THE LIFE THAT MATTERS. Thomas Lynch, the poet funeral director, writes the following in his book of

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1 THE LIFE THAT MATTERS Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45 Thomas Lynch, the poet funeral director, writes the following in his book of essays titled The Undertaking. I may have quoted this to you before, but, if so, it s good enough to hear again. There s this just a shell theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others. You hear it when you bring a mother and father in for the first sight of their dead daughter killed in a car wreck or left out to rot by some mannish violence. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and the exhale of the bone-wracking sob such hurts produce, some frightened and well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with It s OK, that s not her, it s just a shell. I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by a swift slap of a mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he d tendered this counsel. I ll tell you when it s just a shell, the woman said. For now and until I tell you otherwise, she s my daughter. She was asserting the longstanding right of the living to declare the dead dead. Just as we declare the living alive though baptisms, lovers in love by nuptials, funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. (emphasis added) It is how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories. (pp. 20f.) Such a strange tale, the story of the raising of Lazarus. It is obviously a story that anticipates the resurrection of Jesus, a sign that God s Word is more powerful than death.

2 We see this in Jesus comment pertaining to sick Lazarus, This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God s glory so that the Son of God may be glorified through it, says Jesus. But this having been said, Lazarus nevertheless dies. He is not asleep. He is dead and accordingly entombed. This gives Jesus the opportunity to make a series of cryptic comments to Lazarus sister Martha about the resurrection to which he tells her he is the key. But when Jesus sees Lazarus other sister weeping and with her several weeping companions, he breaks down himself because Lazarus was so dear to him. The show of emotion is extraordinary. On many occasions I have seen perfectly composed mourners at a funeral suddenly brought to tears by the weeping of someone who is not so composed, as if suddenly the grief had become contagious. It seems that something like this happened to Jesus, triggering his tears. And Jesus weeps! He weeps for the loss of his friend, regarding whose illness he had spoken so philosophically a few days earlier, as if Lazarus condition was nothing more than an opportunity to make a point for the sake of his mission. So why does Jesus weep? Does he not know that in no time at all he will call stinking Lazarus back to life? This, as I say, is very strange. What is going on here? Perhaps we would do well to go back to the distinction funeral director Lynch makes between the death that happens and the death that matters. Right in the middle of the story of Lazarus Jesus becomes overwhelmed by his friend s death. All of a sudden, this death that has happened becomes a death that matters, a death that means something, and with this, Jesus is reduced to tears. I don t know about you, but this weeping Jesus is the Jesus that I love, the human Jesus who cares about his friend, for whom Lazarus flesh-and-blood-life mattered and whose death is a staggering loss.

3 That s the way it is when we lose someone we love! It breaks your heart! And there s nothing to do but weep and go crazy with grief. When you couple the story of Lazarus with a lesson from St. Paul s Letter to the Romans where he writes, To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace, one is tempted to think that flesh here means the body, which can die, and that the spirit is the opposite of this mortal body that is bound for death. But flesh should not be taken to mean body. Flesh represents the selfish cravings of one who lives his life simply for the satisfaction of his own desires. Flesh is not here the stuff our bodies are made from, as if our bodies are only shells and the real person is something else, a disembodied spirit beyond the flesh. Paul is here talking about the difference between the spiritual death of selfishness and the spiritual life that comes to those who live by the Spirit of Christ as children of God, those who live compassionate and generous lives, which according to our faith is the life that matters and not merely the life that happens. Paul is not making a distinction between this life and the next, the world in which we live our embodied lives and a spiritual heaven beyond this world. He is writing about how it is that we are to live in this world. His conclusion is that we are to live by the Spirit of Christ. A few weeks ago from this pulpit I lamented that there are no occasions in the New Testament when Jesus laughs of shows any sign of having a sense of humor all the time the man of sorrows, never a smile, never a joke. But our Gospel today is a story that may be taken to suggest another picture of Jesus and does so in the shortest verse of the Bible: Jesus began to weep. (John 11:35) Jesus is described as being overcome by grief at the death of his friend. How, you ask, is this picture of Jesus weeping anything

4 other than that of a man of sorrows? Jesus is sad. There is no laughter here, no sign of humor. That is true. What there is, though, is real emotion, personal sadness expressed from the heart. This is not Jesus shouldering the sins of the world. This is Jesus being sad the way we are sad when we suffer loss in our lives. This is the human, the wonderfully human Jesus. And if he could be so saddened by the death of his friend, can we not imagine him sharing a full range of emotions with the people that he loved, including laughter and all the feelings of a common humanity? Why would he weep if it were not for the loss of someone with whom he literally en-joyed life? Here we have presented Jesus the person who is every bit as human as are we. The story of Lazarus appears only in the Gospel of John, the last of the New Testament Gospels to be written. This suggests that it is not the story of something that actually happened one day in Bethany but rather that the raising of Lazarus may be a type of story that John is using to set the stage and anticipate the resurrection of Jesus and the message of the power of God to overcome death. It may be that this story is based on a germ of something that actually did happen in Jesus life, something that was witnessed by his friends and others that left an impression: viz., Jesus grief at the death of his friend, something that moved them and perhaps moves us as well to care for this human Jesus who so cares for Lazarus. As a young boy, I recall reading a book that lived in an end table in my parents living room, probably a Book-of-the-Month Club offering. It was titled The Day Christ Died by, I think, Jim Bishop. Maybe you have heard of it. Anyway, the book was slim, and I picked it up to see what it had to say about the Jesus I was hearing about in Sunday school. As I remember this, there was a long and dramatic description of what Jesus

5 went through on the way to his execution, the scourging, the mockery, the cross, the humiliation and abandonment. I read it and tears welled up in me. This was more real to me than story as I knew it in the New Testament. The Jesus re-imagined by the author was a human being, and I found myself caring about what was happening to him and what he was going through. His death not only happened. It mattered! At least one of the things that Lent should do for us is to cause us to care about Jesus, not merely as Messiah or Savior or icon of the Christian religion, but as a person, living and breathing, a person with all the passions and emotions that we have; a person who enjoyed a too-brief life and loved it every bit as much as we love our own lives, even in the broken places. This is the story announced at Christmas of the Word become flesh. Amen. Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 9, 2008 Emanuel Lutheran Church