V Lent – April 10, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
Mortal, can these bones live?”
God’s haunting question greets Ezekiel, as the prophet casts his eyes over a valley of dry bones.
What Ezekiel sees before him is a battlefield covered with the sun-bleached bones of slain warriors.
It may be the site of the final struggle, when Jerusalem was overrun and the people of Judah were carried off to Babylon.
The bones are a reminder of what it means to be a conquered people living in exile, a people who have nothing left to hold onto but their faith.
It is a bleak picture.
True, it is God who meets the prophet in the midst of the desolation.
God is there.
But it is still a bleak picture—still more evidence of humanity’s failure to value God’s gift of life.
Wherever Ezekiel looks, he sees nothing but ruin, a valley full of bones, “…and they [are] very dry.”
The season of Lent is not only a time when we have an opportunity to give up something we like or have become a little too attached to; it is also a time when we have an opportunity to consider where it is that humanity seems to spend much of its time—amidst the consequences of our sin—staring, in the familiar words of T. S. Eliot, at “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats”.
It is here that God meets us more often than not—in the depths of our despair, in the throes of crisis, in our deepest need.
Much has been said and much has been written about how we Christians would do well to put our trust in God during the good times as well as the bad, but the truth is that human beings are better God-fearers when the going gets rough and they find themselves down and out, and it’s a truth about ourselves we might as well learn to live with.
Often it’s not until we see the evidence—the desolation we ourselves have wrought, the utter mess we can make of our lives—that we are brought to repentance and are ready to hear the saving question: “Mortal, can these bones live?”
It is the voice of God, the God who hears our cry from “out of the depths”, as Psalm 130 that we said together a few moments ago attests.
It is the voice of the God who meets us right where we are, even as we stand and stare at the broken images, in our own valley of dry bones, “where the sun beats”.
It is the voice of the God who seeks to revive our souls by asking us if these bones can live again.
We can hardly improve upon the prophet’s eloquent answer: “O, Lord God, you know.”
It is here at the point of our greatest need that the voice of God calls us up from the depths of our despair: “Prophesy to these bones: hear the word of the Lord: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.”
Just so, in today’s Gospel lesson, it is at the point of their greatest need that Jesus turns to the two sisters, Mary and Martha, and asks them where the body of their brother Lazarus has been laid to rest.
Both Mary and Martha have already expressed their feelings of helplessness and grief in a slightly blurred confession of faith: “Lord, if you had been here, [our] brother would not have died.”
We hear a note of honest and desperate recrimination in these words, the slightest hint that Jesus could have been more prompt in getting there.
But Martha speaks for her sister as well when she goes on to say she knows that whatever Jesus may ask of God, God will grant.
Martha’s confession of faith is hardly blurred here.
No matter that Martha misunderstands Jesus’ statement that her brother will be restored to life as referring to the resurrection on the last day.
In her moment of desolation she is eager to receive the word of hope.
Indeed, it is only at the point of the sisters’ greatest need, when they confess their utter dependence upon God as revealed in Jesus, the Christ of God, that Jesus can say to them, no matter who it is or how long he has been dead: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
For the God who meets us in the midst of our despair, in the valley of dry bones, in the valley of the shadow of death, is the One who brings life.
When all is said and done, Jesus will himself stand in that same valley, under that same shadow; Jesus will himself face down death and rise again in triumph.
Today’s lessons, then, help us fix our eyes on the hope of Easter, without, as a preacher-friend of mine once cautioned his congregation. “rushing it”.
They set us firmly on the road to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, as they recall to our minds the grim reality of humanity’s sinful condition, the condition which leads to death.
But our readings also hold out to us the glorious promise of the God who meets us in the depths of our pain and confusion with the saving question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” and speaks the word of healing: “I will put breath in you, and you shall live.” “…Lazarus, come out!”
“For,” as the apostle Paul puts it, writing to the church in Rome, “the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
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