"Life, Not Longevity" San Williams, UPC
John 11:1-45
Several years ago, I attended a pastors’ conference. One of the speakers was the pastor of a large congregation in southern California. He was convinced that we humans were designed to live for a hundred and twenty years. He based his calculations on passages in Genesis, and on the verse in Deuteronomy that says Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died. This pastor believed stress, unhealthy diets, vitamin deficiency and the like are robbing us of our God-given span of life, so his whole ministry is aimed at restoring the longevity he believes God intends us to have. Whether or not we share the pastor’s conviction that God has wired us to live for one and a quarter centuries, our culture as a whole is obsessed with living longer lives. We exercise, support cancer research, take daily vitamins, replace body parts, and work in countless other ways to add years to our lives. Never mind that we aren’t sure what we’d do with all that extra time if our lives stretched on for decades. As the late British novelist, Susan Ertz, observed, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.” Denying death, or at least holding it off for as long as possible, has practically become an end in itself.
Of course, we enlist God to help us in our quest to achieve long lives. We pray to God to make the sick well, to protect our children from harm, to keep an elderly parent or grandparent from passing on, to recover from the surgery. In fact, the prayer life of many people doesn’t kick in until their lives, or the lives of their loved ones, is endangered. Then we cry, “Please God, let us live!”
Isn’t this the plea that Mary and Martha made to Jesus in our reading today? Their brother Lazarus was sick, so they sent word to Jesus saying, “Lord, Lazarus, whom you love, is ill.” For reasons that aren’t immediately clear, Jesus, instead of hastening to Bethany, lollygags around for a couple of days. By the time he finally arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has already been dead and buried for four days. When Martha leaves her kitchen chores and runs out to meet Jesus, we can hear the anger and disappointment in her voice. “Lord,” she cries, “if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”
Certainly we can sympathize with the Martha’s anger. When, despite our prayers, someone we love dies, it’s not unusual for us to become angry with God; some people will even fire God for being an unreliable guardian. But in the case of Lazarus, Jesus seems to come through after all. He goes to the tomb, orders the stone to be rolled away, calls Lazarus back from the dead, and watches as Lazarus stumbles out of the tomb still dressed in his mummy outfit but apparently alive and well. The sisters are thrilled, Lazarus gets a second lease on life, and everyone lives happily ever after. The end.
Well, not exactly. The irony in this story is that it is this act of restoring life to Lazarus that sets in motion the events that lead, not only to Jesus’ death, but to the death of Lazarus as well. In the next chapter, we read, “So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus also to death.” (12:10). Reflecting on this passage in Christian Century magazine, Frederick Niedner writes, “ How odd that Jesus would raise his friend from death only to enroll him in a brief venture that would get them both killed.” Isn’t that ironic? It sounds like Jesus called Lazarus back to life only to share in his death.
What’s apparent is that John has artfully woven together two stories. The death and resurrection of Lazarus is fused into the larger story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. As Fred Craddock noted, “The passion of Jesus bleeds through the surface of this story…And so the reader sees in and through the Lazarus story the Jesus story.” Notice, for example, how Jesus’ approach to Lazarus’ tomb sounds much like the descriptions of his own death. Jesus is troubled and weeping; the tomb is not far from Jerusalem; the tomb is a cave with a large stone covering the opening; the stone is rolled away; Jesus cries with a loud voice; the grave cloth is left at the tomb. Sound familiar? Clearly, this is not a conventional miracle story about how Jesus raised Lazarus so that he could enjoy a few bonus years. Rather, on a deeper level, it’s about how God gave life to the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus, a life in which Lazarus is invited to share.
Say, this story is beginning to have a baptismal ring to it. In our baptism, like Lazarus, we die with Christ. “Do you not know, “declares Paul in Romans, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”
So that’s what Jesus offers us. Not longer life, but newness of life. Granted, it’s natural for us want to live a good, long life and to want that for the ones we love. As Martin Luther King said on the eve of his death, “Longevity has its place.” But he went on to say, “The quality, not the longevity of life, is what’s important.” It’s the quality of life that we embrace in this community of the baptized.
W.H. Auden wrote, “Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.” In other words, we can’t receive the eternal life God gives us in Jesus until we consent to die. Not only die in the temporal sense—even though accepting our mortality is part of it—but the kind of dying we are called to do every day: dying to self, dying to hate and enmity, dying to the need for revenge, for power, for security. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it so succinctly; ‘When Christ calls a person, he calls him to come and die.”
With Easter just around the corner, we hear Jesus cry out to us from the other side of the tomb. He shouts to you and to me, “Come forth, friend. Take up your cross and follow me. I am the resurrection and the life. Live in me and I’ll live in you…eternally! The end.