The Raising of Lazarus, the Raising of a City

“To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt.” “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory.” Two striking sayings about ordeals and suffering. The first text is inscribed in the nave floor of this Cathedral. The second comes early on in St John’s story of Jesus and Lazarus that we’ve just heard. What connects them is the word glory.

I doubt it would have occurred to anyone who watched this Cathedral burn on the night of the 14th November 1940 to speak of that fiery holocaust as glory. It was no doubt an unforgettable spectacle to behold. But it was a calamitous act of violence and destructiveness. Many died; many more were grievously injured. Where is glory when precious human lives are laid on the greedy altars of war? Where is glory on a day when the grim reaper gathers up so bitter a harvest in this city that is home to men, women and children like us?

But you could have said the same about the suffering of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” The meaning is clear: this is a mortal sickness. The end is coming quickly. Soon this good man, this beloved friend will be dead, and Jesus is needed there. And when the worst has happened, there is still the desperate hope for a miracle: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask him.” Where is glory in any of this?

There are degrees of glory. Perhaps we use it a trifle too easily when we say that something is glorious. But in the Old and New Testaments, the meaning is quite specific. Literally in Hebrew, glory is “weight”, and therefore something significant, portentous, having lasting meaning. So glory belongs fundamentally to God himself, and to created things to the extent that they embody or reflect the divine. When we are confronted by glory, we do what Moses did at the burning bush and bow before the Holy One. We are silenced like the disciples on the mountain when they saw the glory of the transfigured Lord. Where glory is manifested, we are on holy ground. We acknowledge that God is among us. We learn our place in the world. And we worship.

When Jesus speaks of Lazarus’ illness being “for God’s glory”, his meaning is specific. It is not that there is any glory in anyone’s suffering and death, but rather “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it”. At the climax of the story, when the stone is rolled away from Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus turns to Martha and says, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” In the first sign that Jesus performs at Cana in Galilee, St John says that Jesus “revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him”. As then, so now, in this last sign before the passion. Glory and belief coalesce around the mighty works of God that reveal him as having come into our very midst.

I said that the death and raising of Lazarus are the last sign before the passion. Immediately after this episode, Caiaphas speaks about how one man must die for the people. And in the next chapter it is Passover time, and in this same home at Bethany whose intimacy Jesus loved so much, Mary anoints him for his coming death. And as he trembles on the very threshold of Holy Week, he speaks again of glory. “Now my soul s troubled. And what shall I say – Father, save me from this hour? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name!”

And this is where the story of Lazarus is pointing: to the glory of God in the suffering, death and resurrection of his Son. Like Lazarus, Jesus must be subject to this ordeal that lies ahead. “The Son of Man must suffer” say the synoptic gospels. But whereas for Matthew and Mark, the cross is a dark place of dereliction and abandonment, for St John it is glory. In the Christmas gospel he acclaims that “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten Son full of grace and truth. And if you asked him where, more than anywhere, he beheld glory, he would say, at Golgotha. On the cross. Because it is there that we see the glory of loved poured out, with which “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”, where Jesus is “lifted up” and draws all humanity to himself.

So there is the paradox of this day we call Passion Sunday. Glory means, not the splendour we thought it meant as we nodded casually in its direction. As we probe more deeply, we find it means the infinite “weight” of “God’s presence and his very self”, as the hymn puts it, at the heart of humanity. It is the suffering, death and raising to life of Lazarus that reveal it, and all the more because it enacts the suffering, death and raising to life of Jesus himself. But we only see it that way as we look back across the whole story. This is St John’s point in writing his gospel, so that we can enter into what glory means in the big story of God’s solidarity with the human race, his raising all of us to life through what the Son of Man must suffer and endure.

And this Cathedral is itself a living emblem of glory through suffering and resurrection. To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt and was rebuilt. I understand those words better, thanks to Lazarus. Like him, this place has a story to tell about how resurrection can take us by surprise and transfigure us even in the darkest of times. For the story of Coventry is not only about a building, powerful though the imagery and the witness are. The tapestry of Christ in Glory presides over every offering of praise and prayer, and every act of celebration and lament. It lodges in every memory we attach to this place, and in the longings and heartaches, the sorrows and joys of all who come here and stand in their simplicity before God. What burnt and was rebuilt was not just a cathedral church but a household of faith, a community among whom the lived experience of dying to ourselves and being raised in Christ is at the heart of our Christian identity. You and I, all the people of God in every place: all of us are a temple of God’s glory. The resurrections in our lives are the best evidence there is for glory. We are all Lazarus if we have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to newness of life.

We have a little time left as we travel towards Holy Week and Easter. What will our hope and prayer be? The story of Lazarus is placed where it is in the Fourth Gospel for a reason. We read it on this Sunday for a reason. It is to provide a gateway at which to pause and ask what we really want to happen during these awesome days that will soon be upon us. In the book of Exodus, God promises to pass before Moses. Partly out of fear, but more out of love, Moses cries out: “Lord, show me your glory”. The passion, cross and resurrection are the answer to that prayer. Lazarus has given us a parable. Now it is for us to walk with Jesus in the way of the cross and find once more in that place of pain the glory of redeeming love, and beyond the empty tomb, the glory of his resurrection life.

Coventry Cathedral, Passion Sunday, 2 April 2017. John 11.1-45

Hope and the Death of Death

It’s good to be with you on All Saints Sunday and to be launching this sermon series on hope. There is an evocative aspect to this time of year as autumn dies into winter, when the light is eclipsed and the first frosts come.  It can be a forlorn season when spirits are low and summer a beautiful but fading memory.  The solstice beckons, and dark times, and perhaps forebodings about what another year may bring: for our world, for our society, for ourselves. 

