The video is missing the first few moments of the sermon because of a technical issue.
John 11:1-45
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “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.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.
Last Saturday, some of us gathered in this space to hear artist, Chloe White talk about the Stations of the Cross she created for St. Benedict’s. As part of her time with us, we walked, together, from station to station as Chloe talked about the creative influences that informed her work, and about the impact the work has had on her. We weren’t praying the Stations of the Cross, but the experience of listening to Chloe and encountering each station with her and with each other was absolutely, I thought, a spiritual experience. Chloe’s own story and her interpretation, enriched my own, along with the reflections many of you offered. It was an experience for sure, that I felt deeply – and I think some others did, too.
And this is the power of spiritual practice in general, I think – and of the Stations of the Cross, in particular – that we experience, and that we learn from what we experience as we practice.
The Stations of the Cross is a hard practice. It draws us into the suffering of Jesus, and carries us to a place beyond words, and it has us linger there, it holds us, there, as we move slowly and deliberately from one Station to the next.
The agony of Jesus’ Passion becomes all there is. The suffering is hard to hold. Suffering, that perhaps, we wish we didn’t have to feel.
Why didn’t Jesus use his power to do more? Why didn’t he crush the oppressive Roman Empire? Why didn’t he rain hellfire down on those who revel in the violence of torture and war? Why didn’t he just fix it all? Why didn’t he prevent his own death?
If you’ve ever asked these questions, if you’ve ever wrestled with questions like these, know you are not alone.
When contemplating the truth of God, questions like these, I think, are entirely valid, and humans have been asking them since the beginning.
And asking them is good, because it’s by taking seriously what God does not do, thinking deeply about what God does not do that something very important about this life, about our lives, might be revealed.
We live finite lives in a finite world, and this, in the absence of any other circumstances or happenings, will cause us to suffer. We suffer when we confront death, our own, or the deaths of those we love. We suffer as we deal with the ‘little deaths’ in life, the changes we don’t control. Many endings will bring suffering with them.
No matter how deep our faith, how unshakeable our trust in God, we will feel pain. God does not take that pain away, God does not remove our suffering, suffering is in and of this finite world; Jesus himself wept at the death of his beloved friend Lazarus.
We can’t think suffering away, rationalize it away. Suffering must be accepted. And that’s an uncomfortable truth of life. And so we must sit a while with this truth, take time to work it through as a spiritual practice.
The alternative is to try to push it away or deny it, the alternative is to live in fear of suffering and fiercely insist that it play no role in our life. Looking around at the world we live in, we can see the efforts of trying to distract ourselves from the reality of suffering, the ways our own fear of suffering become the cause of someone else’s suffering. Our fear of having to suffer can drive us to try to control the world around us, and the people in it, it can us behave in a God-like way.
If I can just stop this or that from happening, stop this or that person doing this or that, control how this plays out, manage all aspects of my life to be the way I want them to be … then I won’t suffer.
But that’s not true.
Jesus’ difficult story is a story of what it is to be human in this world, and it’s a story of the truth of God, and God’s relationship with us. Suffering, as a human, in this finite life, is unavoidable; but our response to suffering is a choice … and how we choose to respond, how we practice responding will have an impact, not only to our own lived experience, but to the very many ways our own lives are an integral part of the whole story of this world. Our response to suffering can heal or it can do terrible harm.
The time after Jesus’ betrayal, and before his crucifixion, must have been a time of intense emotional agony, a time of terrible psychological and spiritual suffering, and yet Jesus says to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.[1] Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”[2]
We don’t really get to decide not to be afraid, or to not fear suffering, but we can come to trust Jesus’ words and understand them when we set down our sentence-making minds and fully inhabit our whole self and this can be the fruit of intentional spiritual practice, of the experience we have as we practice. There is deep wisdom held within the essence of what it is to be human, God’s presence is inseparable from who and what we are.
And this presence is love.
Confronting our own sufferings and the horrendous human-designed, human-perpetuated sufferings in the world, it can seem, on the surface, to be an absolutely absurd proposition that we should not be afraid! But the alternative is to live a life that’s fear-based and fear-driven, navigating life, making decisions and choices and acting, to avoid suffering at all costs.
If we’re afraid, we’ll either retreat, pull back, withdraw – not participate in all that life is, not live fully – or we can come out fighting, we might confront, try to control as much of life as we can, be quick to attack, lashing out because we’re afraid, and trying to control our fear of suffering through violences of all kinds.
… but if we can just get to it, if we can just reach deep enough, get our minds out of the way for long enough, if we can just figure out, for ourselves, how to connect with what’s already within, we will begin to shift our thinking, and we will begin to let go of fear.
Jesus loved, he loved those he encountered along the way, he loved his friends, his mother, his family, he understood and made real the power of the love of God in the world, and we are inheritors of that love.
We have everything we need for this life journey, we already have everything we need to navigate our own suffering, we are the disciples of the one who has shown the way.
Jesus’ way is freedom from fear; is courage and strength through and from the love that is the Source of All; and it is the insistence that whatever we encounter in this life, death will not win.
Our Holy Week walk with Jesus from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem … to the foot of the cross … and then on to the empty tomb … is agonizing and revelatory, and we’re called, each year, to experience some of that.
We can’t dodge suffering, but we can love, always, and despite it all. This is what we were created for, and for life, and this is why Jesus came into this world, so that we might have life and have it abundantly.[3] So practice, practice letting love drive out fear; love with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind;[4] so that when we take up our cross[5] we might faithfully follow, by the mighty power of God’s love, the one who is the way, the truth, and the life![6] Amen.
[1] John 14:1
[2] John 14:27
[3] John 10:10
[4] Matthew 22:37
[5] Matthew 16:24
[6] John 14:6