Getting Up and Going Out
THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT
Ezekiel 37:1-14 • John 11:1-45
Jesus’s mother basically had to nag him into performing his first miracle. Jesus had told Mary that it wasn’t their problem that the wedding banquet had run out of wine. Besides, the timing wasn’t right for him to do anything about it: “My hour has not yet come,” Jesus said. But Mary wouldn’t engage with Jesus’s stubbornness. Mary just got on with things and told the servants to listen to Jesus, and Jesus ended up turning six twenty-gallon jars of water into the best wine that had been served all night.
In today’s gospel, we hear about Jesus’s last miracle–the raising of Lazarus from the dead. This miracle seems more potent than turning water into wine. But maybe Jesus’s last miracle wasn’t so different from his first. In both cases, Jesus hesitated before acting. And in both cases, it took the faith of someone named Mary to deepen Jesus as a place worthy of our faith and trust.
When Jesus first hears that his dear friend Lazarus is ill, Jesus assures everyone that the illness won’t lead to death. Jesus puts off going to see Lazarus for two whole days. But then, Lazarus dies. And only then does Jesus head to Bethany in Judea, determined to work even in the face of death itself to build the faith and trust of his disciples. But the fact that Jesus showed up too late is a huge obstacle for building that trust.
When Lazarus’s sister Martha intercepts Jesus before he makes it to their village, she lays it all on the table: “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” I think these heartfelt words are a good start to approaching Jesus honestly. But I also think Martha models some mistakes that are easy to make when we try to rebuild faith in Jesus through times of sickness and grief. After telling Jesus that if he’d been there, Lazarus wouldn’t have died, Martha keeps talking, making statements that I’m not sure match the faith that would make Jesus fully present to her in that particular moment.
When Jesus says that Martha’s brother will rise, Martha responds that–yeah, yeah–I knows Lazarus will rise at some point in the future with everyone else who’s died. But Jesus tells her that he himself is the resurrection and the life. Jesus asks whether Martha believes this, and she gives Jesus other seeming “right” beliefs about Jesus–that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world. Martha’s contributions to her conversation with Jesus all include the words “I believe,” or “I know.”
Martha’s sister Mary, though, is a different kind of disciple. When Mary comes to Jesus, she starts with exactly the same words as Martha: “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” But then she says nothing more. Instead of speaking–instead of declaring her faith in Jesus, or telling everyone what she believes–she weeps, and Jesus joins her. And then Jesus asks Mary simply where to find Lazarus’s body.
But Mary’s faith also goes beyond declaring her need for Jesus’s presence. In fact, she acts on that faith before Jesus has even shown that he deserves it, for Mary practices a resurrection of sorts even before Jesus raises her brother Lazarus from the dead.
According to the gospel, when Mary hears that Jesus wants to see her, the people who’ve come to comfort Mary see her do two things: they see her rise up, and they see her go out. And she does these things quickly. These words for “rising up” and “going out” are the same words that describe Lazarus’s own resurrection and exit from the tomb. Jesus tells Martha that Lazarus will “rise up,” and the evanglist tells us that Lazarus “went out” of the tomb when Jesus called him. So, Mary first rose up and went out to Jesus from her home, and only after that did Lazarus rise up and go out to Jesus from his tomb.
In today’s gospel, then, we learn that the resurrection life offered by Christ isn’t something that Lazarus and Martha have to wait for, but something that Mary is already living, because it begins now. Mary seems to know that small acts of rising up are resurrections in and of themselves.
And small gestures of going out are also resurrections from whatever tombs contain us. Gestures of going out for the presence of Christ–even through the internet–because we miss it and because we know we need it.
Mary’s small acts of resurrection faith are what make the larger acts of Christ more meaningful–even more possible. Whatever rising up and reaching out we do today and over the long haul of sickness and grief will be signs of that resurrection faith. Maybe these signs are less dramatic than we hoped for, but they’re signs that rebuild faith.
The end of today’s gospel reports that many of the people “who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did” began to believe in him. I don’t think these people believed in Christ only because of Lazarus rising from the dead. Because they came to Jesus with Mary in particular, they’d seen someone–Mary herself–rise up and go out to Jesus, even before they saw Lazarus do the same from his tomb. And they saw that Jesus’s loving response to Mary, in weeping and agitation, made him worthy of real faith and trust.
In our own season of sickness and grief, much more faith will have to rest on the real, raw, and small expressions of trust that we see embodied in disciples like Mary. The resurrection life is lived now by the cells of Christ’s risen body, rising up and reaching out wherever we find ourselves, whether at risk or tucked away.
© 2020 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas