“Son of man, can these bones live?”
Today’s readings
are, of course, about resurrection.
About returning to
life.
Ezekiel in the valley of the bones,
and Jesus with
his friends in their distress.
Can you imagine a field of
bones?
We’ve all seen skeletons on television, of course,
and
some of us may have visited ossuaries on the continent,
which
are usually memorials to soldiers who fell in the first world war,
and they put the bones of soldiers who have got separated from
their identity into the ossuaries to honour them.
Robert and I
went to one near Verdun, once; it's very impressive.
And
the older ones among us may remember seeing pictures of a huge pile
of bones in Cambodia after the Pol Pot atrocities of the 1970s.
I
think Ezekiel, in his vision, must have seen something like that.
A
huge pile of skulls and bones….
“Son of man, can these
bones live?”
And, at God’s command, Ezekiel prophesied
to the bones,
and then he saw the skeletons fitting themselves
together like a jigsaw puzzle,
and then internal organs and
tendons and muscle and fat and skin growing on the bare
skeletons.
I’m sure I’ve seen some kind of computer
animation like that on television, haven’t you?
But for
Ezekiel, it must have been totally weird,
unless he was in one
of those dream-states where it’s all rational.
But once
the skeletons had come together and grown bodies, things were still
not right.
Do you ever watch those television programmes
where they try to build up an image of the person from his or her
skull? They do it extremely well, although the one I saw of Richard
III made him look just like the famous portrait of him!
The
trouble is, of course, that they never look much like a real live
person, but more like those photo-fit reconstructions that the police
build up from people’s descriptions of villains.
And
think how those dinosaurs that they reconstruct as computer
animations, imagining what they may have looked and sounded like when
all they really have is a fragment of bone! David Attenborough has
done some programmes on them, and sometimes it’s difficult to
remember that these are not real animals, only animations. They are
much better than they used to be, but even still, the difference, in
both the head reconstructions and the dinosaur programmes is that
there is no life.
No spirit, no personality looking out through
the eyes.
And that’s what Ezekiel saw in his vision
–
there were just so many plastic models lying there, no life,
no spirit.
Ezekiel had to preach to them again, and they
eventually came to life as a vast army.
And then Ezekiel
was told the interpretation of his vision –
it was a prophecy
of what God was going to do for Israel, which at the time seemed dead
and buried.
God was going to bring Israel back to life, to
breathe new life into the nation, and put His Spirit into
them.
---oo0oo---
I’ll come back to Ezekiel
in a minute, but for now, let’s go on to the wonderful story of
Lazarus.
The family at Bethany has many links in the
Bible.
Some people have identified Mary as the woman who poured
ointment all over Jesus’ feet in the house of Simon the Leper –
and
because he lived in Bethany,
some people have also said that he
was married to Martha.
We don’t know.
The Bible isn't
very clear about which Mary was which,
apart from Mary the
Mother of God,
and it certainly doesn't say that Martha and
Simon were married to each other, although both of them probably were
married.
We do know that Martha and Mary were sisters,
and
that they had a beloved brother, called Lazarus.
We do know that
on one occasion Mary poured her expensive perfume all over the feet
of the Lord –
whether this was the same Mary as in the other
accounts or a different one isn't clear
But whatever, they seem
to have been a family that Jesus knew well,
a home where he
knew he was welcome,
and dear friends whose grief he shared
when Lazarus died.
In some ways the story “works”
better if the woman who poured ointment on Jesus’ feet in the house
of Simon the Leper and this Mary are one and the same person,
as
we know that the woman in Simon’s house was, or had been,
some
kind of loose woman that a pious Jew wouldn’t normally associate
with.
Now she has repented and been forgiven,
and simply
adores Jesus,
who made that possible for her.
And she
seems to have been taken back into her sister’s household,
possibly rather on sufferance.
But then she does
nothing but sit at Jesus’ feet, listening to him.
Back then,
this simply was Not Done.
Only men were thought to be able to
learn,
women were supposed not to be capable.
Actually, I
have a feeling that the Jews thought that only Jewish free men were
able to learn.
They would thank God each morning that they had
not been made a woman, a slave or a Gentile.
And even though St
Paul had sufficient insight to be able to write that “In Christ,
there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile”,
thus at a stroke disposing of the prayer he’d been taught to make
daily, it’s taken us all a very long time to work that out,
and
some would say we haven’t succeeded, even now.
Anyway,
the point is that Mary, by sitting at Jesus’ feet like that,
was
behaving in rather an outrageous fashion.
Totally blatant, like
throwing herself at him.
He might have felt extremely
uncomfortable,
and it’s quite possible that his disciples
did.
Martha certainly did, which was one of the reasons why she
asked Jesus to send Mary through to help in the kitchen.
But
Jesus replied:
“Mary has chosen what is better, and it will
not be taken away from her.”
Mary, with all her history,
was now thirsty for the Word of God.
