Die Before You Die
Yesterday afternoon I participated in a “Post-Sabbatical Presentation” event on campus along with colleagues from the mathematics, history, English, and theology departments. One of the duties of faculty returning from a sabbatical semester or year is to provide a brief (10-15 minute) overview of what they accomplished on sabbatical. It’s sort of the academic version of the grade school “What I did on summer vacation” event.
My main accomplishment while on sabbatical during the Fall 2023 semester was to complete the first drafts of two book projects. One of these books, A Year of Faith and Philosophy: Exploring Spiritual Growth Through the Liturgical Cycle, is forthcoming from Church Publishing in early October. To give the 30-40 people in attendance a sense of what I’m doing in the book, I chose to read a representative section. Since we are currently in Lent, I chose the section on Lent 5, the final Sunday of Lent (a week from this coming Sunday). Enjoy!
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Year A: Ezekiel 37:1–14, John 11:1–45
The gospel for Lent 5 Year A, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday, transitions us into Holy Week, focuses on what could be described as Jesus’s signature miracle—the raising of Lazarus. The story always makes me nostalgic for various Hollywood treatments of Jesus’s life from my youth. One of the most memorable is the 1966 film The Greatest Story Ever Told, directed by George Stevens.
Stevens hinges the whole three-hour-plus spectacle on the raising of Lazarus, which takes place just over halfway through the movie. Instead of focusing on Jesus and Lazarus, the camera focuses on the reactions of those present. Shocked faces, stunned silence, a woman drops to her knees, a man bursts into tears. One witness runs down the road toward Jerusalem, grabbing random people and sharing the news—“Jesus of Nazareth . . . I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes! Lazarus was dead, and now he’s alive!” “The Messiah has come! A man was dead, and now he lives!”
Why Does Jesus Weep?
If this is Jesus’s career-defining miracle, why is it only reported in one of the four canonical gospels? Why do Matthew, Mark, and Luke not consider the story important enough to include in their narratives? Why does Jesus deliberately delay traveling to Bethany upon hearing that his friend is deathly ill? We know a lot about Jesus with Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, but this is the first time we’ve heard about Lazarus. Is he the domineering older brother of Mary and Martha, or the spoiled younger brother on whom they dote? Why does Jesus weep? What happened to Lazarus after he was raised from the dead? How did he live out the rest of his life?
The story of Lazarus is our story, the story of everyone who seeks, in individual and unique ways, to be friends with Jesus. The Lent 5 Year A selection from the Jewish Scriptures is the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones. We all, I suspect, have spiritually experienced a valley-of-dry-bones season. Dry bones are the remaining evidence of something that was once alive but hasn’t been for a long time. Each of us has been through a “dark night,” a time in which everything relied upon turns out to be unreliable, and everything that made sense no longer does. Let’s look at an example.
Lazarus is dead
I claim to be a follower of Jesus, but the internal flame has slowly decreased to an ember that is threatening to die out. I haven’t seen or talked with Jesus, really spent time with him, for a while. Those closest to me might realize that something’s wrong but are unable to help. Nothing but silence. And deep down, I know this is not just a dry period, a time in the desert. The spiritual ember flickers out, leaving a cold, empty space full of ashes at my core. This is real death, from which there is no return. “Lazarus is dead.”
As noted in a previous section, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that “[w]hen Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” And death is not attractive. It isn’t pretty. No matter how beautiful the dress, how snazzy the suit, how professional the make-up job, a corpse is still a corpse. Spiritual corpses go through the motions, pretending that “there’s still some life left in these bones,” but deep down they know it’s a lie. “My bones are dried up, and my hope is gone. I am cut off completely.”
Loose Him, And Let Him Go
But after what seems like a spiritual eternity—a rattling of bones, a puff of breath, and there are the stirrings of life. I’ve been dead for so long, I’m disoriented. I don’t recognize my surroundings, nor the voice in the distance. “Come forth!” As a moth toward a flame, I’m drawn toward that sound, toward a pinpoint of light, and I find that, against all odds, what was dead is alive again. I’m surrounded by those I thought I had lost, those whom I’d thought I would never truly see again. “We thought you were dead!” “I was!” But I can’t move properly, can’t see clearly, I feel like a mummy who just became alive again. And I hear a commanding voice: “Loose him, and let him go.”
I’ve been raised to new life—so why am I still bound by the vestiges of death, by the graveclothes of a past that I thought was gone? Because spiritual renewal and growth are like the evolutionary process—I drag the remnants of a past reality into my new life. Vestiges of what has died still remain. If inattentive, I will attempt to weave new garments of salvation out of old, stinking rags that have long outlived their purpose. And I cannot remove them by myself—I need help. I need the help of those who love me and who know what it’s like to try to get one’s bearings as a newly resurrected corpse. And the Lazarus cycle goes on.
The Cornerstone of Existence
The message of the story of Lazarus is “Don’t be afraid to die”—especially to those things we cannot bear to even think about losing. Don’t be afraid to release even what seems most necessary—familiar thoughts, comfortable patterns of behavior, toxic relationships, habits set in stone, well-intentioned but self-centered expectations—the very things that for each of us seem to be the cornerstone of existence. To truly live, we have to die. As Simone Weil wrote,
They alone will see God who prefer to recognize the truth and die, instead of living a long and happy existence in a state of illusion. One must want to go towards reality; then, when one thinks one has found a corpse, one meets an angel who says: “He is risen.”
For reflection: C. S. Lewis once wrote that the person of Christian faith should be prepared to “die before you die.” Consider what he might have meant in the context of the raising of Lazarus story.
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