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Passion Sunday (5th in Lent ) : 13th March 2005 Ezekiel 37:1-14 | Romans 8:6-11 | John 11:1-45 Today you lucky people get two sermons of the price of one... the readings offer us a thought on Lazarus; the church this weekend offers us a thought on Noah... The architect was a little alarmed when I told him we were putting on Noah’s Flood this weekend. I told him we were flooding the church to a depth of 10 feet, and then next week we were going to switch the heating off and have “Mass on Ice”... I think he sometimes wonders quite what he’s taken on....
Actually there is an obvious link
between Lazarus and Noah and the fact that we’re thinking about them on
Passion Sunday as we look towards Holy Week and Easter. And God said unto Noah "I want you to build me an Ark, a wonderful Ark, with many decks, deck upon deck, to a very great height...!" And Noah replied "I am at your command Lord, but won't it be difficult for the animals to get aboard?" And God said unto Noah "There will be no animals Noah. Just fish - and not just any fish. Just carp, to be precise" "But Lord" said Noah "I do not understand. Carp can swim. They will in any case survive the coming Flood!" And the Lord replied unto Noah "I know, but I have always wanted to build a multi-storey Carp Ark.......!"
You’ll be relieved to know that
there is no joke for Lazarus...
When John the Baptist was in prison and began to doubt that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus told John’s disciples to go back and report what they saw: “the blind see, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cured, the deaf hear and the dead are raised” (Mat 11.50); so the raising of the dead is seen as a Messianic act - something that the Messiah will do when he comes... So we see Jesus raising Jarius’ daughter (Mk 5.22); the son of the widow at Nain (Lk 7.11); and in John’s gospel - his friend Lazarus. It’s another illustration which points to Jesus as the Messiah. Part of what the Messiah would do is to bring things alive that were dead... and here, in John’s understanding of presenting the person of Jesus, we see him bringing alive that which was literally dead. And, for John, Jesus' miraculous acts were not just showy flashy events to draw a crowd, or wow people; but they pointed beyond themselves to say something significant about Jesus - so, for John, they are signs. And in John’s gospel there are 7 signs, because 7 was the perfect number... More than just raising the dead!
Jesus is the resurrection and the life... he is the one who brings life out of death; he is the one who fulfils the expectations of the Messiah; he brings liberation from the decay and the end that death was... Jesus conquers death... Jesus is the one who brings life! And the glory of God is seen in this triumph over death... just as John talks of the crucifixion as Jesus’ hour of glory... so glory and the overcoming of sin and death become linked... The healing of the blind man (John 9) showed that Jesus was the light of the world; the raising of Lazarus (John 11) showed Jesus to be the Life giver... the one in whom we can have faith... the one who bring liberation, who can bring life out of the death that is our experience of the human condition... And Martha becomes the model disciple - expressing faith in Jesus. No room for doubt...
So the Lazarus story is a sign which marks Jesus out as the life giver; the one who is the resurrection and the life; the one in whom his disciples can trust because he brings life out of death - and the reason we look at this story on the 5th Sunday in Lent is that it foreshadows the resurrection of Jesus - he who is the resurrection and the life will defeat death, will remove the sting, because death will no longer be something to be feared or regarded as a disaster, but will be experienced in it’s context as the gateway to a new and glorious existence... as Jesus died and was raised to the glory of God the Father, so he has set the pattern which lies ahead of us. We will all die one day - that’s one of the few facts of life... but as we place our trust and believe (our faith) in the Messiah, so we too will follow his pattern and be raised to new life with him also... So remind me, where does Noah come into all this???
The salvation story of Noah is a kind of prefiguring of the salvation story played out in the life and passion of Jesus... in the Noah story God judges the creation he has made and finds them wanting... they have gone their own ways, they have forsaken the Creator... so God decides to start again. The salvation is the ark. Those in the ark are kept safe not because of any morality they may have, but because the ark is strong! The ark protects them; it shields them and delivers them to safety. Just as the basket kept Moses safe as a baby, so the ark preserves the hope of a nation... And so Christ keeps us safe through the stormy waters of death in the same way: not because we are clever, or moral, or especially faithful; but because he is strong! He has been there before! He is our salvation! At the end of it all God makes a covenant with Noah, never again will he destroy the earth by flood - and the sign will be the rainbow. Just as the later covenant with Abraham was to do with blessing a chosen nation and the sign was circumcision. And so to the salvation story which impacts on us involves the the promise of liberation; of life coming out of death, and the sign for us is the cross... A signpost again, pointing to divine planning
Noah is a partial salvation story: the Passion of Jesus show us a complete, all embracing, universal, catholic salvation and rescue from our condition of alienation, fragmentation, dis-ease...
As we rejoice in the telling of
the Noah story this weekend, so as we start Passiontide we are also thinking
about how the blood of Jesus seals the new covenant, or the new promise, of
how God will relate to his creation and we stand in awe at the love which
prompted this extraordinary rescue mission to bring us Life, and life in all
it’s fulness (Jn 10.10)...
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Noah & Lazarus
So here’s the Noah joke...
The Lazarus story is one of the 7
miracles John records Jesus doing. It’s set for today because it’s a kind of
precursor to the resurrection... it sheds light on the resurrection of
Jesus... it says something about God’s power over death, and something about
who Jesus is (the posh word for that is to say it is Christological.)
So, important to Martha, Mary &
Lazarus and the folks at Bethany though the raising of Lazarus may have
been, it was more significant that just that because it said something about
who Jesus is...
Jesus waits; and by the time he
gets to the grave Lazarus has been dead for 4 days - very dead; not in a
coma, not pinning for the Fjords, but definitely dead - the Rabbis would
have said that after 4 days the soul had left the vicinity of the body.
There was no doubt that Lazarus had snuffed it. So equally there was no
doubt that Jesus brought him back to life.
It’s not without significance that
St Johns has been taken over this weekend by the story of Noah and the
flood... because that too is a foreshadowing of the Passion....
The story of Noah is a primitive
salvation story, but crafted to show God’s holiness, God’s power and God’s
rescue plan... and the story of Jesus which we rehearse over the next couple
of weeks again shows us God’s holiness, God’s power and God’s rescue plan -
but this plan has complete involvement - it shows God coming in flesh of our
flesh. It shows God weeping with sorrow over the condition of creation under
oppression to death and in need of liberation.