The best is yet to come

 ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him …..’ (John 11:16)

John 11:1-45 (Year A: Fifth Sunday of Lent Sunday 3^rd April 2017)

We choose a thousand things a day: to get up at a particular time and not another, to continue living and working where we are, to know and love another today and every day, to eat salad and not to eat salad, to sign up for social media or not to sign up, to cultivate positive frames of mind or not.  Some choices are hardly choices at all given our circumstances and commitments. Other choices are less given and, perhaps, we may be faced with major life-changing choices that cause us to pause and consider.  Then again, there are choices we freely make without hardly being aware of these as free choices.  We chose to take the stairs in the train station every morning instead of the escalator (or the opposite) and we never think about those sorts of very every-day and routine actions.

The raising of Lazarus (or Eleazar in Hebrew, the meaning of which is ‘God has helped’) is the final and seventh ‘Sign’ in the Gospel of John. This long Lenten Sunday reading from John is completely unique among the Gospels – as is much of the long discourses found in John as well as four of the seven signs of which this is one.  Because this story is unique to the fourth Gospel doesn’t mean that ‘it didn’t happen’.  We don’t know. What we do know is that the story is founded in the truth of the love and power of Jesus to raise people to new life not in some esoteric spiritual and metaphorical sense but, also, in a very concrete and ‘this worldly’ sense.  This can make for uncomfortable hearing and reading to the post-enlightenment rational mind. While it would be nonsensical to treat these long discourses found in John (or, indeed, all of the many sayings of Jesus scattered across all four canonical Gospels) as direct transcripts of what was said (for one thing, as far as know, Jesus did not speak in English let alone the authorised English found in the King James version of the Bible). Things can get lost in translation and the historical and lived experience of the communities in which stories about Jesus circulated in the first century shapes what is emphasised, retained or left behind.  We do well to remember that the evangelist closes his gospel (at least the copy version we have received) as follows (21:24-25):

This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Not everything was written down and what was written down is not fully ‘history’ in the contemporary empirical sense. This is why we need to read the scriptures ‘on our knees’ so to speak. That is with an open and inquiring mind, a prayerful heart and a humble disposition respecting the wisdom and experience of our brother and sister disciples who we went before us. Meeting the Word of God in the scriptures is a living as well as a lived experience. The really important part of this encounter is not the analysis of what was said or is said but, rather, the transformation from death to life and from life to death.  We enter the tomb with Jesus and find new life where we least expect it.  In our daily Lenten dying we sow seeds of new Easter life.  The best is yet to come.  Believe it.