22 March 2026 Lent 5
Ezekiel 37.1-14 Psalm 130 Romans 8.6-11 John 11.1-45
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. We can sing it almost without thought. The toe bones is connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the shin bone, etc. Just imagine what it would have looked like for Ezekiel to hear, and see, dry bones gathering together and making the skeleton they used to be. Then muscle and tendon and flesh covering the bones to make a walking, dancing, body. But this vision is not about dead people and dry bones, Ezekiel is questioning whether Jerusalem, the city of God, will ever be restored or whether it was destined to remain in ruins. And the reading could easily be construed to speak into our current world situation. Nations in chaos, leaders thriving on that chaos and putting profits ahead of the wisdom of the prophets and ahead of the well being of vulnerable citizens and immigrants. Leaders who see themselves ‘appointed by God’, and who use this ‘identity’ to justify everything they do as ‘the right thing’. The old ways are dead, but will new ways rise? Will these dry bones come back to life? Only God’ Spirit can revive us, energise us, and empower us.
Like Ezekiel’s dry bones, the raising of Lazarus takes us on a ride we may not be ready for. The passage we have heard is difficult for us to take literally, we know that people can be ‘revived’ after they have died, but that is usually only possible in the gap between ‘clinical death’ and ‘brain death’, and Lazarus has been dead for 4 days so that gap would have well and truly been passed. But does our difficulty accepting this story mean we dismiss it as ‘untrue’ or ‘folklore’. I don’t think so. Even though we have difficulty understanding how Lazarus was ‘brought back to life’, we don’t discount it as untrue because, when it comes to Jesus and God, all things are possible and even if we don’t understand them, we still accept and believe them. This event and Jesus’ resurrection being just two of them.
One of the commentators I have read this week describes the biggest miracle in this story is not the raising of Lazarus, but the reality that ‘Jesus wept’. For some, the reality that Jesus felt ‘human emotion’ and allowed himself the space to express that emotion speaks volumes about who Jesus was then, and is now for us today. After Martha berates Jesus for delaying to the point that her brother has died even though she also expresses certainty in the resurrection to eternal life, Jesus’ comment ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ does not deny the pain of death, it places that pain in the loving hands of God. The cost of resurrection is death, death to old ways, death of that which is familiar, death of our previous identity.
When Lazarus appears from the tomb, that is not the end of the story, Jesus tells the crowd ‘unbind him and let him go’. The community is commanded to participate in God’s action, to join in in completing God’s redemptive act. And it is interesting that, within the 45 verses of this story, the actual raising takes only 2. And this is typical in John’s Gospel, where what maters most is not the sign, but Jesus’ interpretation of it and our response to it. Lazarus will die again, but the community who were empowered to unbind and set loose, will endure. In fact, we are living evidence that it has endured. We are here today because that community has persisted through the centuries, in works of courage and mercy, and we continue that work of unbinding and loosing.
Through the centuries there have been many who have disbelieved this story, in fact the disciples even report that ‘many’ of Jesus’ closest disciples quit following him, and even those who continued to follow him struggled to believe he had risen from the dead because , as Luke tell us, it seemed ‘like nonsense’. But as we have heard in this letter from Paul, the disciples continued to preach Jesus’ message. As he says “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who lives in you’. Mary and Martha believed this, and Jesus gave them the gift of their brother’s natural life back to them. Lazarus was raised from the dead.
And when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he effectively signed his own death warrant. The ‘power-brokers’ needed to ‘eliminate’ this itinerant preacher who was stirring up crowds, performing unexplained signs and healings, and now even raising from the dead one who was dead long enough that he was starting to decay. And just as the first believers believed that Lazarus, and Jesus, were truly raised from the dead, so too we believe. Even though we, like them, cannot explain it, or fully understand it, or properly describe it, if we do not believe it to be ‘true’ then our faith counts for naught. The Spirit gives us life when life seems most bleak. These can be the resurrection moments of our lives if we turn to the Spirit in trustful surrender and unshakable faith.