Dry Bones, Open Graves, and the One Thing Necessary

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday in Lent, March 26, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

The lectionary is picking up speed as we hurtle toward Holy Week, into the mystery of Christ’s passion. Walking through the desert on our Lenten journey out in the wilds and wastelands, we have come to the valley full of bones. Very many bones and very dry bones: a dinosaur hunter’s treasure trove, an ominous place, the valley overshadowed by death, the place of the skull. Death and dying, on every side. “Mortal, can these bones live?” Whose bones are these? We know instinctively that they are ours. Dusty, dry, no-marrow-left bones, buzzard food picked clean. Like Ezekiel’s people we say, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are cut off completely.” Dried up in broken relationships and social division and oppression, hope lost in the endless forms of suffering we see around us and experience, mental illness,  addiction, crushing poverty, climate devastation, in every twist of shame and blame that two-edged sword cutting both ways, in judgment of self and condemnation of others. We are, we fear, already perished in the wilderness.

“Mortal, can these bones live?” Ezekiel’s prophetic trust, openness to possibility holds back from pronouncing the time of death just yet. “Can these bones live?” “O Lord God, you know.” He prophesies to the bones and he prophesies to the breath and with a great skeletal rattling the dry, dry bones come forth: bone to its bone with sinews and flesh and skin and the breath of God comes from the four winds to breathe upon the slain that they may live, and they do live and stand on their feet, the whole vast multitude. 

“I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people.” God wants us to live. God created us for life and called us forth out of the dirt in the first place, breathed God’s spirit into us so that we would live. And here now when, as the burial office puts it, “in the midst of life we are in death” God still wants us to live, God will not, even cannot abandon us to the grave but calls us forth, stands us up, puts our bones back together and breathes our spirit back into us. Remember snowy Ash Wednesday, kneeling at the altar rail to hear the honest naming of our finitude, our suffering, our need. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Dry, dry bones. And yet that’s not the final word, in that liturgy or out in our wilderness wanderings. “The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in eternal life”—that’s the liturgical bookend. You are dust, to dust you shall return, and, and you will be kept in eternal life. “Whoever eat the bread that I give them will never die,” says our Lord, who calls himself bread and life, and gives us his own flesh to feed us.

Jesus gives himself for us and to us, as he gave himself to Mary and Martha and Lazarus. He comes to the places of our grief and loss and pain and death. He’s moved by our pain, greatly disturbed in spirit. In his guts, is a more accurate rendering of that word. Genuinely moved, not merely an impassible puppet’s mockup of empathy but genuinely, Jesus, God incarnate, weeping with us. See how he loves us!
The raising of Lazarus is an auspicious sign in Jesus’s ministry. It wins him surprisingly few friends to have called a dead man back to life. Thomas, the twin to all our own doubts, calls the other disciples to follow him back to Jerusalem in loyalty and solidarity—“Let us also go, that we may die with him.” There are already intimations that Jesus will face death, must face death for our sake. Mary of Bethany is identified in this passage as the one who anointed Jesus with sweet-smelling perfume and wipes his feet with her hair in anticipation of his death and burial. That encounter actually happens in the next chapter in John, but it frames today’s story. We hear about Lazarus having first been pre-emptively reminded of this image of Mary pouring out all that she is, all that she has, everything that is precious to her, at the foot of Jesus, perfume filling the whole house. That’s where it all happens for Mary, kneeling at Jesus’s feet. The one safe place in all the world. That’s water from the rock, sight to the blind, a Way made out of no way. Kneeling at Jesus’s feet in surrendered self-offering, Mary pays attention to the one thing necessary, as is her practice, her habit of being, practiced and inhabited until it soaks through her entirely, and she can’t help but receive Jesus’s gift of continual self-offering in return.

So after Lazarus her brother has died of an unexpected illness, when Jesus shows up in Bethany, four days late, faithful Martha comes to tell her sister, “He is here and he is calling for you.” He is seeking her out. Mary runs out to meet Jesus and—where else—falls at his feet. In all her grief, in her disarray, her tears, she brings everything she is in that moment to Jesus. And he meets her in her weeping and Jesus beings to weep, too. Shortest verse in the Bible packs a punch. These are no crocodile tears. He feels it in his gut. God is not removed or aloof or staying out of the muck of our humanity, our need and grief and pain. God incarnate, God with skin on, God with breath and flesh and sinews and bones, spares nothing to be with us, and so Jesus weeps with Mary and all the Jews with her weeping, and he weeps with us, too. Every dead place, every tomb, every grave, every fearful valley of bones where we dread to go, Jesus will go there with us. “Where have you laid him,” he asks, and Mary answers by turning back the invitation Jesus gave to Andrew and the first disciples, the same invitation the Samaritan woman ran to carry to her neighbors—“Come and see.” We’ve heard these words of Jesus over and over these past weeks, passed on others lips, and now in grief and the devastation of death, Mary says them back to Jesus. “Where have you laid him?” “Come and see.” And so, weeping, he follows them to the tomb. 

They’ve laid Lazarus’s body in a cave, and blocked it off with stone. Martha, ever-practical, is concerned about the smell after 4 days! but Jesus trusts in the revelation of the glory of God. “Take away the stone.” The same voice that in the beginning called Lazarus into being calls him forth from the grave now. “Lazarus, come out!” A long rattling breath. Tears still for a moment—and then the mourners are weeping fresh, as the dead man comes out of the cave, out of the tomb, so Jesus can give him to his loved ones. He still wears the evidence of what’s happened to him just as the resurrected Jesus will wear his wounds in glory—and the gathered crowd is invited into the miracle, and brought to participate in healing, in new creation and new life. “Unbind him and let him go,” Jesus says, and so the community unwraps Lazarus’s hands and feet bound in graveclothes and pulls the shroud from over his face. “The glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” “When he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” Lazarus unbound and walking given back to his loved ones foreshadows another tomb left empty, another set of unused burial cloth, and we’ll wade deeper into that mystery together in the coming weeks. 

Then as now the practice is Mary’s. One thing only is necessary. Her surrendered posture is a skeleton key to this whole operation: she kneels at Jesus feet, immersed in the stream of loving kindness that flows continually between the Father and the Son in the Spirit. And she adds her offering to that stream, whatever she has, however she is, just as it is, pouring out sweet fragrance or letting tears and ashes track her cheeks. Offering herself. “Come and see, Lord.” Touch this, heal this.

  “Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act,” says the Lord.”