The Lord who unbinds us

Protective God, who gathers us under your wings like a mother hen gathers her chicks, speak to us under the comfort of your wings today and help to bring peace and order to our troubled minds and hearts in Jesus’ name

Amen

Every year, the Reader’s Digest prints many quite amusing items from the daily lives of ordinary people like you and me. I remember reading about a woman who was driving, and she saw an advertising board which read: Stand up and be counted for the 2011 Census. The sign had been hung at the entrance of a public cemetery. Another reader wrote in with a funny excuse he heard from a colleague in a factory where he worked. The man explained his absence from work by saying: Anyway, I’m having my autopsy [ootopsy], later today, but with any luck I’ll be in tomorrow. I don’t know what kind of medical procedure the man was having, though I suspect it was a biopsy, but few people are able to return to work the day after their autopsy. Perhaps Lazarus came back to work five or six days later, but there is no indication they did an autopsy on his body.

While reflecting on this week’s reading, I couldn’t help but identify with the sense of desperation in both readings. Like the children of Judah or Lazarus’s sisters, we are desperate for a miracle. Lazarus and his sisters were among Jesus’ closest friends. Jesus stayed in their home and ate meals with them whenever he was going to and from Jerusalem. So, when Lazarus fell ill and it became obvious that he was not improving, the sisters sent this urgent message to Jesus: ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ When he heard this, Jesus said: surely this sickness will not end in death; God intends to glorify his son through this sickness.

Maybe this reading poses questions that, like me, you might have wrestled with over time and to which you have been keen to get some answers. For example: What was the nature of such a strong friendship between Jesus and Lazarus’s family? If they were such good friends, how come Lazarus was not among the twelve disciples of Jesus? If they were so close, why then does Jesus linger for two days when he learns that one of his best friends is sick, possibly to the point of death? Would any of us respond in such a manner if the family of our best friend summons us to his bed side? I hope not. A few years ago, when I was told that my best friend Keith had suffered a major heart attack, I cancelled my appointments and rushed to Cambridge to visit him and console the family. Jesus answers this last question, saying that the purpose of Lazarus’s illness was to show God’s glory. We might take his answer one step further to mean that Jesus lingered so that the Spirit could set Lazarus and all people free from death; not just physical death, but more importantly the symbolic death that exists inside each one of us in different ways. Jesus says to one of the sisters: I am the resurrection and the life. Jesus wants Martha, Mary, and all those present as well as you and me, to know that his presence is not so much to raise us from physical death, but to restore hope and free us from all that holds us back from experiencing the fullness of what God intended us to be. I find the words of Jesus at the end of our Gospel passage very powerful; he says: Unbind him and let him go. Jesus removed the shackles, the chains and the shroud of death that held Lazarus in its grip. This allowed Lazarus to experience freedom and renewal that can be yours and mine as well if only we allow the Lord to set us free.

We know very well that God has always been active on behalf of his people in releasing them from the bondage of life on this earth. We remember how God broke the shackles of the suffering children of Israel in Egypt through the ministry of his servant Moses. Later, God sent judges and prophets like Deborah, Esther, Samuel and Isaiah to guide the people to a better life and understanding of his way. Ezekiel, one of the major prophets of the Old Testament Scriptures, wrote to the Hebrews while they were in exile in Babylon. Held in captivity, they were suffering from a physical confinement and isolation from their homeland, (in much the same way as we are suffering exile from our churches), but the psychological imprisonment was probably greater. The people of Judah were desperate, and even found it difficult to worship the Lord, because they thought the Lord had been left in the temple in Jerusalem and the laments of Psalm 137 are clear evidence of this. The people of Judah and Jerusalem in captivity believed that God had abandoned them and that their fate might be like that of their northern neighbours, the kingdom of Israel, which had been overrun by the Assyrians and lost to history 150 years earlier in 722 bc. But Ezekiel, among others, tells the people that God will breathe life into the community once more. In a famous passage in chapter 37, the prophet speaks of God bringing life again to the Hebrews who are seen here metaphorically as a field of dry bones. As the dry bones come together, with sinews and flesh, and the breath of life is given to them, so will God bring life once more to the Hebrews and return them to their land. God will cut through the chains that hold his people captive in Babylon and return them to the land he had promised their forefathers right at the beginning of their walk with him. A new dawn was coming when they would experience abundant blessings and freedom.

God’s promise to rescue the Hebrew people from the land of Babylon and Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead in the Gospel reading demonstrate the faithfulness of God in unleashing us from all that binds us. All of us are prisoners of one institution or another. Many of us are held captive by the pursuit for wealth and all the trappings that riches can buy. We spend an awful lot of time keeping up with the Joneses and the Kardashians and, in the process, we become trapped in a never-ending rat race in the secular world we live in. Some of us are held in bondage and weighed down by ill health or an addiction suffered by a member of our family or friend. Millions are kept chained by poverty in so many third-world countries and they exist from day to day with little hope or none. Still others are chained by some situation which refuses to release them. Sometimes relationships with loved ones, people at work or with our neighbours are strained and we feel there is no way to mend the situation. Today, throughout the world we are held captive by the corona virus, and we are a church in exile. If we choose the easy way out and do nothing, the problem will not be solved, and we will remain prisoners in situations that cry for healing. Some other people may be prisoners of a past they cannot escape and may even falsely believe that no one cares. And there are times when we too make ourselves prisoners by our refusal to forgive others; we justify our anger thinking it will somehow punish the other person, but the truth is: such an attitude only hurts us and keeps us prisoners.

In the context of our chains and our prisons, there will be a certain sense of dying. Lazarus was caught in the trap of physical death and maybe other forms of death that the Gospel writer does not share with us. The children of Judah were victims of the death of despair, hopelessness and isolation. But, as God set them free, so too does he release us from all that chains us through the death of his son on the cross. All we need is to be open to His presence in our lives. And God is active in our world through his Spirit that guides and directs our every action. The walking dead and those held captive are all around us. They are with us in our homes and communities. And today in our virtual Cornerstone Church Jesus says to you and me: unbind them and let them go. Friends, we have been set free by a God who breaks the bonds of sin that hold us captive in this life and in turn he calls us to be bound to Him for ever and ever.

May his spirit unbind us from the coronas of our times.

Amen