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Friends,
today's Gospel speaks of Jesus' conquest of death in the raising of
Lazarus. What if death is not at all what God intended. Mind you, I mean
death as we experience it—as something fearful, horrible, terrifying.
This comes from having turned from God. Jesus came primarily as a
warrior whose final enemy is death. It is easy to domesticate Jesus,
presenting him as a kindly moral teacher. But that is not how the
Gospels present him. He is a cosmic warrior who has come to do battle
with those forces that keep us from being fully alive.
Throughout
the Gospels, Jesus is dealing with the effects of death and a
death-obsessed culture: violence, hatred, egotism, exclusion, false
religion, phony community. But the final enemy he must face down is
death itself. Like Frodo going into Mordor, he has to go into death's
domain, get into close quarters with it, and take it on.
Coming
to Lazarus' tomb, Jesus feels the deepest emotions and begins to weep.
This is God entering into the darkness, confusion, and agony of the
death of sinners. He doesn't blithely stand above our situation, but
rather takes it on and feels it at its deepest level.
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