Rattling
Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45
April 10, 2011
As you enter, there is a cast iron sign arching over the threshold with the words spelled out in German, “Arbeit macht frei” or “Works makes one free.” Sounds like one of those mottos your parents impressed upon you. But when you are reading and meditating on these words, you are entering Auschwitz, the most infamous of Nazi concentration camps, situated in southwest Poland.
Most people who enter and tour the facility today find language is incompetent to express what they feel. You could call it “awesome” – but not the way young adults use the word today. The awe is the feeling of death, much deeper but not dissimilar to the feeling of death surrounding Jesus, his disciples, sisters Mary and Martha with the death of Lazarus, eleven days shy of Good Friday.
Something odd, yet remarkable happened about a year and a half ago at Auschwitz that demonstrated just how awesome this place is. That sturdy metal sign over the entrance was stolen. Somehow at night thieves came in and sawed the sign into three parts and eventually dumped it a few kilometers away. The Polish government was so unnerved that they almost declared a state of emergency, but did finally catch the hooligans, tried, convicted and sentenced them to jail terms and a large fine. Then the fellows never showed up to jail and are still loose.
What is remarkable was the sacredness rendered to that most ironic of mottos for it hid the most debasing form of death with the pretensions of a life made free by hard work. The Polish government, which has had plenty of its own problems, responded with alacrity at the desecration of this icon. They knew that people cannot forget or ignore the satanic power of such an innocent phrase and the holocaust it enabled. Has anything changed? Death speaks all languages. The Bible and its Gospel does not deny the existence of death, but speaks a loud and contrary word to it.
Prophets were never considered to be normal people in ancient Israel, because when you are speaking for God you end up being a most unusual human being. Ezekiel never pretended to be normal and in the most abnormal of times in Israel’s history, when Babylon destroyed the nation and its temple and led off its leaders into an exile far away, he saw visions that were weird, but too true to ignore. Ezekiel had seen the death of a nation, a culture, a religious way of life, perhaps even the death of God as his people knew it.
What he saw was a pile of bones, a completely dead church, with no flesh and bones to do things, only some dry bones to give some pretence to human life. We’ve seen enough dead churches around, we know what he was seeing. Dry bones no longer speak, but Ezekiel heard them rattling. Through no power of their own, they gathered clumsily together, rattling even louder, until they started sprouting flesh and sinews and knee bones were connecting to thigh bones – and, well, you know the rest of the song. Dry bones are without doubt absolutely dead, the same as God’s former people in exile, the same it can be said of so much of Christianity today. God spoke to death and made us rattle with life.
The episode in John does not begin full of life, for death is in every verse. Lazarus appears in the first instance as an ill man, before we even know his relationship to the famous duo of Mary and Martha, and apparently he is more than ill, he is dying. His sister Mary, the one we remember from Luke who had chosen the best part by simply listening to Jesus, is described anachronistically as the one who will anoint the Lord with her ointment and wipe his feet with her hair – a burial practice. Death is enveloping all concerned, so the sisters send word about Lazarus’ condition to Jesus, who is staying on the other side of the Jordan, the symbolic geography of the next life. Jesus seems to get the message, but tells his disciples that Lazarus’ illness will not be fatal, but an opportunity for God’s glory. He loved the three siblings, and that’s not said about anybody else outside his twelve disciples, but nevertheless he dilly dallies a couple of days longer before deciding to go back to Judea.
The disciples know a different form of death awaits, “Rabbi, they were trying to stone you there before, do you want to go back to that?” Finally, Jesus acknowledges that Lazarus is dead, but that’s all the more reason for him to go back. Something deadly is afloat here, and perhaps the most courageous statement in the Gospels is uttered by Thomas the Doubter who has no doubts that they should all accompany Jesus, “so that we may die with him.”
When the company arrived Lazarus had already been dead four days and that number means he was really dead, no coma or sleeping sickness, but confirmed death. The characters are changed in the face of death, for Martha goes out forthrightly to meet Jesus as he arrives in Bethany, while Mary hunkers down at home paralyzed by her grief, and Martha has to send word back to her sister to get over here a.s.a.p. because the Teacher is calling for you. Mary has defaulted to the lesser portion.
The conversation between Martha and Jesus sounds so familiar as they struggle for words adequate to express and commiserate with one’s grief and loss, and so resort to inadequate pietisms. We still struggle for those words. Jesus, however, tops us all with his most famous I Am declaration, “I am the resurrection and the life….” He is not hiding anything here, pulling no punches, for the “I Am” is the same name by which God identifies himself to Moses out of the burning bush. This is no magical manipulation for I Am the God who gives life. Martha, she who is put down as the sister of the pots and pans, responds initially as if this were church and she gives the proper liturgical refrain, but eventually she gets it and recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God.
That is inspiring, but it does not do the family any tangible good as Mary arrives and everybody is naturally weeping, and in the shortest verse of the Bible, Jesus wept, overcome at the pathos of the human condition where death has the final word. They bring him to the tomb, just like we bring friends to view the casket. The tomb as was normal in this region was a cave, just as the stable was in a cave and Jesus himself would be laid in a cave, and there was a stone placed in front of the entrance.
Take away the stone, Jesus asked, and Martha the Stewart, always the practical one, famously commented, “Lord, he stinketh!” That’s not an issue for Jesus, maybe it was for all the others. Then Jesus does something rare, he prays openly, with full intention that the others would hear him and know God had sent him. He finished by bellowing, “Lazarus, come out!” Lazarus did come out, wrapped in the swaddling bandages of death. “Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus concluded. Arbeit macht frei – work makes you free.
There is no denying the gruesome reality of death in the Gospel of John, so John mentions it at every turn to make sure that you know this really was a resurrection, that death had died. Nothing finds you in more trouble with the powers-that-be than to defeat the powers of death. We never hear the conclusion, but assume that the resolve of the chief priests in John 12 to put Lazarus to death a second time was probably successful, for after all they were successful in the matter of Jesus’ death. At least at first.
Of course, there is a long way to go before we are back at death’s door on Easter morning. Palm Sunday will seem like a victory parade, but the rest of the week it all unravels and most of us want to hear nothing of it. Easter is surreal and too nice without Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. When the bones are rattling, it is not a sign of death approaching, but of life knitting itself back together. But no one is going to tell you that except right here because we are the only ones possessed by God enough to know it and live it out.
We are the Body of Christ and we are being called loudly to come out of our dead ways, to knit together our bones so that we can make others live.
Living churches’ expenses are always more than their income; dead churches don’t need much money! Living churches may have some noisy children; dead churches are quiet as a cemetery. Living churches keep changing their ways of doing things; dead churches see no need for change! Living churches strongly support missions outside of themselves; dead churches keep their money at home! Living churches welcome all classes of people; dead churches stick to their own kind! Living churches’ members look for someone they can help; dead churches’ members look for something to complain about!
Churches that are alive will always have problems; dead churches’ are no problem – no problem at all.
Lazarus, come out, so we can unbind you and set you free.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan