Ezekiel 37:1-14

Psalm 130

Romans 6:16-23

JOHN 11:1-44

What Can God Raise Up In Your Life?

Much of the time, people resign themselves to the way things are in the world, saying “that’s just the way things are.” Such an attitude does not allow people to consider the possibility that God’s will may be very different from “the way things are” – and that God’s will may indeed start “to be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

We get a sample of what that might actually be like when we read the Gospels – especially John, the Gospel of “the great reversals.” This Lent, we have heard some of St. John’s “greatest hits” – and they are all about great reversals.

On the Second Sunday of Lent, we heard the story of Nicodemus, the prominent scholar-statesman (now there’s a hybrid you don’t see in this country very often!) who comes to Jesus, the up-from-nowhere rabbi from the countryside with no diplomas and no position, to learn from him. That’s a reversal from “the way things are” to start with.

But the reversal goes much further. The learned Nicodemus finds Jesus’ teaching to be too “deep” for him to comprehend at the time, a teaching about the need for all people to be born again or born from above, to value their careers-to-date as nothing (as Paul came to do) and to go back to the beginning to start with God. To reverse course, so that one may truly go forward as far as possible. That’s harder if you think you already “have it all”, or almost all. But without being born from above, no one can have it all. Nicodemus had to think about it.

Two weeks ago, we encountered the woman at the well, with her water jug which she had to lug to the well at the hottest time of the day every day. Here is someone who is at the absolutely opposite end of the hierarchy of social rank and power from Nicodemus who, unlike him, “gets it!”

She is a woman, a member of a persecuted ethnic and religious minority, a small town resident who is an exile in her own village because she has been divorced five times and now is living with someone else. She, unlike Nicodemus, is even nameless in the Gospel account.

Yet she is the first person in the Gospel to run and tell her whole town “you gotta come meet this guy! Can this be the Messiah?”

What a reversal! The person her neighbors probably expected to get “nuked” if the Messiah came to town is the first one chosen by him to have her life transformed and to draw others to him. Maybe it’s because she knew she’d made a mess of her life and

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that she had no status “the way things were,” that she was open to this revolutionary reversal. God can turn peoples’ lives around 180 degrees – if people “let go and let God.”

Who else had ultra-low status in First Century Palestine? People with disabling handicaps, for sure, especially given how they were abused by the theology of the supposedly “healthy.” Even Jesus’ own disciples, you recall, asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

We don’t even hear the man himself protesting this horrific labeling. I guess he was used to it; it was just “the way things were.”

So here comes the great reversal. The man who everyone assumes is the walking embodiment of punishment for sin (his own, while in the womb don’t you know, or that of his parents!) instead becomes the walking embodiment of “God’s works” being revealed in the world.

Jesus, the Light of the World, heals him literally (yes, literally) – but Jesus also reveals that this man who has been despised all his life is the one who has true spiritual insight and can see who Jesus is.

At the end of last week’s Gospel, it says that the man who had formerly been blind worshiped Jesus.

A quick reading of this story reminds us that the Pharisees were appalled by the healing and by the man’s presumption to know God’s will – which he did – and that the Pharisees most definitely did not worship Jesus.

But at this point, neither did “the disciples”.

Perhaps they had not yet experienced enough of a turn-around, a reversal in their lives. They worshiped him after Easter. For the man who had been blind, it was already Easter. He had indeed seen enough. He did not, like the apostle Thomas, have to wait to see “the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands” to believe.

Who could experience a reversal more spectacular than that of an eminent scholar sent back to “First Grade Sunday School” class, or that of a very low status notorious sinner transformed into an evangelist, or that of a man born blind given both physical and spiritual sight at the highest level?

What could be the greatest reversal a human being could experience?

Well, what could be a greater reversal than to go from being dead to being alive?

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And so we come to the story of Lazarus. It is Jesus’ last miracle before his crucifixion, and it was the one which (if we read further in the gospel after this morning’s passage) sealed his own fate, for after it his opponents definitively decided that he must die.

In all the Gospel stories of Jesus, he never hurries. This frustrated Mary and Martha who had sent word to him that their brother Lazarus was very, very sick. (“Figure it out, Jesus: this is a “911 call”. Come quickly and do your thing!”) But Jesus never hurries because Jesus is never too late. It is never too late for Jesus to do something! Even, in the case of Lazarus, to reverse death to life.

Within this story of a great reversal there are others which defy expectations. This first person in the Gospel of John to say definitively to Jesus, “You are the Christ” is not Peter, “Chief of the apostles”, but Martha. A woman. An unmarried woman. A disciple, for sure. A disciple with Easter faith before Easter. The men caught up later. President Larry Summers of Harvard, please take note.

Jesus evoked this enormous faith statement from Martha, and then he went to the tomb. What he did next is, in the Revised Standard Version translation, the shortest verse in the Bible, John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” He wept because he loved Lazarus, and Lazarus was dead. He still weeps with those who weep today when they mourn.

And then – no, he doesn’t raise Lazarus from the dead just yet. He says, “Take away the stone” from the door of the tomb. Lazarus’ friends and family have to do something. They show their faith first, and then they see the miracle.

And they have to do something even after Lazarus walks out of the tomb. Bodies in that place and time were wrapped. Jesus said to the bystanders, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

These stories are not just about what Jesus did far away and long ago. These stories are about what Jesus does, present tense, and what he can and will do, present and future tense – for and with those who are willing.

Even though he came inconspicuously, at night, Nicodemus was willing to humble himself to learn from the extraordinary upstart from Nazareth. What is there in each of us which we need to humble so that we may be born again?

The woman at the well was willing to believe that God cared for her and was offering to transform her life, despite who she was and what she had done. What is there in each of us, by status or past history, that needs transformation by God and are we willing to accept that God offers us such transformation?

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The man born blind was crippled physically, socially and theologically. What is there in each of us that needs to be and can be healed in any sense, by the grace and powerful love of God?

Lazarus was dead. What can Christ raise in each of us that now seems dead but which to God still has great possibilities? Some relationship? Some ability? Some aspect of well-being? A new life? The hope of eternal life? Nothing is too dead for God to do something with!

And remember: Lazarus had friends, who were crucial. Could Christ be calling you to “unbind” someone who is “wrapped up” in something that could lead to death? Some sin? Some preoccupation with material things? Some addiction? If Christ could raise Lazarus, who else can he raise?

All these stories of great reversals are, of course, foretastes of Easter, the greatest reversal of all. But today we worship together on the Fifth Sunday of Lent; our annual remembering of Christ’s suffering and death still lies between us and Easter services. Don’t skip that part. On Palm Sunday and Good Friday we remember that the endless possibilities of new life for human beings did not come without someone paying the ultimate price. We, and all people, are offered transformation now and the hope of eternal life in the world to come because Christ underwent his own great reversal. Christ laid down his divine omnipotence and invulnerability and took the punishment we, and all people, had coming to us for our sins. Rent Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion” if you want to get in touch with that. Christ suffered and died that we might live.

That’s not what anyone expected from God. People expected things to stay the same. Nicodemus expected to stay eminent, the woman at the well expected to stay an outcast, the man born blind expected to stay blind, Lazarus expected to stay dead.

Do we?

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, New Jersey