“Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am going to open your graves and raise you up from them.” Ezekiel 37:12
“Death will be swallowed up in victory.” Isaiah 25:8
“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” I Corinthians 15:26
Throughout the scriptures, death is seen as the enemy. It’s a threat to purpose, imagination, value, and hope. There’s no making peace with it.
I have a friend who once told me that he’s sworn to himself that he will never have children. He said he made this promise because he never wants to put another human being through the existential dread that he feels every night at 3 o’clock in the morning. He made this vow because he would never want a son or daughter to experience the fear that he endures every single day.
While it might be tempting to write my friend off as overly pessimistic – and attribute this fear of death to a lack of therapy – when speaking of death our Old Testament lesson isn’t all that cheerier. When broaching the topic of mortality, Ezekiel writes, “Our bones are dried up; our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.”
Maybe some of you in this room can resonate with such a sentiment (and you just don’t know it yet). Maybe you’ve recently lost a job or a relationship or someone that you loved. Or maybe you’ve witnessed the ravages of cancer on someone close to you and like Ezekiel you want to cry out, “Can these dry bones live?”
My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from Hunter College. She was sharp as could be. She did crosswords puzzles every day for fun, of course, but also to keep her mind. Despite her best efforts, I witnessed dementia wreak havoc on her for the last fifteen years of her life. Before she died, I couldn’t help but think of Solomon’s cry, “Meaningless, meaningless… all is meaningless.”
A former colleague of mine used to remark, don’t ever say that someone has “passed away.” For him, substituting “passed away” for “died” is death-denial. It’s refusing to face facts. It’s submitting to oppression. It’s accepting injustice. And if there’s anything we’ve learned over the past few years, we must not make peace with injustice.
I don’t know if you and I need to stop saying that so-and-so has “passed,” but I get his sentiment. According to the Scriptures, accepting the ultimate power of death is like accepting the legitimacy of the Nazi regime – it’s making friends with all that wages war against God’s creatures.
In our Gospel lesson, we witness Jesus’ attitude toward death. In it, we encounter Mary and Martha – Jesus’ best friends after Peter, James, and John. With them, he found peace amidst the chaos of his life and ministry. And yet, in this text there is no peace. Here, Mary and Martha fall down at Jesus’ feet in the throes of grief. Their brother has died. Lazarus, whom Jesus loved, is no more.
Many of us appreciate today’s text because in it we see Jesus identify with us in our weakness: “He weeps.” “He’s so human.” “Look how he cared.” And while all of that is true, much more than empathy on view here.
Right before that famous verse – the shortest of all verses – “Jesus wept,” the text reads that Jesus was “greatly disturbed” in spirit. It says this not once but twice. And if you know anything about how the Bible works, you know that this kind of redundancy is purposeful. It’s for effect. It’s a cue to the reader that this detail is important.
The Bible commentators help us here. They note that the Greek word translated “greatly disturbed” is more akin to anger than fear. But why would Jesus be angry, you might ask? We can understand why he’s sad, but why is he mad? Is he mad because Lazarus has fallen prey to the circle of life – to the natural way of things? No, say the experts. Jesus is angry because his friend has become prey, not to the natural way of things, but to the great enemy. He’s irate because he does not accept the legitimacy of the reign of death.
Do you see what’s happening here? Jesus has come face-to-face with the power that inflicts carnage on his creatures, and he hates it. Not only that, he just won’t have it. What happens next is a foretaste of Easter. God, in Jesus, has come into the world to wage war on his adversary. The same Word that said “Let there be light” in the beginning is the Word who says “Lazarus, come forth!” And just as light came, so Lazarus was restored.
My friends, death is no match for him. The good news of the Gospel is that you and I will rise with Christ, and all of the pain and suffering that we see and experience will not only end but somehow be undone. And what this means in the here-and-now, beyond a future hope, is that nothing is wasted. No friendship is in vain. No small act of kindness, however futile seeming, is ever squandered. You and I can live in hope, because nothing will return empty. It sounds too good to be true, and yet it’s the promise of God.
So make no peace with death. While it’s true that “in the midst of life we are in death,” what’s truer, because of the resurrection, is that in the midst of death we are in life.1
So live.
“The Burial of the Dead, Rite I & II,” The Book of Common Prayer, 484, 492.
The Rev. Fleming Rutledge’s fingerprints are all over this sermon. From sermons she’s given and written to email exchanges, I am deeply indebted to her for this sermon.
Ben, A lovely sermon. Me? I prefer the use of the word death to to the phrase passing away. I think of death as a lovely full stop, which doesn’t so much deny salvation or resurrection, as gives it meaning. See: winter’s end, then spring awakening.
Apropos of dying and death, I don’t know if you’ve seen this story. Enjoy.
https://virtualflaneur.medium.com/bellos-final-days-457c3fcf4c63
I love your separation of using death as opposed to passed away.