Lent 5A, April 2, 2017

O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

It’s funny to me to have a few verses from Paul’s letter to the Romans warning against setting one’s mind on the flesh rather than the spirit, sandwiched between Ezekiel’s vision or dream of the re-embodiment of a valley full of dry bones and John’s vision or dream of the resurrection or rising of Lazarus after he had been dead for four days. It’s hard not to think of bodies when these dreams are so vivid in their descriptions of sinews, flesh, skin and smell!

We have another long narrative from the Gospel of John. Unlike last week, I don’t have any re-punctuation advice for you this morning to take care of the theological problem of the statement that the illness and death of Lazarus took place so that the Son of God could be glorified. Still, I want to insist that God’s glorification is a consequence and not an intended outcome of targeted suffering. I resist the notion that illness and death are somehow designed for the glorification of the Holy One, by the Holy One. If that’s what John the Evangelist really meant, I believe he was mistaken. There are plenty of ways for the Holy One to show off without picking on little guys living in a place called poor house (Bethany) and the main body of Jesus’ teaching supports my resistance.

It helps me to remember that the Gospel of John is full of metaphors, poetry, and symbolism. It helps me to hear this as if it were the telling of an important vision or dream. In a vision or a dream, things don’t have to “make sense” in order to be true, and a vision or dream, like poetry or music, does not need to get interrogated for facts before it can be called beautiful or significant.

I spent this last week traveling to a place I’ve never been and I had a lot of time on my hands to read and reflect. One of the things that captured my attention was the purpose and meaning of signs and how much I rely on being able to understand signs when navigating unfamiliar territory of any kind. I think often about my experience of traveling alone three years ago to the Galilee. I made arrangements to rent a car in Tel Aviv, got a good map, and felt confident enough to do this because I remembered from previous travel there, that highway signs are written in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. I can read a little Hebrew and can sound out words and figure them out – especially place names because they are mostly Biblical, and many words in modern Hebrew are transliterations of English words. What I had not considered at all was that flashing, temporary construction or traffic signs would be in Hebrew only, and would not be Bible words, so they would be impossible for me to decipher on my own, having not slept for 24 hours, driving 50 miles per hour on busy highways. Somehow, I survived and I did not cause any personal injury or property damage. Still, it was a life lesson in the importance of slowing down, going with a buddy, and saying prayers! It felt like a miracle that I made it in one piece to the Sea of Galilee. I don’t mean miracle in the sense of “an extraordinary event that exceeds known human understanding or power; something supernatural.” I mean miracle in the sense of grace and gift. That’s what I think Biblical miracles are: grace and gift.

The Greek word that often gets translated into our word “miracle,” is say-mi-on, which is, more literally, sign or token, from the verb that means to indicate or to signify. (Signify or significant both have sign as a root.) There is no positive or negative implication in the word. A sign is something that points to something else. It is not the thing – it indicates the way to the thing. To translate say-mi-on or sign as miracle lays a heavy theological load or judgment – maybe too heavy.

The Gospel of John is sometimes called “The Signs Gospel,” because of the narrative’s organization around seven signs. Now, John the Evangelist may have considered these signs to be miracles, in the sense of grace and gift, but it might help our post-enlightenment ears to back away from the supernatural definition and understand the signs as indications of or as pointing to the nature or naturalness of the Holy One. Five of the seven signs in this Gospel are not in the other Gospels, and the other two are told in a very different way from the other Gospels. The signs are: water changed to wine; a royal official’s son restored to health in Capernaum; the healing of paralysis in Bethesda; the feeding of 5,000 from the lunch carried by one little child; Jesus walking on water; the healing of the man blind from birth; and the raising of Lazarus. Lazarus means, “God has helped,” by the way.

For John the Evangelist, the reason that Word became flesh was so that God’s nature could be more fully revealed. These signs point to the nature or naturalness of the Holy One in the person of Jesus – the quintessential embodiment or incarnation of God. So, I want to unburden this story from the weight of historical or scientific scrutiny, and think of it as a sign about which we might ask, “does it indicate the direction in which we are to go? Does it either warn us away or draw us forward? A sign might be aesthetically pleasing, legible and well-placed, but one can only determine the effectiveness based on whether it directs us where we need to go.

As a sign, this story is poetry about restoration of life, restoration of health and mobility, and responsibility of community. Lazarus gets called out of the burial cave, head, hands and legs still bound. What made him get up? Perhaps you know David Whyte’s poem about Lazarus, called, “The Lightest Touch.” It goes:

Good poetry begins with
the lightest touch,
a breeze arriving from nowhere,
a whispered healing arrival,
a word in your ear,
a settling into things,
then like a hand in the dark
it arrests the whole body,
steeling you for revelation.

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

The most amazing part of this sign for me is this: Jesus tells the others to unbind Lazarus in a moment that clarifies how it is that God helps – God helps through the work of the community. Apparently, Lazarus can be raised from the dead, even after four days, but the burial wrappings tying his legs together and his arms by his side, covering him from head to toe, require human hands to undo, in spite of the stench, in spite of the unfamiliar and potentially dangerous territory.

As a sign, this story seems to be pointing to the resurrection of Jesus as the destination; it seems like foreshadowing and it seems like an interesting piece of narrative evidence that Jesus was not the first to be raised from the dead. But I want to call your attention to a destination beyond the resurrection, because I think this sign is pointing past the resurrection of Jesus. I think this sign is pointing beyond Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the Risen Lord in the garden; beyond the appearances of the Risen Lord in the locked room; and even beyond the disciples’ return to their fishing business on the Sea of Galilee. I think this sign points to the encounter the disciples have with a stranger on the beach who was making breakfast for the friends of Jesus after they’d been out all night trying to catch fish. The stranger, who becomes known to them as the Risen Lord, asks Peter, “do you love me?’ three times. Three times Peter says “yes,” “yes,” and “yes, Lord, you know I love you,” and the Lord’s reply to each affirmation of love for the Lord is, “Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep.” That is what all of the signs in the Gospel of John ultimately point to: the care and feeding of the flock – a widely understood metaphor for the people of God. In John, the people of God clearly include people of all ages, both Jews and Gentiles.

All of the signs point to the nature of the Divine being revealed in caring for others – feeding, tending, healing, unbinding or freeing, raising up to new life. It may be that slowing down, having a buddy, and saying our prayers can help us read the signs, especially the ones that are flashing to get our attention. I urge you to pay attention to the signs. No matter what your relationship with the Holy One is like, or how you pray (or how the Spirit intercedes on your behalf with sighs too deep for words), I am convinced that none of us can truly live unless we get to our destination of caring for one another the way Jesus taught us to care for one another. All signs in the Gospel of John point in that direction. That is where we need to go.

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