On Track
Lent 5
Fr. Tim Nunez
May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Of all our modes of transportation, trains are unique: they go where the tracks take them, by design, not merely by schedule. The tracks set where they go. Freight trains, Amtrak, commuter railroads, subways, even streetcars go where they go. I’m not talking about schedules, planes and buses run on schedules. I mean the rails. They run on tracks. Those tracks are necessarily parallel. They go to the same places, but they remain distinct. And the cargo or the people go with them.
Jesus’s life has two distinct and related themes that run parallel, as straight and true as railroad tracks. One rail is the Kingdom of God. That is the culmination of God’s will. The other is the revelation of Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, who came into the world to accomplish his Father’s will. That is the culmination of Jesus’s will, which is his own and is aligned perfectly with his Father’s will. The Kingdom and Jesus at the Father’s right hand go together, parallel, forever.
Each moment the Gospels share about Jesus is like a railroad tie fastened to each of those rails. Everything Jesus says, his teaching, his preaching, and his prayers tell us about Jesus. And they all affirm his Father’s will. Even when he is on the cross, suffering beyond imagination physically, mentally and spiritually, his plea “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” reveals his obedience to his Father’s will right through his own suffering, sense of abandonment and death.
Likewise, when he heals someone, anyone, be it the blind, the deaf, the lame, the woman with the hemorrhage, the paralyzed, the demon-possessed or the lepers, each instance reveals more about him, his power and authority. And they reveal the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom, all of our infirmities, weaknesses and sinful nature shall be set right.
When Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, it affirms whom Jesus is. It’s one thing to raise someone who has just died, which he did. But Lazarus was four days dead. Martha is right. By four days, his body would be decomposing and there would be a stench. Death has done its work. This restoration to life is all the more astounding. Jesus is the one who can reverse even that.
We see the Kingdom of God because in the Kingdom, Lazarus will not be dead. He shall be alive! He shall be unbound from everything that tied him down or held him back from being the person God ever intended him to be.
And there is much more here.
Lazarus, Martha, Mary and their friends have suffered terribly. Lazarus was terribly sick. As he suffered and eventually died, his sisters suffered with him. This is the high cost of love – we care for each other and when we suffer such a loss, it hurts proportionally with the depth of our love. We mustn’t paper over this, or our own suffering, because it has a happy ending.
The sorrow is very real and it mattered to Jesus. Jesus wept. Jesus clearly felt, honored, respected and shared their grief. He absolutely felt it and gets it. Jesus shows that he is with us in our grief. He will redeem it, but not without feeling, honoring, respecting and sharing it with us.
And that reveals the Father’s will to comfort his people even as he draws us to the kingdom, where he will wipe away every tear.
This is life and death. And as we are passing through this life, God wants us to know whose we are and where we are going. We often feel as though we are stumbling along those tracks, veering off at times and scrambling back by grace. But God wants us to hop on board and ride those rails.
Please turn in your prayer books to page 491. It is titled “The Burial of the Dead.” The very first thing we say, sometimes after an opening hymn, is what Jesus said to Martha:
I am Resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.
Whoever has faith in me shall have life,
even though he die.
And everyone who has life,
and has committed himself to me in faith,
shall not die for ever.
We are in John’s Gospel precisely where we are in our liturgical calendar. This incident with Lazarus will drive that celebration and fuel the plot to kill Jesus. Next Sunday we celebrate Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, followed by our sharing in the Passion narrative.
We find this wondrous miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead also foreshadows the looming climax of the conflict over the power of sin and death vs. the power of life and love, and its ultimate victory.
Where is the true joy in Ezekiel? (600 years before Jesus.) It is in God’s promise to raise new life from our dried bones.
Where is the true joy in Romans? “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwells in you.”
Where is the true joy in this Gospel? That Lazarus gained another 30, 40, 50, 60 years of life on this earth before he died? That’s good – but the true joy is the promise, God’s promise, that nothing, even death, can separate us from him.
The tracks go where they go. In that sense, we are all being inextricably drawn to that end, the Kingdom and being with Jesus, as he sits at the Father’s right hand. The rails are fixed—but we are not. And yet, by grace, God keeps drawing us back. The stronger our faith, the more we believe in Him, the more we ride those rails, ultimately to be with him forever.
AMEN!