John 11:17-44

Dead Man Walking

Any of you had the opportunity to come face-to-face with your own death? The Russian novelist, Feodor Dostoyevsky, gave a vivid account of his own confrontation with death. In December, 1848, when Dostoyevsky was 27 years old, he and 43 other students were arrested by the Russian secret police. They were accused of plotting against the Czar and of high treason against the State. The police took them to the Semyonovsky parade ground, where they were lined up and the verdict delivered against each one of them was pronounced: death by firing squad. .

First, the students were stripped, and given the white shirts of condemned prisoners. Then they were then forced to stand for 20 minutes in the biting winter wind. The temperature was 20 degrees below freezing. A priest invited them to make their last confession. He offered them a crucifix and they kissed it, eagerly and desperately, as though it was the only thing that could save them.

 Dostoyevsky kept thinking, “This is impossible. This isn’t happening to me. They can’t mean to kill us!” But nearby was a cart, its coffins covered by a tarpaulin.

Then, the first three prisoners were taken to three posts. Their hands were tied behind their backs and blindfolds were placed over their eyes. Soldiers took their places opposite each post and prepared their rifles. Dostoyevsky estimated that he would be in the third group to be shot. This would give him about five minutes before he’d be taken to the post and blindfolded.

He began to say his farewells to the prisoners on each side of him, and he thought of his family, and his brother, Michael. Then he began to reflect on his own life. Here he was a living, thinking, feeling being. In three minutes he’d be a nobody, a nothing. His thoughts raced. He imagined some sort of last minute reprieve.

 ”What should I do if I were not to die now?” he wondered. “What an eternity of days I would have, [compared to a few minutes] and all mine! I would count up every minute, so as not to waste a single instant”. The thought became such a burden he couldn’t bear it, and he wished they’d shoot him quickly and have it done with.

 Then came the fear - the dryness in the mouth; the choking in the throat; the numbness of arms and legs.

 And then, just as the soldiers had actually lifted their rifles, there came a shout across the square, a galloping horse carrying a soldier with a white handkerchief. He brought a pardon from the Czar. Instead, a sentence of four years’ imprisonment in Siberia, followed by four years’ of military service. So close to death and yet now he had been given new life. It was a reprieve Dostoyevsky was to never forget.

What would you do if you had a second chance at life?  Would you live life any differently? Interesting question isn’t it?

Truth is, life is precious, but most days, I have to admit, I take life for granted. I seldom think about not living, and because there are few obvious threats to my daily life, I simply assume that life will go on without much effort on my part. But every now and then I’m given a jolt of reality. A young person dies in a senseless car accident. Someone my own age dies of cancer. I attend or officiate a funeral or memorial service.

And suddenly death is no longer remote, and life is very precious.

Which brings us to our Gospel lesson for this morning.  It is a familiar story, right? Jesus’ close friends, Mary and Martha, are concerned – their brother, Lazarus, is sick.

You know what that’s like: itchy throat, watery eyes, clammy skin, high fever, can’t keep anything down. Lazarus is ill. But his illness is not just another bug going around. This illness plans to kill him. And so his sisters send a message to tell Jesus that Lazarus’ condition is serious.

But Jesus doesn’t come right away. There is no doubt that Jesus loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus dearly, but he deliberately stalls for two days, and so by the time he gets to Bethany, Lazarus has already died, in fact, the funeral has already happened and the body of Lazarus had been in the grave for four days.

And so you can hear a tinge of regret and maybe even anger in Martha’s words to Jesus when she said, “If you had been here, Lord, my brother would not have died!” And who can blame her for feeling upset. After all, it was her brother who had died, and the text leaves us in no doubt that Lazarus and his sisters were very close. Jesus sees the tears and the grief, and he weeps with them.

Now, I don’t think Jesus weeps because he is sad that Lazarus had died. He made a point earlier to his disciples that the death of Lazarus was only temporary. He had told his disciples that there was a purpose behind the death of his good friend. He wanted them to realize that he really is the Son of God (John 11:4).

Jesus weeps with Mary and Martha because he knows what pain and sense of loss death brings.

His tears are tears of compassion – he can see how much the two woman are hurting and how deeply the death of Lazarus has affected them.

At the tomb, Jesus instructs those gathered to “Move the stone!” I can just imagine the reaction: “You gotta be kidding! I mean, there is love and then there are the practical things of life and death. But Jesus, four days dead does not smell nice!”

