Lord, Can These Bones Live?
a sermon based on Ezekiel 37:1-14, John 11:1-45
by Rev. Christine Ruth

More often than not – when I’m reading the Gospel lesson to prepare for my sermon on Sunday, there’s something in that lesson that disturbs me. There’s always something about the way Jesus does or says things that’s disturbing - even offensive – to my modern sensibilities.

Take today’s lesson, for example. Jesus has just escaped the death squad in Jerusalem. And a messenger runs up to him, breathless, from Bethany, where his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus live. His friends are begging him to come quick. Their brother, Lazarus, is dying, and they want Jesus to come and heal him. But Jesus seems anything, but stressed when he hears the news.

Rather than rushing off to Bethany, he stays right where he is. For two more days, he stays. And by the times Jesus makes the 2-day journey to Bethany, Lazarus is already dead. Extremely dead – Scripture says the corpse was already decaying. By the time Jesus arrives, it’s 4 days after the funeral! You can hear the blame and anger in Mary and Martha’s voices when He finally gets there, “If you had gotten here on time, our brother would not have died!”

Now, before we rush to the end of the story, I want to pause here and ask a question. Why would Jesus delay in responding to their request? Why would Jesus allow them to go through the suffering, grief, and anger before he bothers to arrive to the scene? Well, unlike Mary and Martha, we hear his reasons in vs.4, “This illness is meant for God glory – so that God may be glorified through it.” Basically, Jesus says, “I have allowed this time of suffering and grief so that God might be glorified through it.”

This statement of Jesus is rather disturbing to me. You see, I am one of those people who, when others are suffering, want to fix it and make it okay. If someone’s suffering from loneliness, grief, or depression, I want to single-handedly pull them out of the pit and save the day. And quite honestly, I’ve often gotten angry with God when he hasn’t allowed this to happen. When I’ve prayed for things, and He just hasn’t shown up. When I’m making an important decision, and He hasn’t given me any direction. When I’m feeling lonely or sad, and I feel like I’m being ignored. If God is such a loving God, then why won’t He come and fix it? Why bother praying if God’s not even going to show up?

But Jesus is saying that there’s something about His glory that can only be revealed through our death and resurrection. That resurrection is only possible if the death comes first. Obviously, we must be killed before we can have new life again. Sometimes, suffering is necessary before we can be reborn.

In His book, “Why Christian?”, Douglas John Hall writes, “One of the objects of our journey in life is that we should learn true hope…True hope, not false hope or cheap hope…And true hope, as distinct from mere optimism, is given only to those who have had profound exposure to hope’s opposite – despair. Real salvation needs a hope that is not afraid to have a dialogue with despair.” True hope is born out of suffering and struggle.

Last week I heard a true story about a man who found a chrysalis – a caterpillar cocoon waiting to become a butterfly. He placed it in a jar and set it on his desk, and waited for days for this butterfly to emerge. After many days of waiting, he saw it. The chrysalis began pulsating, squirming – something was finally struggling to break free. This went on for hours, and the man began to feel bad for the butterfly – all the effort it was taking to pierce the cocoon. So, he gets out a scissors and makes a cut in the cocoon, and soon out emerges a beautiful butterfly sitting on his desk. But you know what? The butterfly couldn’t fly. Because it’s in the struggle of the butterfly trying to break free from the chrysalis that its wings develop all of their strength. It’s in that fight with the cocoon that the blood spreads to the ends of the wings, enabling the butterfly to take flight.

Jesus says that the same goes for us. Struggling, suffering, and a kind of death must precede the strength to take flight. In John 12:24, Jesus says, “Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” What does this mean for us? It means that while I often pray for a deeper relationship with God, it scares me. Because if I pray for wisdom, I know I will have to face trials. If I pray for patience, there will something big for which I’ll have to wait. If I ask to know God’s grace and mercy, I may first have to fall flat on my face with failure. If I pray for joy, I will have to trudge through despair. And there’s no easier means for God’s glory to be revealed in my life. Now, is this because God is vindictive or malevolent? Does He will tragedies in our lives just to teach us something? No. But he promises to use those tragedies and may even allow us to suffer for the sake of rebirth in our lives.

Now, we all know what happens in the Lazarus story when Jesus is done being interrogated by Mary and Martha. Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again.” Now Mary and Martha know this: “Of course he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” You’re talking about eternal life, right? But Jesus corrects her, and here I’m going to use the other word for the Greek word, pisteuo, which can mean either trust or believe. He says, “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who trust in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and trusts in me will never die. Do you trust this?”

Jesus is not just saying that he has the power, even at this point, to raise smelly Lazarus from the dead. He’s not just saying that He has the power to get you past the pearly gates when you die. He’s saying that “I AM the Resurrection and the Life, and when you’re hooked up with me, your eternal life begins NOW - in the present, amidst the struggles and trials you’re facing as we speak. This isn’t about some future reward. I came so that when you lose your job, when your loved one dies, when the Twin Towers explode, when your family falls apart, when you’re feeling depressed, or when your child gets sick – that in all of these deaths there will be resurrection.” That no matter how dusty and death-like things look, as the prophet Ezekiel says it, “These dry bones can live!” Because the times of suffering and grief in our lives are more often then not times of God’s greatest creativity - to reshape us, remold us, to bring new birth to our lives.

And perhaps there are hundreds of deaths and resurrections woven into our lives just so God’s glory might more profoundly be revealed. And so we can trust that, even in seasons of struggle, God’s goodness will be found here and now.