A reflection on the Lectionary for Worship from Home, March 29, 2020: Year A, Lent 5

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Romans 8:6-11
John 11:1-45

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

In the midst of the disaster that is the corona outbreak across the globe, the prayer and readings that are assigned for this fifth Sunday in Lent are pretty heartbreaking.  Their imagery is full of promise and hope and it is jarring to read these words in the context of the awful realities of today. 

“Prophesy to these bones,” says the Lord to Ezekiel.  “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord […] I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”  And Ezekiel prophesies to the dry bones and they become alive.  It is a wondrous sign of God’s power in the face of death and desperation. 

But what good is that to us right now?  We read these words in a time when all around us seems fear and anxiety, the specter of death – if the actual thing has not yet touched us personally.   Right now, we still see only dry bones.  Indeed, I feel, at first, anger and sadness when I read in Ezekiel about the great care God takes to breathe life into these bones.  “‘Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live’[…] and the breath came into them, and they lived.”  In the face of COVID, which steals the breath of its sufferers, why is God not breathing new life into them?  Into all of us? 

And then, of course, there is Lazarus: Lazarus who is raised from the grave in the last and greatest of Jesus’ miracles performed in the gospel of John.  “[Jesus] cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’  The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

Where is such a miracle for God’s people throughout the world today?  Why has Christ not come among us and, with a word, stopped this virus in its tracks, opened our tombs and unbound us from this fear, this death?

But before we go down that particular valley of shadows, let us remember that the coronavirus is not the only context from which we read these scriptures.  After all, we are still in Lent, so even if we heard these texts read in our usual Eucharistic service, we would still be physically surrounded by the purple hangings in our sanctuary and spiritually circumscribed by the ascetic practices of our Lenten fasts.  In other words, even in our more normal settings, these words would still be spoken into an austere spiritual landscape. 

In fact, when we put these readings in their own historical and narrative contexts we begin to see that there and then, too, things are far from rosy.  Ezekiel speaks in metaphor to a nation of people who have been exiled from their homeland, who saw their city and their way of life utterly destroyed and who now mourn these great losses far from all they once knew and loved.  Ezekiel speaks about the power of God to bring about transformation even in such desperate times.  The promises of his prophecy are made so that the people will find the courage of faith, so that they may “wait for the Lord” and continue to put their hope in his word (Ps. 130:4). 

Similarly, the story of Lazarus’ restoration would have been first told to a group of early Christians facing their own sorts of exile and desperation.  No longer part of the Jewish communities from which they arose, shunned at best, persecuted at worst by the Roman society around them, these early Christians must have clung to the promises at the heart of this story as they stood firm in their faith in Jesus’ resurrection, too.  

But that’s not all.  Even in the story itself, we can see how hope and sorrow, loss and faith dance in tension with one another.  As writer Debie Thomas points out, when Jesus speaks the words of life to Lazarus, his face is still wet with the tears he has wept over all that has transpired so far.  He wept for Mary and Martha’s righteous anger when he did not come to them when they called.  He wept for the reality of human mortality, for the fact that we all suffer and die.  He wept for his own griefs and his own anxieties, perhaps, for he must suspect (rightly) that this last sign of God’s power which he performs – such a threat to all other authorities – will be the one that leads to his own death on the cross. 

And, like the image of God’s breath in the passage from Ezekiel that stopped me short in the face of the breathlessness of COVID-19, one phrase that Jesus says in the beginning of this gospel story also resonates eerily.  When his sisters send word to Jesus of Lazarus’ sickness, Jesus’ first response is one that brushes it off: “This illness does not lead to death,” he says.  How strikingly similar to many of our own first encounters with corona, before we could imagine the disruption and destruction it would cause.  And, how wrong we turned out to be!  What a mistake we make when we are so cavalier about the fragility of our own lives, of all we hold dear!  So, I think Jesus must weep for that, too, for the ways in which we fail to take seriously the fragility and the preciousness of life. 

And right there, right in the midst of all that loss and fear and grief and anxiety, with the tears still wet on his face, Jesus calls out to his friend, “Lazarus, come out!”  And the dead man arises back into a world still full of suffering and pain; Lazarus returns to a life that is still mortal, still fragile, still precious. 

Resurrection, hope, promise, faith.  These things do not replace our necessary grief and anxiety when we survey the valley in which we stand.  Grief and anxiety are the proper responses to such a landscape.  But hope has a place here, too.  In the person of Christ Jesus, our hope comes alongside us and weeps along with us and yet speaks promises of transformation into our desperation – promises that breath will come to the dry bones around us, that life will be found even in the very jaws of death. 

So, yes, let us grieve all that we have lost and are still losing.  We can grieve, we must grieve because we must care about the suffering before us.  But even as we grieve, even amid all the sorrow and desperation, all the anxiety and uncertainty, let us cling to the hope we have in Christ Jesus, the risen Lord.  For, even “among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found.”  Even now, even here, even still, we can and we will fix our faith and place our trust in the changelessness of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.