With the stone removed, Jesus shouts, “Lazarus come out” and almost immediately the dead man appears (a DEAD MAN WALKING) and walks out from the tomb; his hands, feet and face still bound up with the linen burial cloths. BUT … he wasn’t dead. Apparently, dead doesn’t always mean dead.  Especially with Jesus around.

A few years ago, a letter was sent to a deceased person by the Social Security Administration. It read as follows:

“Your Social Security checks will be stopped in March because we received notice that you passed away. We extend to you our condolences. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.”

Unless their name is Lazarus, the likelihood of those circumstances changing is somewhat unlikely.

But even if we’ve never died, there have been times in our lives when we’ve been just like the body of Lazarus as it lay in the tomb. Oh not literally, but figuratively.

We’ve all experienced those moments or times in our lives when we’ve felt lifeless, frozen, dead to the world.

Sometimes life seems to be going along great. Oh, sure, we’ve strayed a little. But everybody misses Church once in a while. And everybody forgets to pray. We all get distracted and forget to focus on God. But it seems like everything in our life is going great or at least … okay, so we don’t really miss that contact with God.

But then something happens. Something causes the foundation of our existence to crumble. Or the road of life takes a sudden hairpin right when we thought it was going make a left and we spin out of control. Or we make bad decisions. We choose a way of life that really is a dead end.

Whatever the case, we wake up one morning and find ourselves sealed in a lifeless tomb of our own making. And we don’t know what to do or where to turn.

Maybe it’s a disease or an illness that has its death grip on us. A lot of us are so frightened of cancer, that even the mere mention of it causes our hearts to race a little faster. And when we hear that we or one of our family or one of our friends has cancer we can become immobilized with fear.  The fear sucks the life right out of us.

Our thoughts are the same as Martha’s when Jesus told the crowd to move the stone from in front of the tomb. She finally said what she’d been thinking all along about Lazarus’ death. “Lord, it stinks.”

And that’s exactly how we feel when we get that horrible news. The big “C” does stink. It is such a horrendous demon in our lives and in the life of the world. It fills us we fear. It robs us of life and the quality of life.

It wreaks havoc on the individual and the family. It gets us in such a death grip that we can’t even hear all the positive statistics about how many more survive than die from cancer now than ever before. Our fear entombs us, just like Lazarus.

Sometimes it’s our children. It can be our grown children in whom we are disappointed because of their chosen lifestyle. Or it can be fear FOR our children and the problems they face in society today.

How do we protect them? How do we raise them and provide them with the moral compass they need. And what happens when we fail?

Both fear and disappointment are powerful tombs that keep us imprisoned, keep us separated from life and from God.

Or it could be grief that has us undone or entombed. We have all lost someone we love.  I have lost both my parents.  Even thought they lived long, fruitful lives, their deaths were hard on me. And I’ve lost some very close friends. I know what grief is like. I know how it can tear you apart on the inside. I know how it can seal your heart and make you weep so that you don’t want to lose anyone ever again.

All of these things have the potential to entomb us, imprison us, lock us up.

And the mistake all of these things make; the mistake we make when we listen to them instead of God, is that they all think they have the last word. Depression, Fear, Death, Disease, all of these think they have the last word in our lives. Well, I’ve got news for you, that’s not what this passage says.

Jesus heard the cry of his friends Mary and Martha. He felt their grief for Lazarus so deeply that he wept with them. And the Good news is the Good News is the last word.

Despair is not the last word, Depression is not the last word,

Death is not the last word, The Cross is not the last word, the Good News of Jesus Christ is the last word.

A nurse on the pediatric ward, before listening to the little ones’ chests would plug the stethoscope into their ears and let them listen to their own hearts. Their eyes would always light up with awe. But she never got a response to equal four-year-old David’s.

Gently she tucked the stethoscope in his ears and placed the disk over his heart. “Listen,” she said, “What do you suppose that is?”

David had a deeply puzzled look on his face. He looked up as if lost in the mystery of the strange tap-tap-tapping deep in his chest. Then his face broke out in a wondrous grin and asked. “Is that Jesus knocking?”

Jesus stood outside Lazarus’ tomb. He knocked. And then he called with a voice loud enough to wake the dead. “Lazarus, come out.” Jesus is knocking on the doors of our heart, the doors of our tombs as well. Jesus wants to breath new life into whatever situation has bound you and entombed you. Let Him breathe new life into you. Let him roll the stone of your tomb away. Let Him give you new life.

We each have been given a reprieve so to speak, just like Dostoyevsky.  What will we do with it?  Jesus gives us new life everyday.  How will you respond?  That’s a great question to ponder during our stewardship season, don’t you think?

Amen.