Robert Barron - Is Death the End?
Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the Fifth Sunday of Lent and just this magnificent series of marvelous readings from the Gospel of John. Now as a kind of climax we come to the story of the raising of Lazarus. As I mentioned before in the stories of the woman at the well and the man born blind and so many others, the whole spiritual life is summed up in a kind of iconic way in these stories, and this is no exception to that rule. Before we get to Lazarus, though, the Church asks us to contemplate a little passage from the thirtyseventh chapter of the prophet Ezekiel. It's that famous story of the dry bones.
Remember, the prophet is given this vision of the dry bones, the result of a battle, and all these bodies that have wasted away, leaving the bones behind? But then we hear how the Spirit of the Lord breathes upon them, and first comes the sinew and then the flesh and then they stand up as a mighty army and then God breathes his life back into them. It's God reviving Israel. And we hear this line: "I will open your graves and have you rise from them". I don't know about you, but there's really to my mind nothing more extraordinary in the whole spiritual order than this. Let's face it. We are all haunted by death.
So no matter what you accomplish in your life, no matter how much you've achieved and what you've managed to produce or whatever, we all know that it's going to be swallowed up in our own death, right? And that's led some philosophers and others to say, "Well, what's the point? Life is just absurd, isn't it? Death has the final say". "I will open your graves and have you rise from them". Here's the God of Israel now speaking to us, this God of the Bible, the true God who does not think that death has the final say, who announces his purpose clearly to open our graves and have us rise from them. He's the God of the living, not the God of the dead. He wants to breathe life into us, to revive these dry bones.
And think for a second now with the Ezekiel image in mind, I mentioned how the dry bones are undoubtedly the result of a great battle. That in some ways sums up the power of death, I think, the fear of death, putting to death. How many corrupt governments and empires are predicated upon the fear of death? And so you can see in those dry bones, it's the way death just broods over the whole of life. But the God of Israel has a lordship over all of that field of death. He means to bring us out of our graves. So that's Ezekiel long ago, long before the time of Jesus. But then we turn to the Gospel, and we see the fulfillment of Ezekiel's prophecy.
So let's do now what we did before, attend to some of the dynamics of this story, which is so brilliantly told by St. John. Jesus says, "Our beloved Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to wake him". Well, Lazarus has died. There's no question about that. Lazarus has died. This awful finality has come to him. In blithely referring to this as Lazarus being asleep, what's Jesus doing? Same thing he did, by the way, remember, with the daughter of Jairus, when the people are all mourning because this little girl has died. Unquestionably, she's died. And Jesus says, "No, no, she's only asleep," and they laugh at him. He's relativizing the power of death.
So we fall asleep fully expecting to wake up. Sleep has no ultimate power over us. Sleep is not some definitive finality. And so he's pronouncing here: neither is death. Death is like sleep. From it we will awaken. Then we hear, "When Jesus arrived at Bethany", it's just a few miles outside Jerusalem, "he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days". Now, what's St. John insisting upon here? That Lazarus is really dead. There's no room for doubt. There's no room for question. We can't say, "Oh, maybe he was just unconscious. They didn't realize it". Or, "Oh, he was pronounced dead a few hours ago, but primitive times and maybe they didn't know". No, no, he's dead. He's been four days in the tomb.
No matter how final we think death is, God is more powerful. No matter how crushingly final it seems to us, it's nothing for God. See, we're meant to see that contrast. And I love this now, and partially because I was installed bishop up here in Winona-Rochester on the feast day of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. When I was coming of age, it was only the feast day of St. Martha. But a great innovation of Pope Francis is to make it the feast day not just of Martha but of these three siblings, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. So ever since that day, I've had kind of a special devotion to these three figures. But Martha comes out to meet the Lord. So they've been back at the house mourning. She says, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother never would have died".
Can you hear, everybody, in that little phrase an overtone of what everybody says at some level to God when someone they love has died? It's the whole broken human heart in the presence of a death of a loved one as we're saying some version of, "Well, Lord, how come this has happened? How come you didn't prevent this"? There's a little edge of, not resentment, it's too strong of a word, that edge of painful questioning that all of us feel in the presence of death. But then she says, "But even now", so even in my grief, and even with the fact that he's been in the grave for four days, "even now I am sure that God will give you whatever you ask him".
