by Columba Stewart OSB
In the Lenten Gospels this year we have a series of vivid meetings with Jesus, each highlighting a fundamental aspect of Christian redemption. The temptation of Jesus in the desert is the very pattern of our Lenten observance. The story of the Transfiguration confirms Jesus as the one for whom the people of Israel had waited so long; the story of his meeting with the Samaritan woman at the well shows that he came to lead all people, even sinners and outcasts, to worship in spirit and truth; the healing of the man born blind gives us hope that he will open our eyes to see him in each other and in the wonder of his creation. Today he demonstrates for us the greatest truth of all, that he has come to bring us out of death into life. In fact all of these Lenten Gospels are about resurrection, about the lifting up of weak and burdened people by the only power that can truly save us, the very power of God brought close to us in Jesus.
Today’s Gospel, even as it deals with that ultimate, greatest mystery, shows us the most human Jesus we can find anywhere in the Scriptures. “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” “He became perturbed and deeply troubled.” “Jesus wept.” This is not the cool miracle-worker we see in other stories, the guy who masterfully reduces anxiety before pulling off the totally unexpected. This is a man who grieves, who seems undecided about what to do–he waited two days before heading back to Judea–, who knew that the growing opposition to him in Jerusalem meant that this would be a test beyond any other he had faced. The stakes were very high, but mostly because he was so deeply, so intimately, involved. This time it was not an anonymous widow with a dead son, or a miscellaneous beggar who was blind. These were people whose home felt like his own, people who saw in him something extraordinary and yet gave him the gift of friendship and simple hospitality. The placement of the story in John’s Gospel, in which Jesus is super-cool, even to the point of often sounding like he is on divine autopilot, makes the tears, the confusion, all the more poignant. It is the last miracle before his Passion.
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Each sister greets Jesus with these words, and perhaps they are right, that Jesus would have healed Lazarus of whatever caused his death–it is doubtful that he could have turned away in the face of such need. However–and this is very important–raising Lazarus from the dead wasn’t a matter of winding back the clock. He had in fact died, family and friends had mourned, Jesus had been sent for, things had been said. Lazarus was still the beloved brother, the cherished friend. But the life Lazarus was now given could not be the same he had only four days earlier. In this way the story points to the promise made to us by Jesus: though we will surely die, each one of us, as did Lazarus, and though our loved ones will grieve, and the pain of loss will endure, it will not endure forever: just as Lazarus was restored to those who loved him, and just as Jesus was restored to those who loved him, so all those whom we have loved will be raised up to newness of life, and we along with them. Not after four days, like Lazarus, or three days, like Jesus, but as surely as both.
To underscore the point, this story is intensely physical. Lazarus had been dead long enough for his corpse to begin to stink. He came forth bound in burial bands and covered with a shroud. Part of his restoration to full life was to be untied and uncovered, so that his face, that truest bearer of personhood, could be seen once more. In this story, as in Christian teaching about resurrection, the body counts. In just a few weeks we will hear again the stories about Jesus’ resurrection, stories in which he eats, shows the marks of his crucifixion, is recognizably himself, Jesus. His body will have been in some way transformed, but not replaced: it will still be a body, still be his body.
This insistence that the body is integral to our very identity was a key point of distinction between Christians and other schools of thought in antiquity. The body is not a temporary dwelling for the soul, or its “prison”: being embodied is essential to who we are. This is why traditional Christian belief does not regard life everlasting to be like, as one of my teachers* put it, “a kind of eternal tea party of disembodied spirits.” Rather, it is a reclaiming of our whole personhood, soul and body. In the Nicene Creed we’ll recite in a few minutes we will profess “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”; in the Apostle’s Creed we profess “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting”. We don’t know when this completion of our growth from life through death to newness of life will occur or how it will happen; its details eluded even the normally opinionated Saint Paul.
Despite the imprecisions, the resurrection of the body, of our bodies, has been a consistent aspect of Christian belief from the start, and arguably the reason why Christianity spoke so powerfully to a world in which human life was cheap, and the mighty were few and all-powerful. Pointing beyond the suffering of the moment, or of a lifetime, to a life that was fuller and joyful, even glorious, was a powerful message. Christianity did not solve the problem of death, but it offered a response to it, especially to its apparent finality.
Many people today are uneasy with the robust physicality of this teaching, and perhaps are more comfortable with that eternal teaparty of disembodied spirits. But once we start diminishing the role of the body in eternal life it becomes easier to diminish it in this one, and to lose the imperative that drives so much of our Christian and Catholic emphasis on practical, physical, relief of the hungry, the homeless, and other victims of injustice. Our opposition to these debasements of human existence are integrally linked to our belief about the value not just of the soul but of the body: we cannot in fact separate the one from the other. And we must apply such conviction to the care of our own bodies, and respect for them. The truest basis for Christian sexual morality is not repression but respect, the conviction that how we use our bodies is not incidental to the deeper matters of our lives, but very much a part of them.
When Jesus calls Lazarus forth from the tomb, he tells the crowd: “Untie him and let him go.” This too applies to us. Jesus call us to the fullness of life here and now, calling us to come out of the tombs and closets and prisons of oppression or persecution, calling us to be untied from all that binds us, and then to share the gift of freedom with others. The fact, the wondrous fact, is that each of us already is a Lazarus, called into new life by the baptism we have received. And each of us will be Lazarus, raised from the dead, body and soul. With Lazarus we share Jesus now and in the time to come: Jesus, the one whose Body and Blood we will soon offer and receive, death and life together, given for the sake of the world. “I AM the resurrection and the life…everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Columba Stewart OSB is a monk at Saint John’s Abbey, the Executive Director of Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, University Vice-President for Programs in Religion and Culture at Saint John’s University, and a Professor of Theology in the School of Theology·Seminary. This homily was preached at St. John’s Abbey on Sunday, April 6th.
* Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, at Yale Divinity School
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