March 9, 2008
5 Lent, John 11:1-44
Somewhere in the last few years I have run across a great photo of Mary and me in front of a house we owned in Memphis. We are sitting on the front steps behind a huge pile of the ugliest, faded gold, sculptured carpeting you can imagine. It was a great old house, built around the turn of the last century, a sears house, ordered in pieces from a catalogue. Old houses were still cheap then and roomy, and Mary saw a lot of potential in that place. We bought that house on faith in 1981 for fifty-five thousand dollars, imagine that. The day we moved in we started looking for the house we wanted. It had to be under all those layers someplace. That very first day, we were amazed to find good hardwood floors under that ancient carpet. I don’t think we had planned to remove it all that day. It was just that as we pulled up each corner we wanted to see more. The first bit of shiny oak we found sent us looking for more. Over the next ten years we knocked out walls that had been added to make two apartments, scraped plaster, repaired ceilings, pried mirrors off walls and kept digging until the house we hoped would be there was revealed.
I remembered that photo as I began to think about the gospel story we heard today. I am always caught a bit off guard when we get to the year in our lectionary when we read John’s gospel and we get to the story we heard last week about the man born blind and the one we have today about the raising of Lazarus. I have had trouble with both of these stories. I have a hard time hearing their message of hope and revelation, of promise and discovery because I get stuck very early in the story on one little detail that I just can’t seem to leave alone. I get stuck at the point where Jesus tells the disciples that Lazarus has fallen ill and then dies for “God’s glory and so the Son of God may be glorified through it.” He said basically the same thing to the disciples last week about why the man in that story was born blind. Jesus seems to be saying that this bad thing has happened, this tragedy has occurred so that he can show off, so that he can show us what wonderful things God can do. I end up being with Mary and Martha on this one. They both tell Jesus as they meet him that if God wanted to show off, wanted to impress them, then God might have kept Lazarus from dying.
I’ve been getting stuck there since I was a teenager, a time when my prayer life consisted of long running arguments with God about the illness that eventually killed my mother. It was in those years that I ran headlong into the problem of a good God in a world where there is pain. Many years later, after the death of our daughter who didn’t survive her first glorious year of being old enough to drive, these words about Lazarus dying for God’s glory hit me like a slap in the face.
After half a lifetime of trying to find a way to live with the reality that bad things happen and the gut-felt sense that the love and compassion we all feel at times is grounded in a deeper power who is for us........after years of living in that tension, I have come to learn that living with tragedy and hope requires a bit of trust and a willingness to live without some answers. I also know from my studies and from living with scripture that taking any line from the Bible and dealing with it apart from the larger message of our tradition is risky. I know I should just treat this line about Lazarus dying for God’s glory as a small distraction and move on, but I can’t. It is like a half broken fingernail. It catches on the fabric of my life. But I keep looking for ways to smooth out the rough edges, and this year I may have found some real help.
First, I went to the Greek new testament. Sometimes when you go looking for loopholes in scripture you can find some unnoticed nuance to a word that makes life easier. No such luck. I barely have enough Greek to read the sings on fraternity houses, but I found “glory of God” plain and simple in the original. The commentaries weren’t a lot of help either. What did offer some help was a discussion in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (which I highly recommend) that talked about the Hebrew understanding of the glory of God. I had been thinking of the glory God and the glorification of Jesus as having to do with exalting them, lifting them up, making them greater. Mine was a very this-worldly, human understanding. I had heard the Lazarus story saying that if Lazarus is dead and Jesus brings him back to life then people will think more highly of Jesus......exalt him.....praise him.....glorify him. It seemed cruel that God would have someone suffer so that people might improve their opinion of God. That is a very modern, western understanding of glory and glorification.
The Hebrews, when they spoke of the glory of God, were speaking of the revealed presence of God. They spoke of fire on the mountain top as the glory of God, they heard thunder as the glory of God. God’s glory was something present in the world that might be revealed in mystical moments of clarity as well as in the everyday reappearance of the sun in the morning. To glorify God meant to acknowledge God’s presence.....to search if necessary in a situation for all the many ways God might be present. There was no idea of changing one’s opinion of God. God was God. That was it. The glory of God filled the whole world. The trick was not so much to be impressed by it, but to notice it. To see God present, caring, leading, creating. Sometimes you have to pull up a lot of carpet and scrape a lot of paint to reveal the glory of God. Especially if you’re dealing with a real mess. It takes some faith to believe it’s under there, but for the Jews, and that of course includes Jesus, the glory of God was the underlying reality of the universe. Train your eyes. Train your heart. Do a little digging anyplace and you will come to it. One of the things that gives me hope is that even with all the scratching and scraping that it sometimes takes, we seem be wired so that we keep looking till we catch at least a glimpse of that glory. When we do, everything can change.
That house was a great old house. Tall ceilings, big front porch, big back porch. Room for lots of people. I have a lot of great memories of that house, but none more vivid than our hunkering down there after Amy died. People came and went. The table filled up with food. If you’d read me this story about Lazarus in that couple days I might have told you what to do with your Bible. What I didn’t understand until I looked back on those days was a couple of friends who kind of glittered through the surface of that mess the whole time. Winton sat by the front door and greeted people. Brooks swept the back porch till I thought she was going to sweep the paint right off of it. It certainly didn’t need two days worth of sweeping, but that’s where she took up her watch.
What was special about those two people was that they had both, not that long ago had to deal with their own troubles. Winton’s teenaged daughter was in a psychiatric hospital at the other end of the state. This hospitalization was the latest in a long search for some way to bring her back from the edge where she had teetered for a couple of years. Brooks, a woman in her fifties who worked for the city had been raped one day while working in a big mid-town park. We never talked about it, but both of them must have hurled the same accusatory words at Jesus that Mary and Martha did; “where were you when I needed you?” And yet here they were. I wonder what they would think now if they heard me calling them the glory of God, saying that in their simple presence Jesus was being glorified.......God was being made visible. I imagine they would both say that they weren’t thinking about glory, or even God. They just wanted to be there. They would surely deflect any praise. And that too, that little thing, that they would back away from any hint of being named special in that moment, is also a bit of Glory, a hint of what God is like. I have no idea where either of them was in their own pondering of God and pain, but I know they both decided to live that moment out of compassion, in solidarity with people in trouble. Again, that sounds like God.
Maybe Jesus was telling his friends to be attentive for signs of God’s presence......even in this thing that has happened. Jesus who always pointed beyond himself toward God. Jesus who taught awareness of the presence of God as much as anything he taught. Maybe he was just pointing out that all times and situations are opportunities for learning to see the glory of God.
Amen
JB