As some of you will have discovered already, there certain disadvantages spent a lot of your life in reading books. It can turn you broody: it tells against easy-goingness and small-talk: it may divert you from everyday practical kindliness and charity.
But it does have this advantage– it can shed light on what really bulks large in people’s lives, on what they confront, and on what they evade. Opening the covers of a book about the past can be opening a door into contemporary hearts.
And this, too, is true of the books of the Old and the New Testaments, the earlier and the later bondings of God with the humanity which God makes and loves. Open those books, and if you stay with them reflectively for a while, you will find that new vistas open into the hearts of late-twentieth-century Australians.
That, in fact, is what the church’s readings at Mass are for. They are there, not to report, however faithfully, on what is to be found in some religious museum of the past, but to throw a shaft of light down the avenues of the present, to help turn the dim passage of life into a luminous area.
And, strangely enough, that is the point of the two main readings for today (the 5th Sunday in Lent), from the prophet Ezekiel (37: 12-14) and from the gospel-writer John (11:1-45).
I say, ‘strangely enough’, because both passages have to do with the shutting and opening of graves; and for most of us, grave-talk is gloom-talk–it stops us in our tracks and pushes us against a wall. Still, I will say something about these readings, because they do after all have elements of promise, and of vitality, built into them. I am tempted to say that any religion, any world-view, any personal policy, is only as good as the graves it has to deal with: but even if you are not prepared to concede that, think of what is being said in these few biblical sentences.
Ezekiel writes, ‘Thus says the Lord God: O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel’. Most of us, I hope, do not think very much about literal death. But all of us, unless we have been very spoiled indeed, have had some experience of disappointment, either in our own individual lives or in the lives of others for whom we care.
And all of us–unless we have been ignoring pretty well everything seen on TV, or heard on the radio, or read in some paper or book, or found tumbled out in some conversation– all of us know something about life’s deep disappointments. In the work of one science-fiction writer, there is a planet whose name is, ‘Winter’. For some people, whatever the external weather is like, life’s experience might as well be called ‘Winter’. Some of them are in central Europe: some of them are in many parts of Africa: some of them are in Central America: and some of them are in Australia. They wake up in the morning: they look up: and what they see is the lip of a grave.
Frankly, I don’t much like to talk about this stuff: but because we are trying to become adults, and because we are trying to become Christians, we have to talk about it. It is the infantile who decline to address the element of the grave in everyday life.
By contrast, what Ezekiel’s prophecy claims is that we need not be disabled by the contemplation of life’s distresses: and that, for every entrance into dismay and despair and callousness, there are corresponding exits. ‘I will open your graves and have you rise from them’, says the prophet. He is talking about the dark spaces, the black holes, in our own personal lives. He is appealing to our wits, our guts, our sweetness of spirit. If it is the spirit of open-hearted compassion for others, and others who are very other, then it is the spirit of adulthood. That is the spirit which can take us out of the bassinet of emotional babyhood into the streets of the strong. That is the spirit worth a prophet’s talking about.
The gospel story about Lazarus, beguiled back from the dead by the power of a Jesus who was so much the master of love that he could master even death, that story reaffirms what I have been saying.
The gospel stories are not stories about magicianship–about a wondrous intervener, who could, because of his astonishing competencies, cut through life’s distresses, re-seal the broken vase, and make intact again the broken heart. The Lazarus in this story would in fact have to die, as dead as dead could be, later: so would Martha, and Mary, and the onlookers, kind or unkind: so would the formidably powerful Jesus. And that same Jesus would, shortly after the event told in this story, undergo all the emotions of denial, bargaining, anger, and grief, which modern analysts of our mortality find to be typical. Christianity has nothing at all to do with magic, whatever some may suppose.
What it does have to say to us is that we must, like Jesus himself, invest ourselves in love for others in their need, even if that should cost us our lives. It usually won’t, of course, cost us our blood. What it will do is take our time, our concern, our efforts, our patience, our ingenuity which is, when you think about it, getting pretty close to costing us our blood.
If we do that, when we do that, somebody will be helped to come back from the grave of dismay. If we do it for a while, that somebody will not only be the person on whose behalf we do these things it will be ourselves. The resurrection of hope, and of love, usually brings into the light people who are, after all, hand-in-hand.
