John 11: 1-45
Unbind him and let him go
As I write this the fireworks are going off in Penang for the end of Ramadan. Soon we will be singing the A word and decorating places of worship for the end of the three days Jesus spent in the underworld of the dead, the liminal space between life here and Life itself. The raising of Lazarus prepares us for the mysteries of Easter. It is a simply complex story whose many levels of meaning and paradox form a kind of labyrinth that we have to enter before it begins to make sense.
Why didn’t Jesus go straight to Lazarus whom he loved when he was told that he was seriously ill? He loved Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary and yet, so it seems from the text, because of his personal love for them he waited those two precious days. What power of presence did Jesus propel across this time and distance while Lazarus was dying? His delay can only be understood in another kind of light that he calls the glory of God. When he said he would go, the disciples loyally accompanied him but feared the growing conspiracy against him would soon end his life and theirs. His arrival in Bethany suggests the intimate subtleties of his relationships with his friends.
When he meets their grief and approaches the tomb he is ‘deeply moved and troubled’: better perhaps to say grief-stricken and numbed by the power of death. ‘Jesus wept’ puts it barely. His four days of emptiness and grief were his own preparation for the power of life he would exert over death. In Jewish belief the spirit remained near the body for three days before leaving for good. Four days symbolise an emptiness beyond emptiness.
Martha, ever-practical, warns him not to open the cave-tomb but he overrides her calling to the Father out of his desolation just as he would soon do again as he hung dying on the Cross. Across the strange landscape of this story events and powers, divine and human energies, criss-cross weaving a story we cannot read until we lose and find ourselves in it.
What really happened? What really happens in us when we engage with the power of love’s grief that is stronger than our own death?
