Paul N. Walker
Christ Church
11/1/15
John 11:32
“Step Up, Jesus!”
Welcome to All Saint’s Day, one of the most hopeful days of the year. I love this
day because it sneaks in without any of the commercial trappings and anxieties of
Christmas or Easter, but still packs a powerful theological punch. It is a day when
the sea of troubles, ending in the annihilation of death gives way to another reality.
As our collect says, the last word will not be sorrow, but “those ineffable joys” that
God has prepared for us in heaven. When we die, we will be in God’s presence,
where, in the words of our reading from Revelation, “God himself will be with (us),
and will wipe every tear from (our) eyes.”
The gospel text this morning, however, begins not with God’s presence, but God’s
absence. Mary says to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have
died.” Jesus is absent when Lazarus dies. Mary assumes that if Jesus had been there,
this terrible thing wouldn’t have happened. Mary’s comment – accusation, really – is
an honest starting point for people who live in a world where terrible things
happen. That would be all of us. Most of us do not always feel the presence of God
around us. Most of us have moments of assailing doubt and even despair.
When a terrible thing happens, like the death of someone close to us –as in the
scripture reading today, or any of the little “d” deaths that happen in life, then God
can seem absent. By little “d” deaths, I mean a break up, a job failure, the discovery
of some painful fact about yourself or someone close to you. Where is God in all this?
If He had been here, then the little “d” and big “D” deaths would not have died.
The more nihilistically inclined of us tend to agree with overall sentiment in King
Lear, a chilling, basically hopeless play in which nearly all the principal characters
die. Set 900 years before Jesus actually appears on the earth, it is a play in which
God is conspicuously absent, and even the presence of love does not redeem
anybody or anything.
Literary critic Harold Bloom, the giant in the Shakespeare field, says, “we don’t
want to come away from a performance of King Lear murmuring to ourselves that
(all) domestic (life) is necessarily a tragedy, but that may be the ultimate nihilism of
this play.” Ouch. My experience is that even the best of families have plenty of
moments when Lear’s message rings painfully true, and we wonder why God seems
absent.
In fact, so terrible are the unfolding events in King Lear that Gloucester concludes
that the gods are not just absent, but malicious. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’
gods. They kill us for their sport.” In other words, the gods play around with us as
cruelly as schoolboys pull wings off of flies. But your life doesn’t have to be as tragic
as Lear’s, nor do you have to be as despairing as Gloucester for you to identify with
Mary’s accusation: If You had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. But, You
were not, and it did.
The great religious mystics talk about experiencing God in His absence, otherwise
known as the via negativa. Sounds all well and good for St John the Divine, but, to be
honest, I would much rather experience God’s presence through his presence, rather
than his absence.
I really can’t stand the phrase “step up!” Sports commentators use it all the time.
Somebody on the defense needs to step up and make a play. It’s time for that guy to
step up. Everybody says it all the time. Step up? Tell me something less obvious,
more original and halfway intelligent! You know, I know, the players know, and
everybody in the stands know that somebody has got to step up.
Having said that, there are times in life when I really want to say, “Step up, Jesus!
We’re dying over here. It’s about time for you to step up!” Mary and her sister, Martha,
apparently felt the same way. And finally, Jesus did step up, but He was late in the
game. Lazarus, his friend, their brother, died 4 days earlier. If Jesus had stepped up
earlier, Lazarus wouldn’t have died, at least according to Mary.
Well, here’s the thing. Jesus knew what He was doing. He didn’t step up because it
wasn’t time for Him to step up. In His mind, and for His purpose He stepped up at
the exact right moment. When He hears that Lazarus is sick, He deliberately stays
away for a few days. Why? Because Jesus has not come to the world to make good
people better. Jesus has come to the world to raise dead people to life.
We like to say what Robert Capon says best. “For Jesus came to raise the dead. He
did not come to reward the rewardable, improve the improvable, or correct the
correctable; he came simply to be the resurrection and the life of those who will take
their stand on a death he can use instead of on a life he cannot.”
Nowhere in Scripture is that clearer than in this story about Lazarus. Lazarus was
worth more dead than alive. For Jesus steps up to the tomb, rank with 4 days of
death, despair, decay, and doubt, and cries in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And
what must have been a moment of supreme drama, we are told that “the dead man
came out,” his hands, face and feet bound with cloth. Jesus simply says, “Unbind him,
and let him go.”
The news this All Saint’s Day is not that your little “d” deaths and your Big “D”
deaths will not happen. Nor is the news that you are always guaranteed to feel God’s
presence. The news is way, way better than that. It is that your little “d” and Big “D”
deaths are right up God’s alley – the very places He steps up and into. He goes into
the tombs of your lives.
Jesus should know. He went to His own tomb. Metaphorically, His wings were
torn off by the cruelty of the crucifixion. But His stone was rolled away and He was
raised. He does not simply make better, He makes new. He does not just resuscitate,
He resurrects. And He will go on stepping up in this life until this life passes and
death is no more, when there finally “breaks a yet more glorious day…and the King of
Glory passes on His way.” Amen.