Death Is Not Natural
THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT
Ezekiel 37:1-14 • Romans 8:6-11 • John 11:1-45
Barbara and Earl Pettey didn’t stand a chance. But, before I tell you why, let me ask you to play a little game with me. Take a look at the people on your pew and the pews around yours. Look around, and, in your mind, get a group of about a dozen people together. Got that group together in your mind? Now imagine that you are on a plane with those people and that that plane makes an emergency landing in the middle of the ocean. You scramble into a life raft before the plane sinks out of sight, and that group of people sitting around you is the group of people with you in the life raft. With me so far?
Before long, it becomes clear to you and everyone else in your raft that the raft isn’t big enough for all of you. You’ve begun taking on water, and the raft is sinking fast. Someone has to go. In fact, a quick assessment of the situation produces the incontrovertible fact that two people need to be thrown overboard or else the raft will sink and everyone will perish. For the purposes of this exercise—not unlike the movie Titanic—it is pointless to ask whether you could take turns in the raft or whether there is some way to shift people around or bail water quickly enough to avoid the necessity of sending two people to their deaths. Just accept the limits of the exercise and ask yourself who are your throwing overboard? Which two people in the pews around you would you vote off your bright yellow floating island? And why?
I asked a similar question to a group of people at a Theology on Tap gathering back in Decatur, Alabama. We met every week in a local restaurant for some theological conversation, and that question proved to be one of the more effective conversation starters. In the end, Earl and Barbara were voted off the raft unanimously. Both were in their eighties and by far the oldest people in the group. She was a violist, and he played the trombone, but both had retired a long time ago. Their children were all independent and healthy, and both the Petteys and the people around them felt that, if anyone needed to go into the drink, it should be they.
Did you come to a similar conclusion? Do you share that instinctive belief that older people’s lives are less important to preserve—less valuable—than those of younger people? Don’t we feel a greater sense of tragedy when a teenager dies than when an octogenarian passes on? What if I told you that the only reason we feel that way is because we have been fooled into thinking that death is a natural consequence of life? What if I told you that our faith actually teaches the opposite and that, in today’s gospel lesson, Jesus challenges the assumption that death is an unavoidable reality?
To get there, we have to hear this story as more than a miraculous resuscitation. We need to recognize the role it plays in the gospel writer’s deepening portrayal of Jesus as the Son of God. Since the second chapter of his gospel account, in one miraculous sign after another, John has been building the case for Jesus’ divinity. Last Sunday, we heard the story of Jesus healing a man who had been born blind. At one point, the once-blind man described the unparalleled nature of what Jesus had done, saying, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If [Jesus] were not from God, he could do nothing.”
By the time we get to today’s story, just two chapters later, it seems that Jesus’ reputation as a one-of-a-kind miracle worker has become well known. Did you notice how both of Lazarus’ sisters—first Martha and then Mary—said to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died?” Both understood that, had he arrived in time, Jesus would have been able to keep their brother alive. Later on, while Jesus wept outside Lazarus’ tomb, some of those in the crowd looked on and asked, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” The point John seems to be making is that someone who had the power to give sight to a man born blind surely would have been able to heal his sick friend if only he had gotten there a little earlier. But Jesus didn’t want to.
When Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was deathly ill, instead of dropping everything and rushing to his bedside, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, John tells us, even though Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters, he decided to stay where he was for two more days—long enough for Lazarus to die. Why did he linger and only head to Bethany after it was too late? Because with Jesus it is never too late. Because John wants us to know that Jesus is more than a miraculous healer. John wants us to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world, and that he is even the Lord over life and death.
No one has the power to bring someone back from the four-days dead besides God. There is no spell, no incantation, no prayer that would work. Not even a once-in-a-millennium miracle worker could do such a thing. Only the one who has ultimate power over the universe and everything in it could call Lazarus out of the tomb, and that’s exactly what Jesus did. And that changes everything.
Most of us can muster enough faith to believe that, after we die, something good will be waiting for us. Although we don’t really know what it means, we maintain that generic, amorphous hope that we will go to heaven when we die. But how many of us have enough faith to recognize that Jesus’ victory over death is not just a bit of good news that waits for us on the other side of the grave but an earth-shattering, nature-redefining truth that reorients everything we know about this life and what awaits us?
Jesus’ power over death reminds us that God did not create us out of the dust of the earth and breathe into our nostrils the breath of life only to allow that breath to leave us when we are too old for this world. God did not establish an endless cycle of birth and life and death as the foundation upon which the universe is built. Death is not the natural consequence of the life God breathed into creation but a tragic consequence of the brokenness of creation that Jesus came to restore. He is more than the means by which we cheat death or escape its effect. He is the one through whom death itself has been put to death.
If you’re having a hard time figuring out how Jesus’ victory over death is real and complete even though the people we love still die, you’re not alone. I want you to know that I don’t understand how it works. I don’t know how it is that this universe and all of the matter and energy within it, although governed by the laws of thermodynamics, will somehow give way to a way of being that isn’t ruled by death and decay. But I take comfort in knowing that Martha didn’t understand it either. With tears streaming down her face, she said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Instinctively, she knew that Jesus was more than a miracle worker, but she still couldn’t quite understand the significance of the one who stood before her.
Jesus didn’t hesitate. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he said to her. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” he asked, coaxing from her a faith she did not know she had. “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world,” she replied. We can believe that, too, even though we cannot see clearly what is being given to us. Martha’s faith becomes our faith as we, like her, grapple with a reality we cannot fully understand and yet, nevertheless, fully give our lives to.
Every time someone we love dies, we experience the grief and pain that come with that loss. And so did Jesus. He wept the same tears we weep when a friend or family member dies. When death takes someone from us in an untimely fashion, we often feel anger and confusion at what should not have been. And so did Jesus. When he saw Mary crying, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved—moved to the point of trembling with indignance—at the thought that death could take his friend away. Even the one who had the power to bring Lazarus back from the dead experienced the sting of death in this life. Our grief, therefore, is not a sign of faithlessness but a mark of love.
But, because of Jesus, we know that our grief must give way to a new hope—not because we hope that one day death will be no more but because we have already seen in Jesus Christ God’s victory over the inevitability of death. In him, even the laws of nature become subject to the law of God’s unending love.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas