St Mary's

Homily for Week 5 of Lent, 2011

My dear friend, Wendy Brown, recently said to me, ‘Hey, Bernie, would you do a homily in Lent on the “Wilderness Within” topic? You’d be good at that!’  Only certain family members and special friends could say that kind of thing to you with no evil intent….

Anyway, I had a look at this Fifth Sunday of Lent’s Gospel about the re-vitalisation of Lazarus, and thought about the experiences of my daily workplace in the wards of a children’s hospital and thought that, yes, there are a couple of things I could say. And, yes again, I could also do that within the boundaries of another seven minutes.

About twenty years ago an evergreen, almost-fairytale style movie called ‘The Princess Bride’ was a very popular release. The hero character, Wesley by name, is overcome by the forces of evil and appears to be dead. Fortunately for the final third of the movie, he is proclaimed to be ‘…only mostly dead’ and is nurtured back to being ‘mostly alive’ by devoted friends, just in time to be ‘mostly present’ as conquering hero, with a lot of help from his friends. Lazarus’s story is not at all like this and yet, at the very same time, it is indeed quite similar.

In the account of the Bethany event in John’s Gospel – a tale not found in any of the other three Synoptic Gospels – Lazarus is certainly dead. He has been in the tomb for four days. One of the local beliefs of those times was that the spirit of a dead person remained nearby for four days after the time of dying, waiting in the forlorn hope of being reunited with its body. It departed after that time as the body became less recognisable. Their light had gone out for good.

At this point Jesus enters the wilderness tableau of loss, grief and bereavement, too late to be of any apparent good. He weeps with his living friends, asks to see the grave site and challenges those with him to have faith. He speaks into the cave (the dark, lifeless, dry-bones, frightening void), Lazarus hears and responds, and emerges to have hands and feet untied, face uncovered; eyes, breath and heart restored. And the author of John stops this narrative of liberation and hope right at that point.

I’m left wondering what the good friends – Lazarus and Jesus – might have said to each other at such a moment…. That wasn’t the main concern of John lesson but let’s hold on to that thought for later. The writer here immediately uses this Bethany event as trigger for the decision by the authorities to have Jesus removed. The other Gospel writers used the cleansing of the Temple as their catalyst for the Passover plot. So John has Jesus withdraw now and go underground to a little place called Ephraim, right on the edge of the desert wilderness, a place of temporary refuge.

Let’s take a short visit to the wilderness at this stage, the spiritual focus of our community’s Lenten preparations for Easter this past month. The wilderness is indeed a strange place. All at the same time it can be threatening or attractive, it can be external to us or deeply internal, and it is always and ultimately steeped in mystery. Sallywattle in the rainforest, for example, can be haven and retreat, but respect the black snakes, stinging trees and precipices; expect the lack of regular comforts; and be prepared to accommodate the compelling presences of silence and stillness.

Our wilderness experiences can be places of wonder, or of wasteland, or mixtures of both. We might go looking for the respite of a wilderness time to escape our daily grind. Alternatively, we might just feel that we are living most of our days in a wasteland wilderness, struggling with personal and other problems that seem so heavy that, like the stone at Lazarus’s tomb, we just can’t roll them away by ourselves.

The Gospels are littered with Jesus’ escapes to wilderness, whether for safety and security, for time to recover energy, to avoid political rushes to make him king, to make space to battle the demons or just have time to pray seriously. These deserts always remain places where wild and strange things lurk, but also places that we must not shrink from but go through – or just live within – with some courage and hope.

Children’s fiction – indeed much of our world’s art, music, literature, popular culture – depict the wilderness, the unknown, at the heart of our human project. In Michael Rack’s ‘Edward Built a Rocket Ship’ (show book), young Edward looks to the sky and begins his fabulous and imaginary space journey. It concludes with, ‘He ran into his mother’s arms and said, “I’ve touched the sky! I’ve made a billion stars my friends!”’  I went there and I’m back!

In ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ , Maurice Sendak’s 1964 classic (show book), the child Max sails into his interior wilderness to meet, confront, play with, lead and then leave behind, all the wild things of his spirit. He too comes home safely from his terrifying ordeal, not to his mum’s hugs, because he has been a bit of a monster to his family, but at least o find that his dinner has been left for him – and it’s still warm!

Then there’s that intrepid, fictional character, Captain James C. Kirk, who manages to avoid impending darkness by calling on Scotty, his Star-Trekking buddy, to beam him right out of there. Our archetypes of innocence, journey, experience and new-found innocence resonate.

Albert Einstein once replied to the charge of a Jewish rabbi that Einstein was not truly a religious man, as he had always claimed, by saying:   “The most beautiful emotion that we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. The one to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness….’ (p.21, M. Fox, 2009)

Later in the twentieth century, the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom recounted the tale of a patient of his who struggled not to let her candle be snuffed out by deep grief and depression, or ‘passionate sadness’ as it may also be called. She experienced her loneliness as akin to being afloat on a dark ocean, in a small sailing boat, with just a single lighted candle for company. As she progressed through her healing, her metaphor morphed into a much more powerful vision. She was still captain of her own small boat, but now she was being accompanied by many other single-sailor vessels, each with their own unique light and all close by and communicating with one another on their way.

So, by way of conclusion, I wonder again what Jesus and Lazarus might have said to each other on Lazarus’s return from his deep wilderness? As Jewish people, possessed of a keen sense of humour, Lazarus probably asked, ‘Hey, my friend, what took you so long?! It was dark in that place!’ Jesus could only have replied, ‘Lazarus, my friend, let’s have some wine. You look like …– you could do with a drink!’’

On a more serious note, though, what Jesus might have spoken next to Lazarus could apply individually to each one of us also. Some of those possible words might come to you as you reflect further on wilderness and Lazarus in these days leading up to Holy Week. For now, though, I offer three possibilities:

1. Just keep going and hoping!   The mystery of God’s project is profound.
2. Just do it!   Each day you live your life the best you can, you contribute to the ‘Reigning of God’.
3. Just care for each other!   [I imagine that John Lennon, Jesus and Lazarus would have enjoyed talking about this.]

I wish shalom to you and your loved ones on our path from Bethany to Easter.

Bernard McIntyre

BTheol, BA, GradDipTeach, DipCL, MSocSci, QCA (Clinical), PACFA (Register)

The original text of this homily was updated by its author on April 13 2011