William H. Willimon - "The Downside of a Resurrection" (March 17, 2002)
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Transcript
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Pastor | During the season of Lent, | 0:09 |
we have these long and thick stories | 0:10 | |
from the Gospel of John. | 0:16 | |
Today, today's Gospel is from John, the eleventh chapter. | 0:18 | |
The story of the raising of Lazarus. | 0:23 | |
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, | 0:29 | |
in the village of Mary, and her sister, Martha. | 0:34 | |
Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume | 0:37 | |
and wiped his feet with her hair. | 0:40 | |
Her brother, Lazarus, was ill. | 0:43 | |
So the sisters sent a message to Jesus. | 0:45 | |
"Lord, he whom you love is ill." | 0:49 | |
But when Jesus heard it, He said, | 0:54 | |
"This illness does not lead to death, | 0:56 | |
rather, it is for God's glory." | 0:58 | |
He stayed two days longer in the place where he was. | 1:01 | |
Then after this, he said to the disciples, | 1:05 | |
"Let us go to Judea again." | 1:08 | |
The disciples said to him, | 1:11 | |
"Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, | 1:13 | |
and you're going there again?" | 1:16 | |
Jesus told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, | 1:20 | |
but I am going there to waken him." | 1:24 | |
The disciples said to him, "Lord, if he's fallen asleep, | 1:28 | |
he'll be all right." | 1:32 | |
Jesus however, had been speaking about his death, | 1:34 | |
but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. | 1:38 | |
Then Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead. | 1:42 | |
For your sake I am glad I was not there | 1:47 | |
so you may believe. | 1:49 | |
But let us go to him." | 1:51 | |
Thomas, who was called the twin, | 1:54 | |
said to his fellow disciples, | 1:55 | |
"Let us also go so that we may die with him." | 1:58 | |
When Jesus arrived, He found that Lazarus | 2:03 | |
had already been in the tomb four days. | 2:06 | |
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, | 2:09 | |
she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. | 2:11 | |
Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, | 2:16 | |
my brother would not have died. | 2:20 | |
But even now I know that God will give you | 2:23 | |
whatever you ask of Him." | 2:25 | |
Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." | 2:27 | |
Martha said to him, "I know he will rise again | 2:32 | |
in the resurrection, on the last day." | 2:36 | |
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. | 2:39 | |
Those who believe in me even though they die, will live. | 2:44 | |
And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. | 2:49 | |
Do you believe this?" | 2:55 | |
She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe | 2:58 | |
that you are the Messiah, | 3:03 | |
the Son of God, the One coming in to the world." | 3:05 | |
When she had said this, she went back | 3:10 | |
and called her sister, Mary. | 3:12 | |
When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, | 3:15 | |
she knelt at His feet and she said to Him, | 3:18 | |
"Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn't have died." | 3:21 | |
When Jesus saw her weeping, | 3:25 | |
and the Jews who came with her also weeping, | 3:27 | |
Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit, and deeply moved. | 3:31 | |
He said, "Where have you laid him?" | 3:35 | |
They said to Him, "Lord, come and see." | 3:37 | |
Jesus began to weep, | 3:40 | |
so the Jews said, "See how he loved him." | 3:43 | |
And some of them said, | 3:48 | |
"Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind | 3:49 | |
have kept this man from dying?" | 3:54 | |
Then Jesus again, greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. | 3:57 | |
It was a cave, and the stone was lying against it. | 4:02 | |
Jesus said, "Take away the stone." | 4:06 | |
Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, | 4:11 | |
"Lord, already there's a stench | 4:15 | |
because he's been dead four days." | 4:17 | |
Jesus said to her, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, | 4:20 | |
you would see the glory of God?" | 4:24 | |
So they took away the stone, and Jesus looked upward, | 4:29 | |
