“Death Defanged”
“Death Defanged”
John 11:1-4
John 11:1-45
Our Gospel for this Sunday has as its focus the issue of death and dying. It’s been a dilemma through the ages, and a great pioneer in the work of relieving human suffering was a lady named Florence Nightingale. During the Crimean War of the 1850s, she was known as the Lady of the Lamp because of her night support and personal care for the wounded patients. Then after the war, she revolutionized health care by making nursing a respectable profession. Florence introduced statistical and hygiene practices that reduced mortality rates and began a school of nursing. Yet, Florence’s last 25 years were fraught with the fear of death. She told friends that her life hung by a thread that could snap at any moment. However, doctors could find nothing wrong. Examiners left her bedside shaking their heads. Most diagnosed her as a hopeless hypochondriac – dreading death, obsessed by its imminence. History’s most famous nurse, Florence Nightingale, cowered before the big bad wolf: death, bedridden for 25 years – finally dying at the age of 90.
What about you? Has the fear of death ever robbed you of the joy of living? It did for me for a time. Without God, death is horrible. With God, death is still fearsome, but the great strength of Christianity has always been that it brings men and women to terms with death in a way that offers comfort and meaning. Death is defanged because of resurrection hope.
Indeed, that’s what Jesus came to do – to make right what is so wrong – to break death’s stronghold upon mankind – and He would take on our enemy in His last great sign of John’s Gospel. It’s the 7th sign and it appears in the exact center of the book, but, more importantly, it is the hinge for all that precedes and follows. The great sign was the final straw that turned the religious establishment against Jesus to the point of plotting His death.
As many of you know the main character is Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, who for reasons unknown becomes sick unto death. He is so gravely ill that his sisters contact Jesus out of desperation. A fair translation of the message to Jesus would be: “Lord, the one You love is sinking fast” and it’s here that the story has a staged quality about it. For instead of immediately responding, Jesus lingers around for two days. He intentionally stays where he is at and knows that the delay would result in Lazarus’ death. Even His words to His disciples are cryptic:
“Our friend, Lazarus, has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up.”
Jesus is being mysterious purposely and recognizes His disciples don’t understand that He has radically changed the meaning and experience of death. Why would Jesus let Lazarus die only to call him back? To show who runs the show. To trump the cemetery card. No longer was it terminal as Jesus tells them that Lazarus is merely asleep and that He was going to wake him. Yet it is too much for His disciples to grasp. They still think Jesus is talking about night’s sleep so He becomes more specific. Lazarus is dead.
Deliberately, Jesus let Lazarus die and his family grieve. Israel’s rabbinic faith asserted that for three days the soul lingered about a body, but the fourth day it left permanently. That’s why Jesus didn’t come immediately and as a result when He arrived upon the scene of death, He heard the sentiment so common in such circumstances, “if only.” Don’t we hear this expressed in our time? “If only he had missed that flight. If only she had quit smoking. If only I had taken time to say goodbye.” Yet in this case Jesus was the clear target. “Lord, if only you had been here my brother would not have died,” said Martha. But it’s at this point that we hear words that have helped so many people deal with the horror of death’s finality. Jesus assures Martha of an afterlife for her brother Lazarus with a death-defying promise:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, even if he dies will live.
Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”
Jesus has the audacity to pull rank on death. It no longer has the final say-so! However, these words of Jesus did not yet carry the power to change hearts in the midst of deep grief. Belief in God’s power and love was for the moment overwhelmed by painful loss and grief. Martha was crying. Mary was wailing. All the mourners were sobbing, and finally, Jesus Himself, “Deeply moved and troubled in spirit,” broke into tears. “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible, and there are some of the commentators who have asked why. Was it the fact of the grave and its control over people broke His heart? Surely, He didn’t feel the same grief as the devastated mourners, but still something got to Him. As He approached the tomb, He again felt a spasm, a groaning of spirit.
