We’re all used to hearing stories of violence between Israelis and Palestinians…

to the point that…

I think…

it no longer registers.

So we may not appreciate the fact that…

over the past year… 

there has been a significant escalation.…

with almost nightly raids on the West Bank by the Israeli military…

and retaliatory attacks by Palestinians…

provoking a vicious cycle of reprisals.

The situation is apparently the worst that it has been for almost two decades.

In January, a young Palestinian killed seven Israelis outside a synagogue on Holocaust Memorial Day…

seemingly in retaliation for an Israeli raid that killed ten Palestinian militants.

Last month, in one single raid, Israeli soldiers killed eleven Palestinians…

including four civilians…

and left more than one hundred wounded.

Last year, more than one hundred and fifty Palestinians were killed in the West Bank…

including more than thirty children.

One of those was a sixteen-year-old girl… 

who was shot four times in the head and upper body by an Israeli sniper…

while she played with her cat on the roof of her house.

Initially, the military claimed that it was “accidental”…

but later tried to argue that she was acting as a lookout for local militia.

Her grief-stricken father vehemently denied those claims.

He’s now fearful for the future of his son…

wondering whether the army will come and kill him too.

The United Nations has condemned the Israeli military’s use of excessive force…

and the rampant violence by settlers against Palestinians.

But with a new hard-right Israeli government—

which is promising to arm thousands more of its citizens—

the tragic loss of life…

and the hatred that it fuels… 

is only going to get worse.

 

Death, loss, grief—

they’re very powerful experiences…

even when they don’t involve such senseless violence…

and ingrained hostilities.

Death, loss, grief—

at some point, all of us have experienced it:

the stunned disbelief… 

or even the refusal to believe that it has happened…

still expecting a loved one to walk through the door…

as he or she has done, hundreds of times before;

the unreality of it all… 

feeling like you’re caught up in a bad dream;

the tumultuous, conflicting emotions—

not just stunned disbelief…

but also sadness…

emptiness…

loneliness…

anger…

guilt and regret…

and probably a few others thrown in for good measure;

the need for answers;

or the need to find someone to blame, someone to hold responsible…

whether it’s me, personally—

“if only I had known… 

if only I had done…”—

or medical professionals…

or even God;

perhaps especially God.

Death, loss, grief—

they’re very powerful experiences…

something that we all go through at some point in our lives…

and something to which we respond in a variety of ways.

 

We see some of that reflected in this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel—

in the story of the raising of Lazarus.

And, as with the other stories that we have seen from John’s Gospel recently…

it’s not meant to be treated as real or historical.

Rather, it’s symbolic.

It’s meant to teach us something about ourselves… 

and about God.

And the characters that we meet in it are meant to be typical or representative…

characters with whom we’re meant to identify…

characters in whom we see ourselves and our experience.

And, in that regard, this story is no exception.

Here—

in the characters of Martha and Mary—

we’re invited to see our own experiences of death, loss, and grief:

whether it be the seemingly Stoic reaction of Martha— 

the strong one in the family, who holds everyone and everything together;

or the raw and visible emotions of Mary;

and the need to attribute blame—

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”;

or, as so often happens with grieving relatives…

the need to cling to hope…

the need to believe that their loved one, who has died, is okay…

and that, one day, they will all be reunited—

“I know that he will rise again in the resurrection of the last day”.

Here, Martha and Mary are us—

all of us—

in every experience we have of the aching pain of death, loss, and grief.

This is our story.

 

And note how Jesus responds to their grief.

When Jesus saw Mary weeping, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”.

And then, the shortest verse in the whole Bible…

“Jesus wept”.

Jesus—

symbolically and sacramentally God with us, God as one of us—

is deeply moved by human suffering.

Jesus—

symbolically and sacramentally God among us—

weeps.

So, the first striking thing that we see in this story… 

is the assertion that God isn’t distant or aloof;

that God isn’t uncaring.

Rather…

God suffers with us.

God feels our losses…

and God weeps with us.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote—

if you excuse the non-inclusive language—

“Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world…

the Bible however directs him to the powerlessness and suffering of God; 

only a suffering God can help”.

Jesus doesn’t come when first summoned.

He doesn’t miraculously intervene to save Lazarus or to spare his loved ones. 

God doesn’t prevent our pain.

God doesn’t save us from the death, the loss, the grief.

Rather, God stands alongside us in our experience of emptiness. 

God empathises with our pain.

God weeps when we weep. 

God aches when we ache.

We are not alone.

 

But the author also says more than that.

Note how Jesus responds to Martha…

“Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die”.

In these words, the author is inviting us to see beyond our present human experience…

and to see beyond our physical and mortal limitations.

He’s inviting us to participate in God’s life—

here and now.

He’s not offering up some pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die sentimentality—

a patronising reassurance that everything will be okay in the end…

when, somehow, we will all be happy and reunited forever.

Rather, he’s challenging us to trust in God as the ground of being and the source of all life—

now.

He’s encouraging us to believe that God can bring life— 

into the most profound situations of despair and death that we experience—

now.

Through this symbolic story, the author is inviting us to believe—

to take hold of the promise—

that, through Jesus Christ, we can experience God’s life-giving power…

even now.

 

So, in the end… 

we’re also invited to see ourselves in the other main character of the story—

namely, Lazarus.

We’re invited to consider the things that keep us entombed…

the things that bind us…

the things that stop us from being free;
the ways in which we have been symbolically dwelling in death;

the ways in which we have allowed past hurts and failures…

painful experiences—

including our experiences of death, grief, and loss—

how we have allowed them to prevent us from truly living;

and then we’re invited to hear Jesus’ voice calling out to us:

“Come out!”