This is my first diary entry. I didn't think it would be on Lazarus! But this prequel to the resurrection impels us to meditate on life, death, and life after death - the many chapters of eternity. For Pastordan and all you Christo-philes out there, I hope you enjoy the sermon I preached today at my church - the fifth Sunday in Lent.
Reflecting this past week on today's readings - Ezekiel's valley of the dry bones and the raising of Lazarus - has been particularly poignant for me. I've conducted two interments and one memorial service since last Saturday, and so I've spent a lot of time poised at that junction between life and death which are part and parcel of such services.
The earliest I recall an encounter with death was that of my grandmother when I was ten. My Scottish grandma - I told you about her. She was the garrulous, irascible old woman who lived with us, and we were quite inseparable. After a serious stroke around the time I was born, she came into our home, and from then on rarely left it. She did eventually leave to go to the hospital, however, and there she lingered for a couple of months before my mum got a phone call one evening to say that she had died. I don't recall feeling what I would call grief, just a sick feeling in my stomach. Until then, I had lived in that happy childhood ignorance of the meaning of death. You know the ignorance I'm talking about - that innocence where you just assume that the people you know and see every day, the people you care about, will just always be around.
But another characteristic of children is their resilience. And soon I was allowing myself to get excited about not having to share a bedroom with my sister anymore. Most of grandma's furniture was moved out, and dad repainted her room in blue - my favourite colour. We went to Eaton's to buy me a new bed, desk, and dresser. I still use the dresser, and I was sleeping in that bed on trips home well into my thirties, which may be why I'm so stiff and sore a lot of the time. It was a happy day when I finally got to say sayonara to my big sister, and put my stuff away in my very own room.
But reminders of my grandma lingered there. They lingered when I opened the closet door and a faint whiff of lavender would waft out. Her old sachets were still hanging in there, and there were times when I would take them out, and hold them to my nose with my eyes shut. Reminders lingered when I opened her cedar chest, and looked at the old photographs, letters, and keepsakes she had stored there. Reminders lingered when I looked up at my wall to a framed lithograph of Queen Victoria in the Highlands which remained hanging there. Grandma used to point at each member of the rustic Scottish family in front of their field-stone cottage gawking at the Queen in her carriage, identifying each with a member of my family. Then she'd point to Queen Victoria saying, "And that's your other grandmother" - meaning, of course, my English one.
Those tangible reminders left a strange feeling with me - a feeling that my grandma hadn't really left. It was a feeling reinforced every time I had a dream about her, or when I caught my mother giving me a certain look like grandma did. It's the same feeling I get now when I look down at my father's wedding ring, then up at a photo of me and him sitting on a patio, taken about a year and a half before he died. It's the same feeling I get when I go to bed on a blustery winter evening and wrap myself in the afghan my mother knitted me for my new bed - blue, my favourite colour, to match the colour of my new room.
These feelings remind me that the ones I love and see no longer have not really left. The testimony of my heart, of my spirit triumphs over the testimony of my senses. The testimony of the spirit is one of hope. Hope for the restoration of that thought to be lost for good. Hope for the resurrection of those thought to be dead and gone.
I can only imagine how preposterous it must have seemed to those looking on to see a man approach the tomb of a corpse mouldering for four days, open the tomb, and call on the corpse to rise up and live again. It's a good thing they weren't there to overhear his comment to Martha - "Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." Most of them would probably have just slowly shaken their heads in mute astonishment at such blather.
The boldest claims in the Hebrew Bible are ones about restoration - the dry bones of Israel's broken and defeated kingdom will rise again, and so it does. The boldest claim in the New Testament is the resurrection, that fact without which, as Paul says, we would be most pitied among all people. Earlier in John's Gospel, Jesus tells his amazed disciples that it is the Spirit that gives life - the flesh is useless. And here he demonstrates the truth and power of that claim, calling forth a dead man and restoring him to life. As Paul said in today's epistle reading, "the Spirit is life...[and] he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you."
It is significant that Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. The belief of the time was that the spirit hovered near the body for three days, after which resuscitation was impossible. We are meant to know that it is not an accident or carelessness that keeps Jesus two days in the Transjordan. He says that Lazarus' illness "does not lead to death, rather it is for God's glory." And indeed the act itself is so stunning, so undeniably a wonder that only God could work, that it is followed immediately by the plot to kill Jesus. Raising the dead is the straw that broke the camel's back. It is Jesus' first, deliberate step on the road back to Jerusalem, the road to Pilate's headquarters, the road to Golgotha.
We need to be aware that Lazarus' rising is not a resurrection. It is a resuscitation. Soon the religious leaders will be plotting to kill him once and for all, to try to eliminate the evidence of the wondrous works of God. But the raising of Lazarus foreshadows the resurrection to come. It puts the world on notice - indeed, it puts the power of sin and death on notice - that God is about to do a stunning thing. God plans on a reversal that will trump all previous reversals. God plans to conquer death, and to keep it conquered.
I often say in my funeral homilies that death is not the end, like a movie shuttering to its close. Rather, it is another chapter in the eternal life granted us through the loving grace of God, the grace which shines through today's readings. The realization that the movie continues is not a retreat into denial, but an acceptance of the testimony of our hearts. Those who have lost loved ones know what I am talking about. We know that our loved ones continue to be present, journeying with us, and looking a photograph or a keepsake should remind us that the spirits of those loved ones hover nearby.
As we begin the final leg of our Lenten journey, arriving with Jesus in Jerusalem next Sunday, let us step along that road boldly, confidently, full of hope. God has vouchsafed to us the promise of eternal life through our Lord's victory over the cross of death. And, although we know that this final leg is the most painful, and that the cross is a hard door to open and enter, we do so anyway - we, the Church militant here on Earth, joining with the Church triumphant in hymns of victory. Amen.