are we being called to be like
Jesus in this, as his followers and his disciples? Are we, too, being encouraged to not let
death set our agendas? What does that
mean and what would it even look like? Of
course, we see that Jesus doesn’t rush to Lazarus’s death bed to try to prevent
his literal death. And we all know that
when it comes to Death (with a capital D), none of us is really in
control. Capital D death will always set
the agenda for us in terms of how many days, months, years, we have in this
life. And yet….While we have no control
over when or how we die, there are ways that we can still live without letting
death set the agenda. And there are also
so many millions of the little d-deaths that we experience in our lives: the
endings, the changes, the failure of our plans or our health, the unexpected
twists and turns of our lives, the outcomes that, no matter hard we work, we
cannot control. What would it mean for
us to live our lives not letting those little-d deaths set the agenda for how
we react or how we live?
Our patron saint, Thomas, may have
something to teach us about this. In
today’s gospel, we get one of the rare glimpses of Thomas. As Jesus tells the disciples that it’s time
to return to Bethany, a town that is very close to Jerusalem, the chorus of
disciples reminds Jesus that they were just in Jerusalem, and the people there
were actively threatening to stone Jesus.
Thomas replies, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Um, ok, Thomas! What are we supposed to do with that? Perhaps, Thomas, the eternal pragmatist,
grasps something that the rest of the disciples don’t grasp. Perhaps, even as he responds out of his
intrinsic loyalty and faithfulness to Jesus (and thus, making himself Jesus’s
ultimate “ride or die”), he realizes in that moment that this isn’t just about
the death of Lazarus but it is also, in fact, about the death of Jesus and
those who follow him. And he embraces
that. It’s a weird sort of paradox that
in embracing death, he, too, isn’t letting death set the agenda. And that rings true with our experience,
doesn’t it?
When
we can learn to embrace big D death as a companion who actually walks by our
side through our whole life, not something to be feared, then we are no longer
spending so much energy fighting or fending off death. When we learn to use our energy rolling along
with all those little-d deaths rather than fighting to control or bend them to
our will, then in some mysterious, paradoxical way, we aren’t letting death set
the agenda.
So, the gospel reading for today shows
us that Jesus refuses to let death set the agenda, but then there’s one more
twist. In John’s gospel, Jesus is fully
equated with God. And all throughout
scriptures, we’ve seen God express a variety of emotions. God gets angry; God changes God’s mind; God
expresses regret. But it isn’t until Jesus
is invited to come and see the grave of his friend Lazarus that we see a God
who weeps. This large and in charge
Jesus, who knows that he can and will raise his friend from the dead still
weeps at the death of his friend. What
does that mean? What does it mean for us
that we follow a God who weeps?
Later this week, on April 1, my
husband’s full time job will be cut to a quarter time job because his church
has run out of money to pay him and they have exhausted all other options that
were available to them. This is very
much a looming, little-d death for him, for me, for our family. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks
obsessively looking at jobs, occasionally mildly harassing him to update his
resume. Last week, I thought I’d found
the perfect job for his skill set that would support him being able to continue
to care for his church on Sundays. And
after I finally got him to get everything together to apply (over a week of
increasingly more forceful nudges), he went to do it only to find the job
posting had been taken down.
As I’ve continued to ponder this, to try
to deal with my own disappointment without taking it out on him, I’ve begun to
see how I’ve been letting death (with a little d) set the agenda for me. My expectations and demands and attempt to
shape reality into what I think is best have not been life-giving for our
relationship and they haven’t been so great in my relationship with God,
either. I certainly don’t have it
figured out yet, but I’m still wrestling with what it means for me to live into
the call of Jesus’s disciple to not let death set the agenda in this particular
area of my life and in these relationships.
So, your invitation this week is to join
me in pondering either one or both of these questions, looking at where this
gospel may intersect with your life and your faith journey in this moment. What does it mean for you to follow a God who
weeps? And/or what are the ways that you
are letting death set the agenda in your life right now, and how might Jesus be
calling you to change in that?
[i]
Haverkamp, Heid, ed. Everyday
Connections: Reflections and Practices
for Year A.WJK: Louisville, 2022.
quote by Michael L. Lindvall, p
351.
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