Ezekiel 37.1-14; John 11.1-45
The prelude to the passion narratives in the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is Jesus’s action in the Temple, following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. His turning of the tables and his provocative parables and teaching are what finally push the scribes and Chief Priests to plot to kill him.
However, St John tells a different story.
The raising of Lazarus is not included in the other gospels. But John tells us that, on hearing about this miraculous sign, the Pharisees and Chief priests call a meeting of the council, where they say: ‘What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.’
Caiaphas, the high priest that year, instructs them that it is better for one man to die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed, and so, John tells us, from that day on they planned to put Jesus to death.
And to underline the point, just a few moments later, John tells us that Jesus returns to the home of Lazarus, where he is anointed by Mary with costly perfume kept for the day of his burial. The Chief Priests discover that Jesus is there, and so they plan to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was because of him that the crowds were believing in Jesus.
This, then, sets the scene for what happens next: Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey, the crowd who saw him raise Lazarus hail him as king with palm branches, and the Pharisees grumble to one another, saying: ‘You see, you can do nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!’
And so, the stage is set for the Lord’s passion, and his confrontation with death on the cross.
This perspective of St John is particularly well preserved in the Orthodox Church. In the Eastern tradition, the day before Palm Sunday is known as ‘Lazarus Saturday’. But what is the Evangelist trying to tell us by uniquely placing the raising of Lazarus as the immediate precursor to the passion?
Well, I think it has something to do with what Jesus says to Martha in today’s Gospel: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ That is, in this prelude to the passion, St John is showing us that there is already a promise of the resurrection. In other words, Christ enters Jerusalem as Light and Life itself, in order to defeat death and liberate humanity from under its shadow.
As he says about his imminent death on the cross to the crowd once he arrives in Jerusalem: ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’
Both readings this morning provide us with an image, or icon, of what this gathering and drawing action of Christ looks like in his passion and his death.
Every day in this Cathedral, we recite the Apostles’ Creed, and profess our belief in the fact that Jesus suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and descended into hell. The prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones is a powerful prophetic image of this article of our faith.
In this scene, the dead end of the old order of sin and death before the birth of Christ is summed up in the question, ‘Can these bones live?’ It is a vision of the good purpose of God in creation seemingly coming to failure in the death of those he had formed from the earth for himself.
But then, the word of the Lord is sent forth, with the promise that the breath of life will be given to the dead, and that they will be re-clothed with restored bodies. This is the promise of resurrection.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this prophetic vision is the divine promise that the graves of the whole house of Israel will be opened, and those imprisoned by death will be brought back to the land of Israel. The parallel here with St Matthew’s account of the passion is explicit: as Jesus dies the earth shook, the rocks were split, the tombs were opened, and the bodies of the saints were raised from the dead.
As when a large rock falls into a lake and crashes against the surface, it forces splashes of displaced water to rise in all directions, so Christ dies and descends into Hades, and crashes down upon the empire of death. The dead rise from their tombs as the shockwaves of his conquest, rising like those splashes of water, because death cannot handle the presence of him who is Life itself.
For in his death and descent into hell, Jesus goes to those, like Lazarus, who are imprisoned and bound by death, and he bids them come forth, issuing the commandment, ‘Unbind him, and let him go!’
As the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.’
Or, as the great Easter refrain of the Orthodox Church has it: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, by death trampling down death, and to those in the tombs granting life!’
Sometimes we can think that our observation of this most solemn time of the year should be marked by a morbid and morose piety. As if the point of it all was to feel really sorry for Jesus.
But as Passiontide begins, and we prepare to enter Holy Week, our perspective must be brought into focus by John’s prelude to the passion. The raising of Lazarus reveals that Christ goes to Jerusalem and walks the way of the cross as Life itself. He goes to conquer death. In other words, our celebration of Lent, Passiontide, and Holy Week only happens because Christ is risen from the dead.
Yes, this was costly for Our Lord. As he foretells his death, Jesus says that his soul is troubled. He is fully human, and so he feels our natural fear of unnatural death, just as he weeps besides Lazarus’s tomb.
But he does not shrink back. Should he say, ‘Father save me from this hour’? No, he says, for the very reason that he has come to the hour of his death is so that he might be the grain of wheat that falls to the earth and dies, so that our redeemed lives might be the fruit of his conquest of death.
And having this perspective in mind might just give us courage to walk with the Lord of Life, and face our death, and the things which trouble us.