and He said, "Father, I thank you for having heard me. | 4:32 | |
I know that you always hear me, but I've said this | 4:37 | |
for the sake of the crowd standing here, | 4:40 | |
so that they may believe that you sent me." | 4:41 | |
And when He had said this, He cried out with a loud voice, | 4:46 | |
"Lazarus, come out!" | 4:49 | |
And the dead man came out, | 4:52 | |
his hands and feet bounds with strips of cloth | 4:54 | |
and his face wrapped in a cloth. | 4:56 | |
Jesus said to them, "Unbind him. Let him go." | 5:00 | |
Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary | 5:05 | |
and had seen what Jesus did, believed in Him. | 5:08 | |
This is the Word of the Lord. | 5:14 | |
Thanks be to God. | 5:18 | |
Audience | Thanks be to God. | |
- | One of my roles as a pastor, | 5:25 |
as a religious expert, a theologian, | 5:28 | |
is occasionally to burst somebody's spiritual bubble. | 5:32 | |
Some of you may have had this experience with me. | 5:36 | |
Some layman comes in and tells me | 5:40 | |
that he has received some nocturnal vision of Jesus, | 5:42 | |
and I am forced as a learned theologian | 5:47 | |
to have him reconsider. | 5:50 | |
Perhaps his vision was a result of a night of Italian food. | 5:52 | |
Someone says to me, "I have witnessed a miracle!" | 5:59 | |
And I respond, "In Durham?" | 6:03 | |
(crowd chuckles) | 6:06 | |
Give me a break! | 6:09 | |
We have too many means of explaining weird events | 6:10 | |
for you to have gotten a miracle. | 6:16 | |
I took an introductory course in Old Testament | 6:20 | |
when I was in college. | 6:23 | |
We were studying the book of Exodus. | 6:25 | |
The Hebrews are free from slavery, | 6:28 | |
they're out in the desert, | 6:30 | |
but their food runs out, they've got nothing to eat. | 6:32 | |
And they pray to God, and one morning they come out, | 6:35 | |
and there is this white, flakey, this manna | 6:39 | |
out there on the ground. | 6:43 | |
They gather up the manna, they make it in to bread, | 6:44 | |
and thus, they are preserved. | 6:47 | |
Well, we had never seen anything like this | 6:54 | |
in South Carolina. | 6:57 | |
What could this be? | 6:59 | |
Well luckily we had a professor there to explain it to us. | 7:02 | |
He told us that there was this professor somewhere | 7:05 | |
who had found out that in the Near East there is this beetle | 7:09 | |
that secretes this substance from its body, | 7:13 | |
and when this dries, it turns | 7:17 | |
a kind of white, flaky substance. | 7:19 | |
And then it was found that if you would ingest | 7:24 | |
these bug droppings, that they had a sort of sweet taste. | 7:29 | |
Now it did take away a little bit from the story | 7:35 | |
(audience chuckles) | 7:39 | |
to realize that these Hebrews | 7:40 | |
had sustained themselves on bug droppings, | 7:42 | |
but I was impressed, it did make the story easier to take | 7:47 | |
after it had been explained to us. | 7:52 | |
And scientifically, too. | 7:56 | |
Although you had to wonder, these Jews, | 8:01 | |
they couldn't tell the difference | 8:06 | |
between a miracle of God and bug droppings? | 8:08 | |
Well in today's gospel, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. | 8:14 | |
And things like this just don't happen | 8:21 | |
every day here in Durham. | 8:23 | |
What are we to make of so weird a story? | 8:26 | |
Well, here comes then the Jesus seminar. | 8:31 | |
These scholars remind us | 8:34 | |
that John's Gospel is a very late gospel. | 8:36 | |
This story is not told in any of the other gospels. | 8:38 | |
There's a lot of material in John's Gospel | 8:42 | |
of dubious origin. | 8:45 | |
That is, made up. | 8:48 | |
Jesus was not some kind of primitive miracle worker, | 8:51 | |
says professor Borg, | 8:56 | |
he was a first century Gallilean sage, | 8:58 | |
who said a number of interesting things, | 9:03 | |
but didn't actually do that much | 9:06 | |
that can be historically verified. | 9:10 | |
Therefore, relax. | 9:14 | |
Now, the trouble is, as I admitted to those of you | 9:19 | |
who were here last Sunday, | 9:22 | |
in my attempt to relieve you | 9:24 | |
of anxiety that you may have felt | 9:26 | |
when you watched Jesus heal a blind man, | 9:28 | |
as I have admitted, as a pastor | 9:32 | |
I have witnessed enough | 9:37 | |
of these weird inexplicable phenomena | 9:39 | |