Yet we know within ourselves that the turning of the year tells a truth about the transience of things, the necessity of dying, our own mortality. The Christian and civic calendars echo this time of fall and of loss with the commemoration of the dead on All Souls’ Day followed by Armistice Day not long after.  Yet the liturgy lays over it a quite different way of construing winter: with the joyful celebration of All Saints, and with the exquisite season of longing and expectancy which is Advent.  Liturgical winter is not only a time for the burning of the leaves but for the rising of the sap; of light penetrating the darkness of this world, of grace and truth ordering our wayward human lives, of love everlasting transfiguring our loneliness, struggle and pain.  It is a time to rediscover hope.

I am sure you agree that hope is in short supply right now.  Like the colliding weather systems that made Hurricane Sandy such an awesome and destructive power across the Caribbean and North America, it is as if many different kinds of turbulence have come together in this decade to make things appear even more precarious than they were before.  I am thinking of the economic chaos whose millions of victims are the voiceless poor and those with least resources to withstand its angry shocks; and of the recognition of how close we are to irreversible climate change; and of the relentless conflicts tearing apart the Arab world; and of the failure of powerful wealthy nations to make lasting inroads into global poverty. I could go on.  If the church can speak a single word into this state we are in, it must surely be hope: daring to look both into ourselves and beyond ourselves for the power to give us back our dignity, rebuild fragmented societies and mend a broken world.

And if hope is needed to transform the big story of the world and its future, it is also needed to transform the little stories of our personal lives and relationships.  I say little: but they are not little to us. Each day many face fightings within and fears without that constitute a powerful undertow dragging us away from the light and immortality for which we were made. Physical or mental illness, ageing, misfortune, broken relationships, addictive behaviour, unhealed memories, loss: these are our personal equivalents of the global threats that on good days we try to pretend are not as bad as we had feared, and on less good days have the capacity to paralyse us with the thought that one day this little light of ours will be put out for ever.

This makes All Saints’ tide all the more of a gift.  At this time of year, the liturgy invites us to celebrate those who were and are lights in the world.  It says to us: notice what fills the pages of history and what is all around you today: the goodness, the graciousness, the joy, the perseverance, the charity of the people we call saints.  Sainthood is not the sentimental whitewashing of a human life to make it seem something that it isn’t.  Nor is it often heroic, as if the only way of holiness is to scale Himalayan peaks of faith, discipline and good works.  The secret lies in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday.  Pusey said that sanctity doesn’t mean doing extraordinary things, but doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways.  ‘Extraordinary’ means doing them for God, making drudgery divine:  The saints are emblems of hope: because they light little fires in dark rooms and inspire us to go on believing, trusting, hoping against hope in the God who makes all things new as our reading puts it.. 

One of these is death itself, the last enemy that we have faced on All Souls’ Day.  Today’s gospel tells of how Jesus raises Lazarus back to life.  Bethany where Mary, Martha and Lazarus lived was a favourite place for Jesus.  There he found what he had had to renounce for the sake of his ministry: friendship, family and foyer, the warmth of care and affection, a place to call home.  So Lazarus’ death is a blow not just for his own family but for Jesus too: ‘see how he loved him’ they say.  St John uses this story as an introduction to his account of the death and resurrection of Jesus that makes up the rest of the gospel.  It’s a kind of visual aid: the man who died and came back from the dead announces what Jesus himself is about to do, only more gloriously, for when Jesus comes back from the dead, all things will begin to become new for he will be alive for ever.

But this beautiful story doesn’t simply illustrate a truth about Jesus crucified and risen in history.  It gives us a picture of what we ourselves are in him: those who have been brought back to life through the power and grace of God.  We are Lazarus, once held by our grave cloths as people who were not yet truly alive, emerging blinking and bewildered out of our tombs into the strong light of day into which the risen Saviour has led us. We are Lazarus, sought out and found by the searching loving grace of God that rolls away the stones that imprison us, opening up amazing new doors of possibility: new life, new purpose, new meaning, new joy, new hope.  This is St John’s message.  It is about how Jesus transforms our lives: like the man born blind who comes to see; like the woman at the well whose thirst is quenched; like the water turned into wine and the bread multiplied on the hillside.  It’s the light shining in the darkness as we shall soon hear in the Christmas gospel, and the darkness never again being able to overcome it. 

And this, I think, is what St John would mean by sainthood.  To be a saint is to live the new life God offers us in Jesus, to find that the ordinariness of work, leisure and relationships becomes something extraordinary because we learn to see God and bless him in it all.  So All Saints is about who and what we are as the people of God, faithfully following Jesus, speaking his words of truth and love, living in the strength of God as points of inspiration and challenge in a world that has so little time for him. The secret is to live out of gratitude for the love of God that made us and redeems us and sustains us. 

At All Saints’ tide, I think of the men, women and children who have lived that way in past ages and have completed their journeys and are now at rest.  I think of those who have loved me into life, influenced me, touched me in important ways, but for whom I would not be here now as a priest, a Christian and a man.  Like Lazarus, who was no-one in particular, simply a friend of Jesus in whom the life-changing power of God made all the difference.  That is why we celebrate that great multitude no-one can number who were faithful unto death, and have now received the crown of life, and in whose company, God willing, we shall one day find ourselves sharing in the vision of God when death shall be no more, neither mourning nor crying nor pain, for the first things have passed away, and the One seated on the throne says: ‘behold, I am making all things new.’. 

Blackburn Cathedral

4 November 2012

(Revelation 21.1-6a, John 11.32-44)

The first in a series of sermons at the Cathedral on the theme of hope.