Journey's Weekly Homilies

Homily by Tom Kinzie
March 17, 2001 The Raising of Lazarus      
(Ez. 37:12-14,   Ps 130,  Rom. 8:8-11,  Jn 11:1-45 or…)

John 11 Not included in today's reading, but underlying everything in the story, is this ominous verse: So from that day on they were determined to kill him. Readers of the Gospel of John often remark that the gospel seems to be written, as it goes on, with an ever-increasing sense of gloom and doom.  Even as Jesus is the one who performs signs and wonders that he may be seen as the Holy One of God, the opposition to Jesus grows fiercer.  Just as Jesus is the gift of life, he is moving inexorably to his own death.  Through all of this Lazarus becomes a symbol of the struggle between life and death in our own lives.  Even in Jesus, we sense, his gift of life to us comes through his death. The world is filled with sad stories.  I work with a Bosnian woman.  Her family's closest friends are another Bosnian family and they have known each other for years.  Together the two families faced war and destruction, lived in a refugee camp, then moved to the United States with all the loss and hope those experiences occasioned.  Just recently, the other family's husband and father died.  The eight-year-old son, as the family was being driven away from the cemetery, held a photo of his dead father in front of him and sobbed over and over again, "My daddy, my daddy, my daddy." Here in this story, in a scene repeated throughout the ages, a person weeps at the overwhelming sense of loss, loneliness, and grief.  There is no consoling in the immediacy of death.  Later, perhaps, comfort will come, we hope for all, but at first there is only loss.  We experience the loss, but we hope for something else. In the entrance of the chapel at New College, Oxford, one enters a bare room except for a modern sculpture of Lazarus.  A visitor wrote.  "The figure stands upright, but is still so tightly bound all over with the winding-cloths of death as to present a study of total helplessness and passivity.  Only the head is beginning to move, tilted slightly backwards and across the shoulder, responding, it would seem, to some call that is coming . . .As one enters the ancient chapel, nothing could more powerfully symbolize the truth that what one approaches this church to hear is the word of Christ, always summoning from death to life."  Is there still a word of life today?  Have we heard it?  Do we long for it? Death in gospel of John is not a word that just points to biological extinction, that moment after the last breath and heart beat.  In John, as in Paul, death is the enemy.  Death is that which keeps us from being fully alive.  We are in death each moment that we are alive, that is true.  From the first breath we take as babies, as St. Augustine starkly put it, we are already heading to the last moment of our lives.  But there is also a quality of existence that eludes us.  We sense, perhaps, that we are not fully alive, not alive with wonder, possibility, courage, and grace.  We sense sometimes that we are more dead than alive.  Something wakes us up (someone's dying, some moral catastrophe, some beautiful sunset, some great pursuit of truth and justice, some whisper of love, some grace) and for a moment we know it to be true, that we have not been as fully alive as we could have been. I will tell you of just such a moment that comes unbidden and with a rhythm I do not understand.  The last time was at night.  I woke up abruptly and the name of Susan was in my mind.  I had not thought of her for years, but that night I could not but help but think of her.  We were classmates for 12 years in grade and high school and for 12 years she had to bear the indifference, the silence, and the outright hostility of her classmates.  Why?  There is sometimes a terrible stratification that happens, even in small towns, based on what -- perceived differences, grades, economic levels, clothes, looks, body types -- all the superficial signs that get mistakenly taken for a person's worth. One day especially comes to mind.  It was in a junior class meeting.  We were to vote on the class princess for the junior-senior prom.  Susan was nominated and then elected princess.  It was a cruel joke, of course.  And after the votes were counted the election was voided and the "real" princess was elected.  How could she bear it?  Why didn't somebody stop it?  Why didn't she run from the room in anger and disgust?  I will always remember the look on her face as she sat there and laughed along with the rest of the class.  What else could she do? But what I think of now is five years after high school.  I was visiting my hometown and having coffee in the Round Up Café.  It's the kind of restaurant you might expect with such a name, where an honest breakfast could still be had, if cholesterol and fat grams are not counted.  I was looking around the café, remembering faces and events that had taken place there.  And then my eye caught the eye of a woman working in the kitchen.  It was Susan.  She was washing dishes.  For the briefest moment we looked at each other, but then our eyes slid down and away from each other.  We did not speak.  It was the one moment we might have had.  I could have at least asked her how life was going for her.  It would have meant more to me than her, I am sure.  I count it now as a moment in which I was more dead than alive, a moment in which the full weight of indifference and neglect accumulated themselves into a timid and awkward silence.  Though such thinking is considered wildly out of fashion in our assertive and affirmative culture, I think of that moment now only with regret and, yes, with shame. Who was it who said that the great religious and spiritual traditions could be summarized in a series of two word phrases? There is something useful in the observation: Wake up! Be alive! Become conscious! Notice life! Be aware! Act Justly! Practice love!  It is the calling to new life that such phrases proclaim. In the Gospel of John we are invited to embark on just such a journey, a journey which is to lead us to life, to what the gospel calls abundant life.  It is not an easy journey.  Death is the enemy.  We are wrapped tightly in the accumulated layers of death cloths.  We have grown used to the tombs.  We do not even smell the stench of death in this culture that follows us around.  But though this is so, we are not stuck there as if there were no future, as if God's love for us were not more powerful than death. We embark on this ever-deepening journey, called to become more human and more alive to the possibilities God has given us.  For it is true that God, and in God, Love is always with us.  But we forget.  We no longer recognize that presence.  There is no time to notice.  The usual becomes the habitual and we are no longer open to the grace that could be ours, that is closer to us than our breathing, which is as near as the beating in our hearts.  Through all of this we begin to notice that death is not only the enemy, but also a great possibility.  Something has to die for us to get to another place.  St. Francis may have had this in mind when he addressed death as a dear brother. The Notre Dame theologian John Dunne wrote that there are two great consents that each adult is asked to make.  Saying these "yes's" is what allows us to become more human and more fulfilled.  The first consent we are asked to make in our adulthood is to say yes to our own death.  We are to come to the full realization and acceptance of the absolute inevitability of our own dying.  This means that all the attachments we have, all of the things we count as worthy and full of meaning and importance, all will fall from our hands.  All of our projects, our demands for certainty, all of the things we honor, all that we have, whether we want to or not, we will have to let go of.  We believe that Love's hands will still hold us when we die.  We will not be let go of, we trust, but we will have to let go of everyone and everything. The second consent we are asked to make is to another form of dying.  We are asked to say yes to the continual grace of transformation.  This yes is to affirm that no matter where we are on the journey, we are not yet at the end of the journey.    There are still stones that must be moved.  There are still death cloths that bind us.  We are still and ever waiting for the voice that calls us to come out.  For Love loves us so deeply, in the bowels the gospel says, and weeps for us whenever we hold on too tightly, as if there were not something more, as if there were not some deeper life to which we are being called. I do not say that these consents to either kind of death are easy.  Oh God no. But it is our belief that genuine life comes no other way.  The death we must die in order to become new people is a finally a friend and a mercy. Look, we are all going to have, and some of us already have had, hard and terrible things to walk through.  We are even now being called to let go of all that is not light, not love, not of God, to let go of anything that is not for our brothers' and sisters' sake.  This unbinding of death's cloths, this rolling away of the dark stone of death will be a thing of difficulty discomfort, and even danger.  But sometimes, when I join the circle at the table of this community, I sense such love and warmth that I begin to believe that this journey to new life is even possible.  I do know that I cannot go anywhere without you.