to learn to be a little slower | 9:47 | |
about dismissing these things out of hand | 9:50 | |
simply because they do not appear | 9:54 | |
to occur every day in Durham. | 9:57 | |
Well it is a rich, too rich story. | 10:02 | |
This wonderful, long story of the raising of Lazarus. | 10:05 | |
I can't do justice to all of it, | 10:10 | |
but I just want to call your attention | 10:13 | |
to one part of the story. | 10:15 | |
That is the very end of the story. | 10:17 | |
At the very end, Lazarus is not only resuscitated, | 10:21 | |
but I noticed the reaction of the onlookers to this. | 10:26 | |
Jesus goes out to the tomb of Lazarus, | 10:33 | |
and in a voice loud enough to wake the dead, | 10:37 | |
He shouts "Lazarus, come out!" | 10:40 | |
And this mummy-looking corpse appears, | 10:43 | |
and then Jesus shouts, "Unbind him! Let him go!" | 10:46 | |
And there, the once-dead Lazarus stands before them, alive. | 10:50 | |
I do lots of funerals as a pastor, | 10:58 | |
and what a grieving family would give, | 11:02 | |
just about everything, I expect, | 11:06 | |
to be able to call, as Mary and Martha did, | 11:09 | |
on someone who would come out, say a few words, | 11:12 | |
loud words, and restore their loved one to life. | 11:16 | |
And that makes, perhaps all the more strange, | 11:23 | |
the reaction to the raising of Lazarus. | 11:27 | |
The reaction to this event, | 11:31 | |
at least on the part of the good | 11:33 | |
Bible-believing religious experts, | 11:34 | |
is not joy, it's not celebration, | 11:37 | |
it is a determination to get organized | 11:41 | |
and finally put Jesus to death. | 11:44 | |
Mary and Martha are just thrilled | 11:48 | |
to have their brother back. | 11:49 | |
But the theologians are less than thrilled. | 11:51 | |
In fact, in verses right after this, | 11:55 | |
John says that after this event, | 11:58 | |
after the raising of Lazarus, | 12:01 | |
that this set in motion a process | 12:05 | |
that led directly to the arrest | 12:07 | |
and the crucifixion of Jesus. | 12:09 | |
The disciples warned Jesus not to go out | 12:13 | |
to the cemetery there, to Lazarus's tomb. | 12:16 | |
You'll die. | 12:22 | |
Now the other gospels say | 12:24 | |
that Jesus got in to trouble for different reasons. | 12:25 | |
It was His anti-establishment attitude. | 12:29 | |
It was conflict with the governmental | 12:32 | |
and religious authorities. | 12:34 | |
It was His advocacy for the poor | 12:36 | |
that landed Jesus in hot water. | 12:39 | |
But it's interesting that John says | 12:43 | |
the thing that really got people were these signs. | 12:45 | |
It was the raising of the dead | 12:51 | |
that got Jesus nailed to a cross. | 12:55 | |
Why? | 13:02 | |
What's bad about this outbreak of life? | 13:05 | |
Well, everything, apparently. | 13:13 | |
What do we do, what do we do, when we get some sign | 13:16 | |
of the glory of God? | 13:21 | |
Some sign in the midst of ordinary life? | 13:22 | |
Our interpretive machinery starts to crank and rumble. | 13:27 | |
We explain, we historicize. | 13:32 | |
These were primitive scientific Jews, | 13:36 | |
unlike us smart, know-it-all, modern people. | 13:38 | |
They were gullible, they would believe | 13:44 | |
in someone coming back from the dead. | 13:46 | |
Or we psychologize. | 13:48 | |
We say, look, many of us are sometimes dead, | 13:52 | |
spiritually speaking, and this is a kind of | 13:56 | |
poetic metaphor for that. | 13:58 | |
We have these elaborately-constructed | 14:01 | |
intellectual mechanisms of defense. | 14:03 | |
All of this in service of ensuring to us | 14:06 | |
that what's dead stays that way. | 14:11 | |
I've not seen the dead be raised in Durham, | 14:17 | |
I will not be lured into believing | 14:21 | |
that this happened in Bethany, we say. | 14:22 | |
But of course that is just what they said | 14:27 | |
back there in Bethany, when they first saw Jesus. | 14:30 | |
Jesus gets out to the cemetery, | 14:35 | |
and the first things that Martha said to him are, | 14:38 | |
"Lord, don't trouble yourself, Lazarus is dead." | 14:42 | |
Case closed, you're too late to do him any good. | 14:46 | |
What we need is a good grief counselor | 14:52 | |
to help us adjust to the facts of death. | 14:55 | |
