Lent 5 Year A

John 11:1-45


One of the things I thoroughly enjoy in a good story is that point where everything changes. The phone rings, the detectives have a breakthrough, a character confesses a secret. I love looking out for those pivotal or hinge moments. And we have one today in our gospel reading. Chapter 11 is located right at the centre of the Gospel of John: 10 chapters precede it and 10 chapters follow it. This story stands as a pivot between Jesus’ public ministry and His private ministry to the disciples. This story is both the climax of what has happened before, it is the last of seven signs Jesus does and the beginning of what is to come; from this day on some of the leaders of the Jews planned to put Jesus to death.

There’s another really interesting pivot right at the centre of the 54 verses this story takes to tell. In verse 27, exactly halfway through, Martha confesses her belief in Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God. In the other three gospels it is Peter who makes this fundamental and decisive confession about who Jesus is. In Johns gospel the model of belief in Jesus is a woman called Martha. And she does so right at the centre of the centre of the gospel. I wonder if the patriarchy realised that when they chunked up John’s gospel into chapters and verses.

Martha is a cracking Biblical character. She doesn’t hold back in bluntly saying things to Jesus. Luke tells another story about the two sisters. Jesus and His disciples are in their home and Mary is sitting at his feet listening. Enter Martha stage left asking Jesus “…do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?” Perhaps, this was Martha completely frustrated with a social system and a culture that confined women to domestic roles and labour. You can also hear frustration rippling off her in this story as she bustles out to intercept Jesus on his way to her home and straight off says to Him “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And, of course, it has to be Martha who, in that moment of high drama when Jesus asks people to take away the stone rolled over the doorway of Lazurus’ tomb, exclaims “but there will be a stench, He’s been dead four days”. I wonder how much eye rolling and tutting people generally did around Martha. And yet, it is Martha, who at a pivotal point in John’s account of the story of Jesus, at that hinge moment where things take a turn towards making sense, confesses Jesus as the Messiah the Son of God. She sees the world as it is, has no trouble in calling out the world as she sees it. And a big part of what she sees about the world is that Jesus is, most definitely, the one who can do something about the state of it.

And yet for all that Martha is focussed on the present moment when she is thinking about the world, she slips away from that and into thinking that Jesus can only bring change in the future. Jesus says to her “your brother will rise again”. “I know that” she says, “he will be resurrected on the last day”. And her misunderstanding, her caution perhaps, leads Jesus to gently correct her, leads Jesus into a watershed moment of self-identification – “yes, I am the resurrection” He says “and the life”. I can do something about the state of the world in the future, but I can also do something about the state of the world in the present moment. I can bring resurrection in the future, and I can bring life now. The next time we hear about Martha, Mary and Lazarus in John’s gospel is not in grand statements about their places in heaven or in people’s memories but is in a here and now story of their continuing friendship with Jesus. Jesus is back in their home and the intimacy in the friendship has deepened, Martha is enjoying serving Jesus, Lazarus is sitting at the table with him and Mary anoints His feet with perfume. There is life in everyday life.

We all have our tombs, our gravesides, our indescribable griefs. We all have our Lazarus; the things we loved that have died on us and we have buried away for long enough that the spirit has left them. The relationships that didn’t work out. The opportunities that went by us. The losses of work, money, homes, health and all else besides that take away our breath and our words. The Lazarus that died without warning. The Lazarus that took its time to go. And perhaps we all have that wish, that sneaky feeling, that the death of this thing that was as close to us as a very much-loved sibling, would not have happened if Jesus had only hurried up.

And part of the story of this story is that somewhere, at some point, in response to our pain and upset and tears, Jesus says “where have you laid him?”, show me this tomb, this place where you have buried your Lazarus, the thing you loved and have buried. And when we take Him to that tomb and we show Him what that death has done to us before he does anything else, Jesus stands in that place of grief and sadness and weeps. To quote a new poem by Jon Swales

Just tears—
falling into the dust,
God’s sorrow taking a body,
love admitting the cost of love.
This is the mercy—
not that death is undone,
not that peace arrives intact,
not that joy suddenly becomes speakable,
but that grief is not unbelief,
that lament is not corrected,
that sorrow is not asked
to hurry.
That the broken are not told
to be strong
for God’s sake.

Before anything changes in the present or in the future, God stands gently by our side and weeps with us. God recognises the costliness of life. God recognises the demands made on us by cultures and systems which ensure that one group of people suffers great loss in order for other groups of people to gain. Before doing anything else, God stands alongside those made poor by the wealthy amassing more wealth, alongside those made more vulnerable by the powerful dominating and being tyrannical in pursuit of more power. God stands alongside those whose stories begin in loss, those whose stories are shot through with loss, those whose stories pivot around an event of unbearable loss. And God weeps alongside them, alongside us.

I would like to suggest that before we can really understand what our own salvation looks like, what our confession of Jesus as the Messiah means for us in the present and in the future, we too, like Martha, need to take the time to watch Jesus weep at the tombs of our lives. We too perhaps, need to pay attention to that pause, so filled with grief, where our life and yours (in reference to God) are brought together in a wonderful exchange, to quote a phrase from the Eucharistic prayer that we will shortly hear. We too, need to watch Jesus weep before we can watch Him resurrect and bring life. We too, need to participate in the depths of costly love before we can participate in the uprising.

And this is what we now intentionally pivot towards as we follow Jesus on His way to the cross. We are being invited into God’s overwhelming generous solidarity with us, that great love admitting the cost of love. I wonder if, after wiping away His tears of grief and then his tears of happiness, Jesus asked Lazarus what it was like to die, and what it was like to be given life.