Grief has lingered with me this week. Not much to do with Lazarus or his sisters or his friend Jesus from the hill country. It began with a musty old cupboard underneath a window. I'd filled it with cardboard cartons shortly after we returned to Tucson from exile in the Pacific Northwest. It contained some easily discarded decades-old retirement planners. It contained a copy of the Leach family coat of arms crusted with mold: a blot indeed on my family's escutcheon.
But it also contained old letters, and old photographs, and old prayerbooks, and old appointment diaries. The letters had all been scanned in by my brother Dave, who has since died. The prayerbooks are obsolete (if pretty) and the diaries too.
The photographs included slides from the 1960s taken by my mother and father. Maybe there is a technique to recover them, though they too have probably been scanned.
What has not been preserved, but has survived the mold, are pictures of my past, from college through about 2002. There for example are pictures of a camping trip on Point Reyes in 1977. And from 2000 a picture of a friend in my parent's driveway, on his motorcycle, there to welcome my return from an earlier, solo, exile to the East Coast.
What brought grief up for me in these artifacts, and these pictures, is remembering what I had lost, or never gained, in those years; and those things now slipping away. Friends die, move away, fade. Even die of neglect.
Relationships shift. New ones are painfully bought. Old ones are even more painfully lost.
So as I go back through the ages, seeking what can be saved, and what must be forgotten, old griefs are awakened, connected to new joys or sorrows. Practically speaking, knowing that my brothers' stewardship was more careful than my own, I can refer family members to the essential items in new electronic form.
But what lingers are the memories awoken.
Jesus had no such problem, apparently, with memories awaking. "Lazarus, come out!" he said and he did. Martha and Mary had each chastised him earlier with the worthy words, "if you had been here he would not have died". Not a claim many of us could make, though many have tried. "If I had only'" met by "there was nothing we could do". In all that, "thanks for the memories" seems pretty vague.
Were Martha and Mary ever annoyed with their friend? I think so. But then his grief was genuine. Became genuine. "Where have you laid him?" and "Jesus wept."
The evangelist John can be so abstract it can seem painful, even cruel. "I am glad for your sake that I was not there" is not going to fool anybody.
Yes, you are the son of God. Are you also a friend? Yes. The 'son of Man', better, 'the human one', is a friend and not a stranger. When it comes down to it, he is real. Jesus is real. God is not an abstraction. A difficulty. A philosophical proposition.
The compassion of the Lord is personal, real, and immediate. Lazarus does not go down to the grave unmourned. He does not rise unaided. And when he dies again, not to be resuscitated from a corpse, he or his sisters, God will be with them too.
In the name of God, merciful, compassionate, and wise.
"Jesus wept."
Lazarus rises from death to inevitably face death again. But in this life he is now a sign, anticipating the resurrection I shall know and can know now. -Suzanne Guthrie
In the first eleven verses of the eleventh chapter of the gospel of John, the focus seems to be on Jesus’ delay in responding to the news of his friend’s illness. He seems very cool: hearing this news he stays put another two days.
What kind of friend does that? You or I might, for a start. For practical reasons. Transportation, lack of information, other commitments. But Jesus has a practical reason he does not mention. He has just come from Judah where it has become too hot to hold him. The occupiers are on his trail, and the collaborators are not far behind. The Romans, the Herods. So he has just arrived in Galilee but then turned around and journeyed back through the hill country of Samaria to Judah again. At the risk of his life. But his friend is ill. And so he shows some compassion and bravery in the midst of apparent passive indifference. It’s a risk. But he goes.
Show me where they have laid him. That is what sets him off. Up till now the fancy talk of showing the power of God. Now he has too – if it is there, if it is real. He weeps at the tomb of his friend. Then he calls, “Lazarus, come out!”
The unbinding of Lazarus prompts us to ask, how are we bound? What holds us back from the fullness of life, resurrection life?
Lazarus. The resuscitation of a corpse. Not yet the fullness of resurrection. He will die again, and his sisters will mourn him. Or predecease him.
What does it show us? The power and compassion of God are intermingled. He is not remote. He is on his own time table, for reasons we do not know.
When he comes. In a sense he is already there. In the compassion and the grief. But it is the presence of a friend, a personal touch, and his voice, that brings us to the miracle. The miracle: God’s showing, through extraordinary events, that he is real. That love is stronger than death. That hope, not fear, is at the end.
“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?”
Lord, you consoled Martha and Mary in their distress; draw near to those who mourn, and dry the tears of those who weep. You wept at the grave of Lazarus, your friend; comfort all who sorrow. You raised the dead to life; give to all eternal life.
Grant, O Lord, to all the spirit of faith and courage, that we may have strength to meet the days to come with steadfastness and patience; not sorrowing as those without hope, but in thankful remembrance of your great goodness, and in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those we love. And this we ask in the Name of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
Postcommunion prayer:
Almighty God, we thank you that in your great love you have fed us with the spiritual food and drink of the Body and Blood of your Son Jesus Christ, and have given us a foretaste of your heavenly banquet. Grant that this Sacrament may be to us a comfort in affliction, and a pledge of our inheritance in that kingdom where there is no death, neither sorrow nor crying, but the fullness of joy with all your saints; through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
http://edgeofenclosure.org/lent5a.html
The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt)
Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890), Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, May 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