We began to look at something like this | 15:02 | |
not with open minded determination | 15:04 | |
to understand what this strange thing means, | 15:07 | |
but with a closed-minded refusal to consider | 15:11 | |
that anything really weird, | 15:15 | |
that is miraculous, has happened. | 15:18 | |
When confronted by John 11 one through 44, what do we do? | 15:22 | |
First we have our creed. | 15:28 | |
First dogma. | 15:31 | |
Miracles don't happen. | 15:33 | |
The world is in this fixed grip | 15:35 | |
of certain natural irrefutable laws, Amen. | 15:37 | |
Now let's all get together and explain, | 15:43 | |
make some sense of why miracles do not happen. | 15:46 | |
Such is our attempt to reason | 15:51 | |
about the essentially unreasonable. | 15:53 | |
And we think that we are so wonderfully open-minded. | 15:56 | |
This story of Lazarus reminds me of a story, | 16:04 | |
a parable Jesus told, about another Lazarus. | 16:08 | |
In Luke 16. | 16:14 | |
There, there is a miserable Lazarus, | 16:18 | |
who dies of poverty, and sickness, and hunger. | 16:22 | |
Now there was a rich man in the story | 16:27 | |
who had never been hungry, and never been sick, but he dies. | 16:29 | |
And when they get to the afterlife, | 16:34 | |
the rich man is surprised that he has landed in Hell. | 16:37 | |
And poor Lazarus now reposes in the bosom of Father Abraham. | 16:42 | |
And so, the rich man pleads with Father Abraham, | 16:49 | |
"Oh please, please let me come back from the dead | 16:52 | |
and go back and warn all my self-satisfied, rich relatives | 16:55 | |
that this is the way things work out in the world. | 16:59 | |
That this is the end for those | 17:02 | |
in investment banking, or Enron. | 17:04 | |
Let me go back to my neighbors | 17:07 | |
who work for Anderson Consulting | 17:09 | |
and warn them to change their ways and repent, | 17:11 | |
and straighten up and do right." | 17:14 | |
Father Abraham says, "Forget it. | 17:18 | |
If they won't listen to scripture, | 17:23 | |
if they wouldn't listen to the words of the prophets, | 17:26 | |
if they wouldn't heed Moses, | 17:29 | |
you think they're going to heed somebody | 17:31 | |
who comes back from the dead? | 17:34 | |
Stay in Hell." | 17:38 | |
Well Jesus, it's just a parable, it's just a story, | 17:41 | |
but in a curious way, its truthfulness | 17:46 | |
is verified in today's gospel of the raising of Lazarus. | 17:49 | |
Here we've got a Lazarus who has come back from the dead. | 17:56 | |
He is unbound, he is free, he is standing before them | 18:00 | |
as an irrefutable living sign. | 18:04 | |
Proof of life-giving power of Jesus. | 18:07 | |
Mary and Martha seemed to figure things out. | 18:12 | |
You are the Messiah, the one sent from God. | 18:15 | |
But the crowd, all the rest of us, | 18:19 | |
respond with one voice, "This is impossible. | 18:22 | |
It is impossible to have somebody walking around loose | 18:27 | |
doing this kind of stuff. | 18:31 | |
Let's kill Jesus." | 18:33 | |
When Jesus shouts, "Unbind him! Let him go!" | 18:37 | |
He's shouting to dead Lazarus in the tomb, I suppose. | 18:43 | |
But I wonder if one reason that he shouts so loudly is | 18:47 | |
maybe he's hoping that we will overhear. | 18:54 | |
That we listening in on this scene | 18:59 | |
might hear him shout as well. | 19:01 | |
He's shouting to a dead person. | 19:04 | |
But he's also being heard by dying people. | 19:09 | |
Oh we think of ourselves as so open-minded, | 19:15 | |
so open-futured, free, so alive | 19:17 | |
to all that we meet in the world. | 19:20 | |
We're modern people. | 19:23 | |
We call the world as we see it. | 19:24 | |
We're free from prejudices, | 19:26 | |
we're free from narrowness of vision. | 19:28 | |
But I don't know, I'm not so sure. | 19:33 | |
Maybe we're all so bound by that modern worldview | 19:35 | |
that rather tightly restricts what can and what cannot be, | 19:39 | |
that confines our notions of just who is in charge | 19:45 | |
and where the world is moving. | 19:50 | |
If you began to think about these things | 19:55 | |
with the assumption that God has withdrawn from the world, | 19:57 | |
that the future is all fixed and determined. | 20:01 | |
That there is no power afoot other than our own, | 20:04 | |
then if Jesus should intrude and unbind a corpse, | 20:09 | |
