Ezekiel 37: 12-14 (RM) or 1-14 (RCL); Psalm 130; Romans 8: 8-11 (RM) or 6-11 (RCL); John 11: 1-45.

It may have happened to you, or to someone you know. You miss your last chance to be present to someone you love before they die.

When it happened to relatives of mine, they had just left their husband and father in the hospital after an unremarkable visit, and learned only hours later that he had passed away about the time they were down in the parking lot getting into the car. Just this week it happened to another relative: her mother died early in the morning, in hospice, when she was not there.

In 1997 I was preparing to fly home from a conference in the Netherlands when I received a call from my brother the night before that our father was seriously ill. I landed at Dulles for the connecting flight and ran to the bank of pay phones along the wall. I reached my brother at home. My father had died in the hospital while I was over the Atlantic.

In today’s Gospel, however, the writers of John make a point to say that Jesus delayed deliberately when he heard his dear friend Lazarus was dying. By the time Jesus and his friends arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days. There’s a theological reason why the writers framed the story this way. It seems that in ancient Jewish belief the spirit of the dead person was thought to remain near the body for three days. “Four days” meant that Lazarus really was dead. Martha’s later words reinforce the point: “By now there will be a stench, he’s been dead four days.” (Or, in the old King James Version, “he stinketh.”)

All three of the stories from John’s Gospel that we’ve been hearing in Lent – Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus’ creation of new sight for a man born blind, and now the revival of Lazarus – were stories constructed to meet the immediate pastoral needs of the Johannine community at the end of the first century C.E. They were struggling to survive as followers of Christ in a world where, on the one hand, they lived in fear under the Roman military occupation, and on the other, Jewish converts to Christianity were excommunicated, as it were, from their local synagogue. They needed to believe that Jesus was indeed “the resurrection and the life.”

The writers of John told these stories adding extra scenes with a variety of characters, and layers of dialogue, to make clear that Jesus knew he was on his way to arrest, trial and execution on a cross at Jerusalem. His friends, however, couldn’t yet put the pieces together. In the first scene his friends seem to think that Lazarus could be healed, and they couldn’t figure out why Jesus delayed their departure. The dialogue raises the ideas of darkness and light (a favourite in John) and why Jesus first said that Lazarus’ illness would not end in death. His friends thought Jesus meant that Lazarus would not die before they arrived. Jesus meant something else. Yet, however clueless they were, they knew that Jesus was putting himself and them in danger by going back to Judea.

Jesus’ dialogue with Martha illustrates more misunderstanding about death and life. When Jesus tells her, “Your brother will rise,” Martha thinks immediately of the belief that the dead will rise at the end of time when God is victorious, and this means bodily resurrection as well. This would have been standard Jewish belief, found in the book of Maccabees and in Daniel. But the writers of John are coming from a later Wisdom/Sophia theology which holds that the righteous remain always in life, body or no body, because they live on in the Spirit. The Word, Sophia, was pre-existent before creation – we see that in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God.” We see Jesus’ pain at the lack of comprehension by Martha, Mary, and his disciples. He starts to cry. Yet Jesus speaks here in terms that come from the Sophia tradition: embraced by the life of eternity, returning to the Holy One, lifted up, exalted, and returning.

It’s understandable to dwell on the circumstances of a sudden death, or to sink into the regret and deeper pain that follows if we blame ourselves for what we didn’t do. Yet in faith we can tell the story differently. We can focus on “the life that does not die.” We can look beyond what we see here, and what we see now.

© Susan K. Roll