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I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (11:25).

Released just days before Bowie’s death, ‘Lazarus’, from the album Backstar, reflects on mortality, resurrection, and the afterlife, with Lazarus as a symbolic figure.  It was kind of an self-written epitaph predicting his ongoing fame after his demise.

 

It’s not bad epitaph, as they go, and has a catchy lyric, though its not a patch on my favourite,

if you can find the small grave at St Thomas Winchelsea, you can read Spike Milligan’s famous last words:  “I told you I was ill”!

 

Sometimes I wonder then, that so many external observers and casual commentators consider Christians to be obsessed with Sin, and Lent to be all about avoiding it.

Whereas, in fact, it seems to me that the righteous are not as much concerned with Sin … as they are, like Bowie was, with DEATH and DYING.

It’s long shadow or it’s sudden coming.

 

And in this, more interesting fascination, we are not alone.

This is what has fascinated all Lazarus-watchers

from Leo Tolstoy to Led Zepplin, from John Connolly to Nick Cave

 

And , of course, this is what the Gospeller is ultimately concerned with in this Tour De Force central passage- the seventh sign of Jesus the Christ.

 

It’s High Risk passage because John allows for the fact that, among his listeners there will be those adenoidal literalists who will draw the wrong conclusions.

 

John’s real thrust is to present Jesus as the one

who has power over SIN and DEATH, in this life AND the next.

 

This self-effacing Son of God offers Eternal Life on both sides of the grave,

and at the same point out, to his listeners shame,

that death, or deathliness, may be present on both sides of the grave too.

‘We all know that Lazarus will rise on the last day’ Jesus says, in effect,

‘ But I, who am both resurrection AND life

            Speak the very life that I AM.

Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die to *this* Life’

 

If you can believe that?

 

Can you?

 

It seems to me that this is the unavoidable deeper question before us this morning   and is the question most present throughout Passiontide & Holy Week.

 

If you choose to, just look at those booklets-

there are a lot of opportunities to sit with it

and be present to our response….

to let Deep call to Deep.

Of course, one reason for doing so, would have hardly occurred to Jesus or John, which is our modern discomfort with miracles of all kinds.

 

To curb my own enthusiasm and to cover my bases, I decided to scour my shelves more thoroughly.

 

In time I picked up Rudolf Bultmann’s Commentary on John

Bultmann was a first rate liberal-protestant theologian

who spent a long career in the mid C20th-

demythologising the miracles of the New Testament

and emphasising instead its implications for individual existence & experience.

 

I chose to revisit Bultmann, not really because I agree with take on things,

but to see what he, as someone quite disinclined to believe very much at all,

made of this most miraculous of miracle stories.

 

Was really as central as all that?

Does it matter as I think it does?

 

 “The story of Lazarus” he concedes “is not *only* about the awakening of faith

 in the hearts of those who hear and believe in Jesus’ words

but about the resurrection of a dead man, 

and, by it, Jesus claim to bring life eternal”

 

In other words  Bultman rightly recognises the existential power of this story-

to provoke questions, to inspire allusion, creativity, depth, stretch….

Of course, this is what initially attracts so many to it in the first place.

But he also concedes that its very power consists not- as a neat metaphor for personal renewal. No.

 

But only in the real demolition of death’s grip over us finite beings

on both sides of the grave.

 

It is not enough to file this away as an inspiring story, from which we can gain hope.  To be honest- its not that inspiring.  It’s too …. Distant and odd for that.

 

It seems to me, as it did to Bultmann, and has to more or less all serious theologians of all stripes, that you lose the substance of Jesus Anger at death

and his assertion- through Word and Wonder-

that in HIM death by death is undone-

there is really nothing left to inspire.

 

The eternal Life that Jesus offers now

and the everlasting Life that Jesus offers beyond

are both bound up in Jesus claim to be THE ONE

-the author of peace and lover of concord-

in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life,

whose service alone is perfect freedom.

 

The question is whether we will engage with this High Stakes claim and believe it?  Or will we shy away from it as so many who were there, did.

 

In In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work “The Brothers Karamazov” (1879) Ivan Karamazov also uses the story of Lazarus to cut to heart

of what is at stake in this choice to believe in Jesus Christ.

Either it matters more than anything.  Or nothing matters at all.

 

Ivan is questioning, like many before and since, how a just and loving God can allow innocent people, particularly children, to suffer.  A good entry point.

 

Ivan’s understandable skepticism about God

contrasts with Alyosha’s strong faith and spiritual inclination.

But- because he engages with THIS claim

it is Ivan who get’s closer to the truth in the end.

 

Following their, now famous discussion on the problem of evil, Ivan proceeds to tell Alyosha the story of “The Grand Inquisitor.”

 

In this poem within the novel, Jesus returns to Earth

during the Spanish Inquisition and performs miracles,

including, crucially, the raising a young girl from the dead.

 

It is mirror of John’s gospel.  On this hinge hangs it all.

 

Jesus act, as in Bethany, was existentially liberationist.  Dangerous.  Radical.

That’s what excites his followers.

But it is also miraculous.  Powerful.  Terrifyingly believable.

That’s what scares the authorities

The Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal and guardian of the Catholic Church,

arrests Jesus and confronts him, arguing that humanity cannot bear the burden of such possibility, and that they would rather be ruled by the church

than experience the dangerous freedom that Jesus offers.

The terrible tragedy of the vignette is that the Inquisitor

is not a paint-by-numbers grant claret-clad cardinal

but an old wearied priest in worn dark cassock

who has long lost sight of the power claims of his vocation.

 

It is too hard to believe-he thinks-too precarious.

Better wrap it up & make it safe

 

But John’s Jesus will not be contained so easily.

 

There is existential solidarity here, yes.

But there is something even more fundamentally hopeful than that too:

an ontological hope- one that recalibrates the nature of being itself,

far beyond the experiences of individuals.

 

Jesus knew sorrow in his friend’s death.  And Jesus wept.

But Jesus also salves that sorrow

by limiting death through the miracle of Lazarus’ resurrection.

 

Yes,  Jesus knew terrible sorry in his own Passion. And Jesus died.

But so Christ harrows the hell of death and isolation

In the miracle of his own resurrection from the dead.

 

 

Surely, these are the claims we must enquire after this Holy Week?

And surely this is what the inquisitors are terrified by?

That anyone might actually believe all this stuff.

 

What endless possibilities that should not exist might then come into being?

 

            Weakness might the strong confound

                        And by the hands in grave-clothes bound

                                                Adams chains would  be unbound.

 

                                    When Art by art should be assailed

                                                And when to the cross shall life be nailed.

                                                            Then from the Grave shall hope be hailed.

 

I don’t know about you but this is what interest me –

that in the face of death, a desperate person can find real life in Jesus Christ.

 

Which, of course, was exactly Dostoevsky’s own experience?

When he was condemned to death together with his fellow revolutionaries

the writer turned to one of his fellows, a Jacobin atheist called Spesnev,

and he said, famously: “Today I will be with Christ”.

 

 

In the gospel that he left behind what do you think was

the most heavily underlined passage?

 

The resurrection of Lazarus, from John Chapter 11,

 

in which Jesus said to Him

as he says to you and me:

“I am the resurrection and the life.

 

Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live,

and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.

 

Do you believe this?”