Isaiah 25. 6 – 9
Revelation 21. 1 – 6a
John 11. 32 – 44
‘Unbind him, and let him go.’
We worship Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Fully divine, fully human. Who really lived, really died, and really rose again so that we can all share in that resurrection too. We worship the God of life, who wants us all to be fully, really, alive. The Feast of All Saints is a golden, shimmering bridge between the life we lead here, from birth to death, and the eternal, luminous life of heaven. God designed that bridge. God is that bridge. That luminous life is always present in prayer and compassion, always united with us in our best and worst moments, and always calling us home into God’s own Kingdom.
The saints were, and are, real people. They had good days and bad days. Failures, injuries, exasperations. Witty conversations, complicated marriages, great fashion sense. Imprisonment, humiliation, torture. Laughter, friendships, hope. Evelyn Underhill wrote that ‘the saints are the great experimental Christians.’ Underhill, whose grave is in our churchyard, reminds us that being experimental, one of the priorities in our new Mission Action Plan, is being no less than saintly. Every single saint, old or young, rich or poor, prominently influential or seemingly insignificant, was subversively counter-cultural, and valued being Christ-like more than being anything else.
Meet two of them, who lived over 1400 years and many timezones apart:
St Perpetua, an African single mother and a scholar who lived in the third century. She became Christian, her father was furious, she was arrested, and separated from her baby. She was in prison with St Felicity, who was pregnant. When allowed to see her baby, Perpetua said that ‘the prison became a palace.’ Ss Perpetua and Felicity died together, torn apart by animals and Roman gladiators as part of a celebration – of all things – of the Roman emperor’s birthday. Her last words to her fellow-Christians were: ‘Stand fast in the faith, and love one another.’ Her feast day is on 7 March. She is a patron saint of mothers.
St Martin de Porres, whose feast day was yesterday, November 3rd. Known as the ‘angel of Lima’, he lived in Peru in the seventeenth century, the mixed race illegitimate son of a Spanish knight and a black freed slave from Panama. He became a Dominican monk when he was a teenager, and was famous for looking after enslaved people and offering them dignity. When he was made a saint in 1962, Pope John 23rd observed that St Martin was ‘not a learned man, but he possessed true knowledge which ennobles the spirit, the “inner light of the heart”.’ He is the patron saint of all who fight against racism. One of the first who would have cried out, ‘Black lives matter.’
In today’s Gospel we meet another saintly man, one of Jesus’ most dear and closest friends. That person is Lazarus. Lazarus’ friendship with Jesus is one of the simplest, most beautiful, most pure, and most outrageous chapters in the Bible. Lazarus knows how to love. Lazarus is sick. Lazarus dies. His sisters adore him. His sisters are frustrated that Jesus wasn’t able to help sooner. Jesus is in pain. Jesus is bereaved. Jesus is crying. Jesus is in deep grief, more emotionally exposed and raw than we have seen him before in this Gospel. He will not be this way again until the crucifixion. Lazarus is dead. Jesus wept. Jesus shouts ‘Lazarus, come out!’ And Lazarus emerges, long after death, covered in bandages, alive, somehow. Jesus tells his family to ‘unbind him and let him go.’ Let him go. He is free. Free to live. His freedom is not just from the bandages, but from death itself. Let him go. He is free. The tears well up in the eyes of his sisters and his friends not with the pain of bereavement but with the bewilderment and shock of…..joy. He is alive. No one can explain it, except through loving and learning from Jesus. Because Jesus is God, Lazarus is alive.
Jean Vanier has suggested that the Greek word to describe Lazarus – asthenes – which means ‘sick’, ‘feeble’, or ‘insignificant’, and the way that his family home is described (as belonging to his sisters and not to him), suggests that Lazarus was probably disabled.
When Mary and Martha let Jesus know that Lazarus is dying, they say, ‘the one you love is sick.’ The one you love. Lazarus was unique. Lazarus was loved. Lazarus, Vanier points out, ‘is present but he never speaks and is never described…Lazarus seems to be a “nobody”, except to his sisters and Jesus, who love him deeply.’
Jesus raises Lazarus the way that the Father will raise Jesus. Lazarus was in a tomb, dead. Jesus was in a tomb too. The stone needs to be moved from Lazarus’ tomb. The stone is mysteriously rolled away from Jesus’ tomb. No one believes Lazarus can come back to life. No one believes Jesus will either, even though he told his disciples over and over again. After the resurrection, Jesus needs to prove – again and again – that he really is alive.
The Gospel of John, in a tragic twist, connects Lazarus’ death and Jesus’ crucifixion with a dangerous premonition: what Jesus does for Lazarus attracts so much attention that the local religious leaders respond not by celebrating who Jesus is and what he can do, but by figuring out how they’re going to kill him. His outrageous love, evidently stronger than death, is too dangerous for those with religious and political authority. Clinging to their power, they react with violence and the desire not for abundant life, but for cruel death.
We are not separate from each other. We are interwoven into the sacred heart of Jesus, inseparable from the love of God that gives us our salvation and our eternal life. The mutual embrace of the living and the dead, whether they are famous saints, dear friends and family, or people whose lives and names are known to few or only to God, is the mutual embrace of prayer. As Austin Farrer wrote, ‘every soul that has passed out of this visible world, as well as every soul remaining within it, is caught and held in the unwavering beam of divine care.’ The unwavering beam of divine care is what proceeds from Jesus to Lazarus, who transforms from the stench and decay of a corpse to the radiant promise of new life.
When we pray for the departed, we pray for their resurrection and our own, and that ‘they may rest in peace, and that light perpetual may shine upon them’. When we pray, we share in the heart of God’s love for them, and reflect God’s love for us in our longing for the peace and rest of those who we love and see no longer. To be Christian is to be together. The living, the dead, God, humans, the planet in its daily graceful rotation around the sun. We are all one body, together with the saints. We claim this is true every time we join with all the saints and the ‘whole company of heaven’ in the Eucharistic prayer. Listen for it later in the service and pay particular attention to what this prayer may mean for you today.
This morning Isaiah tells us that God will ‘swallow up death’ and wipe away our tears. Revelation expands on this powerful image: a new heaven and a new earth, God’s gift to his people, is a place where there will be no more death, no more suffering, no more pain.
In the resurrection, we are welcomed into God’s own home, not as guests, but as friends and as true family with all the saints. As we look forward to Advent, we prepare room for God to be born in us. This preparation takes time, is marked by patience, repentance, and chances to make a fresh start. As we pray to and pray with God’s holy saints, bathed in light, we can grow closer to Christ’s humanity and his divinity, and to God’s desire to dwell with us. To be with us. To give us a new way to love and a new way to live. And to wipe away every tear from our faces with the tenderness of an adoring mother, cradling her beautiful child. Amen.