What was it? Death had never bothered Jesus before as with the raising of the son of the widow of Nain or the little daughter of Jairus. However, now as Jesus approached the tomb of Lazarus, He’s more troubled and distressed and for good reason. Personally, Jesus knows that death for Him is looming large right around the corner. He knows more about the world’s and our greatest nightmare – the specter of death, and recognized more than anyone present that it was not God’s original intent. Moreover, this means that even if a person experiences a peaceful death at 90 years of age, it is not the way things were meant to be. Do you sense the wrongness of death? Often, we can assure ourselves and others that death is a perfectly natural part of life. Yet it’s really masking a profound intuition. For isn’t there something inside of us that can scream, “No! I was made for something more than that.” It’s what Solomon perceived as he wrote in Ecclesiastes – “God has set eternity in the hearts of men.”
Yes, though it’s a part of nature, there’s a wrongness about death, and at this moment Jesus seemed self-consciously aware of His dual identity – the Son of God from heaven and the Son of Man born on earth with a body – human, mortal, killable. He would have to go like Lazarus through death to get to the joy and laughter of Resurrection on the other side of death and it would all begin with betrayal at the Garden of Gethsemane.
Thus, Jesus wept as He witnessed the effects of death on the family of Lazarus whom He loved. Greek scholars say that the word translated “deeply moved” conveys more than grief and sorrow, but instead anger, even rage. It’s that He’s furious. He’s bellowing with frenzy against death – that huge reality of life which was not God’s original intent. He’s not thinking, “Look, just get used to it. Everybody dies. That’s the way of the world.” No, He doesn’t do that. Jesus looks squarely at our greatest nightmare – the loss of life and loved ones. He’s angry at the evil and suffering in the world and as the One called “a man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3). He’s seen plenty of it, and at that very moment Jesus Himself hung between two worlds. Standing before a tomb stinking of death gave a portent of what lay before Him in this damned – literally damned-world. That His own death would end in resurrection did not reduce the fear and anguish. He was human and would have to pass through Golgotha to reach the other side.
What does Jesus do at the tomb side? You know the rest of the story! “Lazarus came out.” When Christ speaks the dead listen. Lazarus jolts up in the coffin as if awakened from a nap. A woman screams. Another faints. Everyone shouts. Jesus raises Lazarus to become a dead man walking, but not before recognizing the danger of it all. He’s all too aware that it will cost Him His life. It will make Him so dangerous that the religious leaders will plot His death. He knew that to interrupt Lazarus’ funeral was to summon his own.
More than he would have ever dreamed, the high priest had it right as he cut to the chase and told the assembly of leaders: “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish!” Little did Caiaphas know the immense scale of it all. To solve the dilemma of planet earth it would take the death of the One and Only God/Man Himself. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” His sacrifice on the cross would make things right. Death would no longer be the end, but instead usher in a glorious new existence.
About fifteen years ago, I saw a movie, Atonement. It was about a girl and guy in love in 1930s Britain. But the girl, played by Keira Knightley, has a younger sister, Britney, who is intensely jealous, and through deviousness frames the boy as a rapist. As a result, the couple’s relationship ends with the death of the young man and the forlornness of the girl. But fast forward: Britney, the cause of tragedy, becomes a successful author. She’s now old and suffering from terminal cancer. Throughout her life, she’s been weighted down with guilt, and to assuage it, she’s written a novel about the couple, but alters their life story to make a happy ending.
Yet, hasn’t this become a glorious reality for each of us on a much grander scale? Hasn’t God also changed forever the life-script of each of us so that death is not the end of our story? He so loved us and He saw us destroying ourselves. He saw our pain and knew we could not free ourselves from the traps and misery of our own creation. So, as with Lazarus, He wrote Himself into our stories, our life-scripts. He wrote Himself in through Baptism. By means of the Sacrament He changed our destinies. A heavenless life enjoys no light at the end of the tunnel, no home at the end of the journey. But Jesus changed all that! His destiny became our destiny. As he was raised, we too will be raised. In this way He destroyed the power of death. It has been defanged through Him Who is the resurrection and the life. Through our relationship with the One who wrote Himself into our life-script there is never a dead end, but a good and glorious end. Thus, we are enabled to exult even this day that He Who began a good work in us will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. Though we celebrate the day of Resurrection just a few weeks hence, yet, even now, we are enabled to exult in that promise first given to Martha:
“I am the Resurrection and the life. He (or she) who believes in Me will live even though they die, and whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.”