We begin with a friendship. “Jesus”, we read, “loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus”. Mary is the one who broke all social convention and annointed Jesus’s feet with perfume and wiped them with her hair. He is clearly close to her sister Martha and her brother Lazarus too. We begin with a friendship.
Gallilee is safe territory for Jesus, but down south in Judea it is dangerous. “Rabbi, they were just now trying to stone you and you are going there again?” say his disciples. But when there is a friend involved we take risks. We can all, each one of us, think of friends who have made sacrifices, perhaps even taken risks, to help us. We can be inspired to take such risks, to make such sacrifices, for our friends in turn.
Friendship is a very important theme in John’s Gospel. Apart from Jesus, the key figure in the Gospel is the always unnamed, described simply as “the one whom Jesus loved”. It is as if we are watching a film through the eyes of one of the characters. You know those films where the camera is positioned so that we never see one of the actors but always see things through her or his eyes. In John’s Gospel we see things through the eyes of “the one whom Jesus loved”, because that is how John wants us to see the world. We are the ones whom Jesus loved. As Jesus says later in chapter 15, “You are my friends. I do not call you servants … but I have called you friends”.
Cardinal Basil Hume said “Holiness involves friendship with God - there comes a time in our walk with God when we need to move from being Sunday acquaintances to being weekday friends.” I think the author of St John’s Gospel would very much have agreed - friendship is a very important theme in John’s Gospel.
What we see in the rest of this passage about Lazarus is something of what friendship with God means.
We have the one bible verse that I am sure you can all commit to memory, it being the very shortest verse in the whole bible: John 11:35 “Jesus wept”. Or as other translations put it “Jesus began to weep”.
Jesus has already extolled to Martha all the spiritual messages possible about the hope of resurrection. All the good stuff that you would expect me as a vicar to preach at a funeral. Yet when confronted with the reality of a friend’s death, Jesus can’t hold the tears back. “Jesus began to weep”. Every vicar will have had the same experience. We do maybe ten, twenty or forty funerals a year. We say all the right things, all the spiritual messages about the hope of the resurrection. We are very professional. We keep it all in. And then we do a funeral - perhaps a child’s funeral, perhaps a friend’s funeral and we are confronted with the reality of death and we cannot hold it back and we begin to weep.
There is a poem that I would like to tear out of anthologies. I have to tread carefully here, because it is a poem that I know is dear to many people. It is a poem written by Henry Scott Holland, a canon of St Paul’s cathedral and then Regius professor of Divinity. Who am I as a mere newbie vicar of St Peter’s to argue with a canon of St Paul’ cathedral? Who am I to argue with a regius professor of Divinity? Indeed there is much in that poem that I agree can be of great comfort. But there is just one line which for me ruins an otherwise lovely poem. “Death is nothing at all” it claims.
It is only one brief line. But it is a lie. When families ask me if they can have this poem at their loved one’s funeral, if I am brave enough, I ask them to consider leaving that one line out. Start not at “Death is nothing at all” but at the next line.
I never forget the first funeral I took of a friend, because death is not nothing at all. There funerals you will not forget, funerals of someone you loved and who mattered a lot to you.
Death is NOT nothing at all. It is not just something we can shrug off (1). Even for Jesus himself, when confronted by the death of his friend - it hurts. “Jesus began to weep”. What does it mean for Jesus, the one who is both human and God, to be faced with death? Does he weep for us, for our grief, for our loss? Does he weep because even while his divine side knows all is fine, his human side fears death is the end? We don’t know. The German theologian Jurgen Moltman says “God weeps with us so that we may one day laugh with him”. Perhaps he is right. We don’t know. What we do know, is that confronted with the death of a friend, Jesus weeps.
And we see more of what it means to be friends with Jesus, friends with God, as we see Mary wrestling with him. “If you have been here, my brother would not have died” or as the bystanders put it “could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died?”
This is not a gesture of doubt. Oh yes she believes …. She believes that he could have saved her brother: so WHY DIDN’T HE?
It’s only in a true friendship that we can be safe enough to take the gloves off and let our true feelings. Cardinal Basil Hume talks about “Holiness involving friendship with God”. It is no true friendship if we are scared to be real with him.
As Frances Spufford puts it in his book Unapologetic “you get more for your money, emotionally speaking, if you just howl and kick as hard as you can at the imagined ankles of the God of everything, for it is one of His functions, and one of the ways that he is parent-like, to be the indestructible target for our rage and sorrow, still there, still loving, whatever we say to Him” (2)
Why is it that we pray as a church for one person with cancer, and their cancer goes into remission, and we pray for someone else and their cancer comes back and they die? And it doesn’t matter if we pray for 99 friends who all get better if one friend we love dies. “Don’t you care Lord? Why did you let them die?”
Friendship with God often means being like Mary, howling and kicking against the ankles of the God of everything. Why?
And then we see a sign.
John’s Gospel doesn’t call them miracles. It calls them signs.
Lazarus is brought back from the dead. Not like Jesus who once risen will never die again - resuscitated, brought back to go old and die.
Just as the Gospels portray Jesus’s birth as both like and unlike other miraculous births, so we have Jesus’s coming back both like and unlike other comings back from the dead.
Throughout the scriptures from patriarch to prophet to John the baptist’s mother, a barren woman too old to bear child miraculously conceives, indicating that God was at work, but no one suggests that the husband and wife had not also been at work. Then comes the birth of the messiah. Like the birth of the baptist - but even more miraculous, a virgin brith.
So throughout the Old Testament and the ministry of Jesus, we see several of these resuscitations, the recently departed brought back to life.
It is as John’s Gospel puts it a sign. As Fr Richard Ounsworth puts it “Death is no illusion; but for us who are Christ's friends, death is not the end of the story, but the beginning of the last and most glorious chapter of our life stories….., death -- the disastrous result of human sin -- has been transformed by God into the gateway to an utterly new kind of life”(3)
Is this a happy ending? Lazarus emerges from the tomb! But of course one day there will be another funeral because Lazarus did not live for ever. But it is a sign. a sign of what we shall see at Easter when Jesus defeats death, a sign of a happy ending that we have not yet experienced when injustice shall be ended, suffering cease, the world made right, and death has lost her sting.
Our reading ends there. John’s Gospel does not. No sooner has Lazarus been brought back, than the religious leaders respond by plotting to kill Jesus. That is how they respond to Jesus’s act of love and mercy. How do we react to people’s goodness and kindness? How do we respond to God? When are we like the religious leaders? And when are we like Mary? And how can we move more from one to the other?
(1) apologies to Fr Richard Ounsworth OP for plagiarism at this point - see his sermon on www.torch.op.org
(2) Frances Spufford, Unapologetic, p.104
(3) Fr Richard Ounsworth OP, sermon on www.torch.op.org
