LENT 5 PASSION SUNDAY

“BREATHE UPON THESE AND THEY SHALL LIVE”

Readings:

Ezekiel 37: 1-14 – Come from the four winds, O breath.

John 11: 1-45 – See how he loved him.

“Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost, and we are cut off completely”. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.

Why is it that death seems such an affront to us? After all the millions of years we’ve been around you’d have thought we’d be used to it by now. But we’re not. It still comes as a shock, we’re hardly ever ready and everything in us seems to rebel and say this isn’t how the story’s supposed to end. Surely God can write a better ending than this.

You don’t get much better than Ezekiel’s vision of prophesying, summoning the life-giving wind, the very breath of God from the four corners of the earth. It’s Indiana Jones stuff, a cataclysmic climax to Israel’s drama. No matter what their failures and their turning away and their breaking of the Covenant, God isn’t done with them. Flesh for the bones, skin covering the flesh, breath entering into Israel. There’s no doubt who’s in charge here, no doubt who writes this script, directs this drama. No time for a chorus of “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones” because hear the Word of the Lord and God, with a breath, puts Israel back on their feet.

So many situations look like that in our world: our hope is lost and we are cut off. There’s real reason for despair in our world: From Afghanistan to Syria, from the grief of the many families of passengers on that lost Malaysian airliner to the grief of one family when their lovely daughter is victim to a freak accident at school. But the hope we look for, although we ourselves can seldom see it at the time, is that God, the best storyteller ever, hasn’t finished any of our stories, neither of the living nor of the dead; neither of what we see happening in this world nor in what we hope for in the world to come.

I always remember an elderly Irish nun standing by the bedside of a family member of mine who was near his end, and her just looking down at him so tenderly and saying: “Ah, to be sure; we’re not meant to die”.

And that, I think, is the rumour that exists in all of our hearts and minds. And it’s certainly there in the hearts and minds of Martha and Mary. Martha is caught between what she knows with her mind: I know that my brother will rise again in the resurrection on the last day (a theological idea, if you like), and what her heart is telling her, that this Jesus – the friend she told off for letting her lazy sister off with the household chores, the friend she’s just rebuked for taking so long to get here – this Jesus in some way is the ending. And to that stirring in her heart, he puts the words: “I am the Resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?” And Martha, who can scarcely understand what this can possibly mean, says: “Yes, Lord”.

It’s that “Yes, Lord” that Christians say in spite of the way things are, in spite of losing people we love and seeing the world full of injustice and hatred and cruelty. We look at it all, and we still say: Yes, Lord, I believe. Or as my Irish nun put it, “To be sure, we’re not meant to die.”

And Jesus knows this and is moved to the depths of his being by seeing what grief and loss do to us, Mary and her friends weeping by the tomb. And Jesus himself weeps. God in flesh cries our tears. Imagine. But he needs to, to know how we feel when the world seems to come to an end for us. He wept and the Jews said: “See, how he loved him”. God knows, in Jesus God feels. This is the meaning of Emmanuel, God-with-us, or it means nothing at all.

But if the story were to end here with the raising of Lazarus that would still be no use to us, because Lazarus will die again as we all do. Another chapter of the story is needed if God’s purpose in Jesus is to be fulfilled.

At the foot of the Cross and at another tomb one day soon people will weep for the Jesus who wept. His identification with us, his being one of us only is completed on the Cross. Only on the Cross does Jesus know what it means to be us, to be vulnerable, weak, afraid and in pain. Here Jesus the healer becomes Jesus the broken One; here Jesus who prays and God answers, becomes Jesus who prays: “My God, my God, why?” and God is silent. Then he’s one of us, then he knows.

But the story’s still not finished, because just as at the tomb of Lazarus, there will be another rolling away of the stone; and the voice of the Father will call him back into life, and the graveclothes will be left behind and Jesus will be reunited with his Father, in love and in glory. And so shall we.

Come from the four winds and breathe on these bones that they may live. I am the Resurrection and the Life, says Jesus. This is our hope, that our suspicion that death isn’t the end is true. God spoke us into being, breathed us into being out of dust at the beginning, and in Jesus he shows he can and he will do it again. Easter isn’t quite here yet, but in Christian hearts the rumour of Easter is never far away. Emmanuel, God with us, God for us, calling us always into life.