And Jesus replies, and here in line with a common Jewish expectation of the time, "Your brother will rise again". And Martha says, "Well, yeah, I know he will rise in the last day with all the righteous dead". And then Jesus says, "I am..." Remember from last week, 'ego eimi'? Here's another one: "I am the resurrection and the life". In other words, what Israel was sort of vaguely hoping for, that maybe at the end of time through God's power the righteous dead will arise, Jesus is saying, "Ego eimi. I am. I am the divine power. I am the resurrection and the life". And I think it's lovely; at this point, Martha makes one of the great confessions of faith in the whole New Testament.
Think of St. Peter: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God". Think of St. Thomas after he's put his fingers in the Lord's wounds and he says, "My Lord and my God". Well, here's Martha now, listen: "Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world". Again, I want to speak in defense of Martha a little bit. We know from these earlier stories that she's out there with the details of hospitality and Mary's at the Lord's feet, and Martha complains and Jesus says, "Oh, Martha, Martha. Mary's chosen the better part".
Well, that Martha has overcome whatever obsession with a practical fussiness she had and that she's come to real profound faith, you see it here. "Yes, Lord. I've come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world". Now, see what's happening, everybody. Their brother's died. So there's the fact and the finality of death. And she questions God: Why has this been allowed to happen? But then there's this incipient faith. Yeah, I do believe that he'll rise at the end of time. But then it's coming now to a deeper place. It's coming to a deeper place because she's confronted Jesus, who says, "I am the resurrection and the life". Yes, yes, I've come to believe that too. You're the Christ, the Son of the living God. You see, it's this movement of a soul toward deeper and deeper faith in the power of God over death.
Then these gorgeous details: "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, 'Where have you laid him?'" The deep emotional distress of Jesus that's on display here. He's in the home of his friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Lazarus has died. He sees the people around weeping, and he's moved at the deepest level. See, friends, don't think of God as just this kind of distant philosophical principle, a detached first cause. No, no. The God of the Bible is a God who's always entered into our lives and especially into our suffering, and particularly into our experience of anguish in the presence of death. And everybody listening to me right now, myself included, we all know this experience, that God enters into this with us.
Marvelous. And it's followed by, I think it's the shortest verse in the New Testament but one of the most eloquent, simply this: "And Jesus wept". We never really hear about Jesus laughing in the Gospels. He says a lot of kind of wry and humorous things. But we do get this emotion on clear display. So moved is he that he begins to weep. The tears of Jesus are the tears of God. As he enters into what bedevils us the most, what confounds us the most, what breaks our hearts, his heart is broken with us. And the people, lovely, say, "See how he loved him".
Now, Jesus comes to the tomb of Lazarus. And we see something here, it's very clear in all the Gospels. Jesus is not just a moral teacher, not just an inspiring spiritual guru. He's come, the Word made flesh. He's come, God and man together. He's come as a great warrior to do battle with our greatest enemy. Yes, he battles all the manifestations of sin. That's true. Watch him taking on the scribes and Pharisees and everybody else. But the principal enemy that God has always faced down is death itself. "I will open your graves and have you rise from them". Well, now here it's happening. He says, "Take away the stone". And again, they reiterate, "I mean, Lord, it's been four days". And just to make this as vivid as possible, "surely there will be a stench".
They're in a desert environment. And the gross finality of death is again being emphasized. But Jesus doesn't worry about that. But rather, in a loud voice, he says, "Lazarus, come out"! I've said this before. God's words are not merely descriptive, but they are creative. They don't just in a derivative way describe what's going on; rather, they make what happens. "Let there be light," and there was light. "Let the dry land appear," and it appeared. "Let there be animals teaming upon its surface," and so it happened. "As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, so my word does not go forth from me in vain, but rather accomplishes its purpose".
That's the prophet Isaiah. "This is my body... This is my blood". And so they are. And so here. "Lazarus, come out"! This is not just wishful thinking. I mean, I could stand in front of a tomb and say, "Oh, come out," speaking out of my own broken heart, but it would have no efficacious power. But when Jesus speaks, because of who he is, what he says is.
And so, "The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face wrapped in a cloth". Don't you love the particularity of that description? They remembered this. Trust me, they remembered this. "Lazarus, come out"! And so he comes out. "I will open your graves and have you rise from them". And then the lovely final line: "Untie him and let him go". Well, there's the liberating power of Christ. We're tied up by lots of things. Things that frighten us, things that bedevil us, things that limit us. But the ultimate thing that binds us is the fear of death. One day we'll hear the same voice calling us to come forth from our graves and have us rise from them. It's the Christ who wants to liberate us. And God bless you.