Jesus was happy enough with
bread and cheese, or the equivalent;
he didn’t want a huge and
complicated meal.
He wanted to be able to give Mary what she
needed,
the teaching that only he could provide.
He would
have liked to have given it to Martha, too,
but Martha wasn’t
ready.
Not then.
But now….. now it’s all
different.
Lazarus, the beloved brother, has been taken ill and
died.
It’s awful, isn’t it, when people die very suddenly?
I
know we’d all rather go quickly rather than linger for years
getting more and more helpless and senile,
but it’s a
horrible shock for those left behind.
And, so it seems, Lazarus
wasn’t ill for very long, only a couple of days.
And he
dies.
It must have been awful for them.
Where was
Jesus?
They had sent for him, begged him to come, but he wasn’t
there.
He didn’t even come for the funeral –
which, in
that culture and climate, had to happen at once,
ideally the
same day.
The two women, and their families if they had them,
were observing the Jewish custom of “sitting Shiva”,
sitting
on low stools indoors while their friends and neighbours came to
condole with them
and, I believe, bring them food and stuff so
that the bereaved didn’t have to bother.
But Martha,
hearing that Jesus is on his way, runs out to meet him.
This
time it is she who abandons custom and propriety to get closer to
Jesus.
And it is she who declares her faith in Him:
“Yes,
Lord, I believe that you are the Christ,
the Son of God, who is
come into this world!”
And Mary, too, asserts that if
Jesus had been there,
Lazarus would not have died.
But it
is Martha, practical Martha, who overcomes her doubts about removing
the gravestone –
four days dead, that was going to smell
rather, wasn’t it?
But she orders it removed, and Jesus calls
Lazarus forth.
And he comes, still wrapped in the bandages
they used for preparing a body for burial.
When Jesus is raised,
some weeks or months later, the grave-clothes are left behind, but we
are told that this didn’t happen to Lazarus.
The people
watching had to help him out of the grave-clothes.
---oo0oo---
Of
course, I think the point of these two stories –
and the point
of linking them together in the lectionary –
is fairly
obvious.
Life comes from God.
In Ezekiel’s vision, God
had to breathe life into the fitted-together skeletons,
or they
were no more than computer animations,
or dressmakers’
dummies.
And it was God who, through Jesus, raised Lazarus from
the dead.
Without God, Ezekiel’s skeletons would have remained
just random collections of bones.
I think that this may have
been a dream or a vision, rather than something that actually
happened, but it makes an important point, even still.
God said
to Ezekiel that just as, in the dream, he had breathed life into the
skeletons, so he would breathe new life into the people of
Israel.
And the story of Lazarus, of course, foreshadows
the even greater resurrection of Jesus himself,
a resurrection
that left even the grave-clothes behind.
Lazarus, of course,
will have eventually died permanently, as it were, when his time had
come;
Jesus, as we know, remains alive today and lives within us
through the power of the Holy Spirit.
So what have these
stories to say to us, here in the 21st century?
We don’t find
the idea of a fieldful of bones coming together and growing flesh
particularly special –
computer animations have seen to
that.
And we don’t expect to see the dead raised –
more’s
the pity, in some ways;
maybe if we did, we would.
Then
again, that doesn’t seem to be something God does very often in our
world.
But I do think that there are two very important
things we can take away with us this morning.
The first
thing is that God can make dry bones live again.
Sometimes we
despair, I know, when we look round and see the state of the church
today –
tiny, elderly congregations that aren’t really
viable, churches having to close or only have one or two services a
month, and so on.
Or we might see services where people’s
emotions are manipulated by big-name preachers and vast stage shows.
Or we see churches where whole groups of people are demonised
and condemned.
And we wonder, “Can these bones live?”
Is
God really still here?
But, you know, there are signs of spring
–
the other week, there was what they are calling a “revival”
in a small town in the USA called Asbury.
It is, of course, far
too early to tell whether this will bear fruit in the form of genuine
repentance and changed lives,
or whether people were simply
caught up in some kind of mass emotionalism, all too easy to do.
But
if it is real, if it is resulting in changed lives….
Well….
Can these bones live?
The second thing that is that
it’s all God’s idea.
Our relationship with God is all his
idea –
we are free to say “No, thank you”, of course,
but
in the final analysis, our relationship with God depends on God,
not
on us.
I don’t know about you, but I find that really
liberating –
I don’t have to struggle and strain and strive
to stay “on track”.
When I fall into sin, I am not left all
by myself,
but God comes after me and gently draws me back to
himself.
I can just relax and be myself!
Our
relationship with God is God’s idea.
It is God who breathes
life into us.
It is God who brings us back when we go astray.
It
is God who helps us to change and grow and become the people we were
created to be, designed to be.
It is God who breathes life into
the dry bones of our spirituality, who calls us out of the grave, who
enables us to grow and change.
Amen, and thanks be to God!