well you may find yourself wishing that he were dead. | 20:15 | |
That you could go back to a more secure, | 20:20 | |
safer, fixed little world. | 20:22 | |
In a way, you see, all of us are Lazarus. | 20:27 | |
We're not dead, not yet. | 20:31 | |
But all of us are headed to Lazarus's destination. | 20:35 | |
And that binds us, that confines us. | 20:42 | |
So we adjust, we face facts. | 20:47 | |
We stoically settle down in to some sort of arrangement | 20:51 | |
with omnipotent death. | 20:56 | |
Death becomes an article of faith for us. | 20:58 | |
You only go around once, Amen. | 21:02 | |
You can't teach an old dog new tricks, right. | 21:05 | |
People don't change, Amen. | 21:09 | |
I had no other option, | 21:12 | |
it was the only thing I could do, Amen. | 21:14 | |
So we're hooked. | 21:20 | |
We're addicted, we're bound, we're caught. | 21:22 | |
We call it substance abuse or factors beyond our control, | 21:27 | |
or the facts of life, | 21:32 | |
but what they really are is the facts of death. | 21:34 | |
We're bound, we're hung up, we're fixed, we're entombed. | 21:39 | |
And though this sort of thing | 21:45 | |
is not much of a way to live, | 21:47 | |
there is at least something to be said | 21:49 | |
for facing the facts. | 21:51 | |
But then there intrudes in to our dark arrangements | 21:55 | |
this one with a voice loud enough to wake the dead, | 22:01 | |
"Unbind him! Let him go!" | 22:04 | |
And some free being strides forth, unhooked, unbound, | 22:09 | |
and what do we say? | 22:17 | |
"Well let's get organized! | 22:20 | |
Let's pull out all our intellectual, political, | 22:22 | |
psychological resources, | 22:24 | |
let's get together, let's kill it." | 22:26 | |
In less than two weeks, | 22:32 | |
that's exactly what we'll do, | 22:36 | |
at a place called Calvary. | 22:39 | |
A friend of mine, who spent his adult life active in AA, | 22:46 | |
Alcoholics Anonymous, | 22:51 | |
tells me that a high percentage of people | 22:55 | |
are unable to beat the disease of alcoholism. | 23:01 | |
And that's not surprising, because addiction to alcohol | 23:08 | |
is a tough thing to beat. | 23:12 | |
And yet some do. | 23:17 | |
Some break free, he says. | 23:20 | |
And I said to him, "You know, I understand that in AA, | 23:25 | |
you teach people that they've only got | 23:29 | |
one problem in life, alcohol. | 23:31 | |
Their problem is not their marriage, | 23:34 | |
their problem is not something | 23:36 | |
their parents did to them when they were young, | 23:37 | |
their problem is they just can't stop drinking." | 23:39 | |
My friend confirmed this to be true. | 23:44 | |
But then he added something that was interesting. | 23:47 | |
He said, "Sometimes, when you finally stop drinking, | 23:50 | |
when you finally get sober, | 23:55 | |
you finally break free, take the cure, | 23:56 | |
sometimes you find that you have another problem." | 24:00 | |
"Well what is that other problem," I ask. | 24:04 | |
What to do with a new life, that's the problem. | 24:08 | |
My friend said, "When you're drinking, when you're caught, | 24:15 | |
you don't have to think about what to do with your life. | 24:20 | |
The bottle tells you every move to make. | 24:24 | |
But when you get free, when you get your life back, | 24:28 | |
well, the ball's back in your court, | 24:30 | |
and that can be more than a little frightening." | 24:32 | |
Well that kinda thing might make you | 24:39 | |
wanna kill AA for setting you free. | 24:41 | |
For giving you tomorrow, for giving you a life. | 24:46 | |
It is odd how frightening | 24:51 | |
resurrection can be. | 24:56 | |
Once new life is handed to us, | 25:00 | |
the ball is back in our court. | 25:03 | |
Should there be one who comes out to our tomb | 25:07 | |
and peers in? | 25:12 | |
The one who weeps, because he thinks it's a shame | 25:15 | |
that anybody dies before he or she really lives? | 25:19 | |
One who shouts with a loud voice, | 25:24 | |
loud enough to wake the dead, | 25:26 | |
"Unbind her! Let her go!" | 25:28 | |
Well what then? | 25:32 | |
What would be our reaction? | 25:33 | |
Will our reaction be, "Lazarus is dead, | 25:37 | |
case closed." | 25:42 | |
Or, "Unbind us. | 25:44 | |
Let us go"? | 25:49 |
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