The Fifth Sunday in Lent-Year A

Lent 5A March 26, 2023 “The core theme of [today’s gospel]—even more than Jesus’ love, compassion, and vulnerability—is the defiance of death. Jesus does not just raise Lazarus from the grave; he mocks the grave in his almost blasé attitude toward the last enemy. He…waits two days before setting out for Bethany, refusing to let death set his agenda.” i. I read these words in one of my lectionary commentaries early in the week, and all week, I’ve been pondering that one phrase---how Jesus refuses to let death set the agenda. It’s not surprising, considering this is John’s gospel. John gives us a Jesus who is “large and in charge.” John makes no bones about the fact that Jesus is God incarnate, and it is the gospel that most emphasizes Jesus’s divinity. Throughout John, Jesus offers 6 or 7 signs (depending on which biblical scholar you talk to), which are stories of Jesus’s miracles that follow a predictable pattern, and the purpose of these signs is to reveal God’s glory and to testify to Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. Our story for today, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, is the last of the signs in John’s gospel, and it leads to a pivot toward Jesus’ death on the cross. Over and over again, the gospel of John emphasizes that God has a plan that Jesus is working to fulfill, at a particular time, and the Jesus in John’s gospel is completely unflappable (even into his death). So, of course, John’s Jesus doesn’t let death set the agenda. But I’ve been thinking about that all week. What does it mean to not let death set the agenda? Are we being called to be like Jesus in this, as his followers and his disciples? Are we, too, being encouraged to not let death set our agendas? What does that mean and what would it even look like? Of course, we see that Jesus doesn’t rush to Lazarus’s death bed to try to prevent his literal death. And we all know that when it comes to Death (with a capital D), none of us is really in control. Capital D death will always set the agenda for us in terms of how many days, months, years, we have in this life. And yet….While we have no control over when or how we die, there are ways that we can still live without letting death set the agenda. And there are also so many millions of the little d-deaths that we experience in our lives: the endings, the changes, the failure of our plans or our health, the unexpected twists and turns of our lives, the outcomes that, no matter hard we work, we cannot control. What would it mean for us to live our lives not letting those little-d deaths set the agenda for how we react or how we live? Our patron saint, Thomas, may have something to teach us about this. In today’s gospel, we get one of the rare glimpses of Thomas. As Jesus tells the disciples that it’s time to return to Bethany, a town that is very close to Jerusalem, the chorus of disciples reminds Jesus that they were just in Jerusalem, and the people there were actively threatening to stone Jesus. Thomas replies, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Um, ok, Thomas! What are we supposed to do with that? Perhaps, Thomas, the eternal pragmatist, grasps something that the rest of the disciples don’t grasp. Perhaps, even as he responds out of his intrinsic loyalty and faithfulness to Jesus (and thus, making himself Jesus’s ultimate “ride or die”), he realizes in that moment that this isn’t just about the death of Lazarus but it is also, in fact, about the death of Jesus and those who follow him. And he embraces that. It’s a weird sort of paradox that in embracing death, he, too, isn’t letting death set the agenda. And that rings true with our experience, doesn’t it? When we can learn to embrace big D death as a companion who actually walks by our side through our whole life, not something to be feared, then we are no longer spending so much energy fighting or fending off death. When we learn to use our energy rolling along with all those little-d deaths rather than fighting to control or bend them to our will, then in some mysterious, paradoxical way, we aren’t letting death set the agenda. So, the gospel reading for today shows us that Jesus refuses to let death set the agenda, but then there’s one more twist. In John’s gospel, Jesus is fully equated with God. And all throughout scriptures, we’ve seen God express a variety of emotions. God gets angry; God changes God’s mind; God expresses regret. But it isn’t until Jesus is invited to come and see the grave of his friend Lazarus that we see a God who weeps. This large and in charge Jesus, who knows that he can and will raise his friend from the dead still weeps at the death of his friend. What does that mean? What does it mean for us that we follow a God who weeps? Later this week, on April 1, my husband’s full time job will be cut to a quarter time job because his church has run out of money to pay him and they have exhausted all other options that were available to them. This is very much a looming, little-d death for him, for me, for our family. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks obsessively looking at jobs, occasionally mildly harassing him to update his resume. Last week, I thought I’d found the perfect job for his skill set that would support him being able to continue to care for his church on Sundays. And after I finally got him to get everything together to apply (over a week of increasingly more forceful nudges), he went to do it only to find the job posting had been taken down. As I’ve continued to ponder this, to try to deal with my own disappointment without taking it out on him, I’ve begun to see how I’ve been letting death (with a little d) set the agenda for me. My expectations and demands and attempt to shape reality into what I think is best have not been life-giving for our relationship and they haven’t been so great in my relationship with God, either. I certainly don’t have it figured out yet, but I’m still wrestling with what it means for me to live into the call of Jesus’s disciple to not let death set the agenda in this particular area of my life and in these relationships. So, your invitation this week is to join me in pondering either one or both of these questions, looking at where this gospel may intersect with your life and your faith journey in this moment. What does it mean for you to follow a God who weeps? And/or what are the ways that you are letting death set the agenda in your life right now, and how might Jesus be calling you to change in that? i. Haverkamp, Heid, ed. Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year A.WJK: Louisville, 2022. quote by Michael L. Lindvall, p 351.