Standing, Touching, Prophecying

From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

Standing, Touching, Prophecying: 10th April 2011: am: Dr Raymond Pelly

• Psalm 130
• Ezekiel 37: 1 - 14
• John 11: 1 - 45

Because the Gospel is long, this sermon is short! It’s intended as preparation for Easter, the Paschal Mystery of the Passion & Resurrection of Christ. Three themes can bring this Gospel to life for us in the world of devastations we now live in: standing, touching, prophesying.

After a quake, one thing is obvious: some people, some buildings, remain standing; others not. In the Lazarus story, the contrast is between the Lazarus who is dead, very dead, and Jesus who is O so alive, who remains standing. Let’s focus on what this means. Heaps: Jesus risks death by stoning to be with his friend – just as he risks the cross to be with all his friends – us! But like people of real standing, of true mana, he is a realist. He brings home to people what has actually happened. Lazarus is dead; just as he himself really & truly died. That, however, is not the end; just the beginning.

When Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection & the life’ this stems from the fact that he shares the life of God fully, unreservedly. Earlier in the Gospel of John we read, ‘Indeed, just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, so also the Son gives life to whomsoever he wishes’ (5:21). That is the bedrock belief behind the story. If we don’t get that, we don’t get it. But if we do, we can see why this theme of standing is so powerful: Jesus is the One who remains standing today & every day; the One who stands with people in their need – in the story with Martha & Mary - as with us in our need; the One who gives life at the risk of life – what greater mana can we imagine than that?; the One who withstands evil, in the story the peddlers of hopelessness & cynicism. Isn’t it amazing how life seems to spread out in ever-widening circles from this man who remains standing, whose standing is in God?

From standing we go to touching and then remembering. Once things go wrong, how much of it can we take in? It’s one of the great fantasies of modern life that we can live in a sanitized, air-brushed, hi-tech world where the nearest we come to reality is the TV screen. But in the story there is this shocking unwelcome fact that Lazarus is dead – just as in a disaster, there are many victims, many of whom can’t be identified or even found. Yet the Jesus of our Gospel, the One who is full of life, who remains standing, does not live in a world of unreality. He weeps, is greatly disturbed in spirit, deeply moved, is touched. His compassion goes out to all concerned, the living & the dead, to Mary & Martha, & of course to Lazarus. Which presents us with a question: shall we ever do anything creative or effective about what is going on around us unless we are touched by it, unless it gets to us? Which is where remembering comes in. Worship, & Christian life generally, is the dangerous, provoking memory of the death & resurrection of Jesus Christ. Not a bloodless myth, but the precious story of a flesh & blood individual like us who breaks through counterfeit or second-order life (virtual reality) into actual embodied life, where all the suffering is, but also all the healing. The resurrection of the body &, we might add, of the body politic. This is the Jesus who cried out, ‘My God, my God’ in his own sufferings; who cries out to God every time any person suffers, especially innocently or for no reason, ‘How long, how long’, a cry ‘from the depths’ as much for healing as for justice. Central, then, to the standing, the mana, of Jesus is that ‘he takes it all in’, brings it to the place of all final healing: the living God.

Finally, the prophetic voice of the One who remains standing, is the voice that scatters the darkness, that opens up the future. We hear this in the Gospel in the Jesus who with a loud voice cries, ‘Lazarus, come out! Unbind him and let him go!’ – just as he himself was summoned to life by God, the graves clothes thrown off, no longer needed. In the early, post-Easter church, the Resurrection was likened to cock-crow, the loud & thrilling sound of the rooster waking up slumbering humanity. In the life of Jesus, this happens in the pre-dawn, after an appalling ‘night’ of suffering & betrayal. But the accent is not on that, but on life, unlimited life. The true prophetic – resurrecting voice – is heard when human life, as in death, is at its lowest ebb, when all hope seems lost. The resurrection-inspired prophetic imagination, by contrast, points the way forward for the human community (& the material creation) with unheard of, surprising suggestions, shocking in their newness. Just when we’re tempted to give up, we hear about – or feel moved to speak about - resurrection-like transformations; and the one who is speaking (or inspiring us) is the very One who remains standing. Shall we ourselves speak & act like believers? People who stand up for ourselves & for God. This is the challenge of the Gospel.