Portsmouth Cathedral

Passion Sunday 26.03.2023

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

Ezekiel 37. 1-14

John 11. 1-45

 The readings for this Passion Sunday are rather like a trailer for where we’ll be spiritually and liturgically in two weeks. We get a foretaste of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Day as scripture gives us two readings on life and death – two very strange readings!

 First, from Ezekiel. The valley of dry bones. We hear of dead bones, dry bones, and rattling bones, bones connecting to bones – you’ll remember ‘the hip bone connecting to the thigh bone’ - and being covered with sinew and then brought to life by the wind – the word for wind means the same as ‘breath’ or ‘Spirit’. And then there’s our Gospel. The story of the death of Lazarus, the grief of his sisters, Jesus’s strange delay in going to them, and then, at the end, the dead man walking alive out of his tomb.

 It is a very old and ancient Christian perception to see Christ’s death and resurrection as a whole; as though they are intertwined, struggling with one another. And this makes sense in our experience where there is no life without death and no death without life. In the Christian faith the cross is like a key to both death and life.

 The cross is etched into our foreheads at baptism and retraced on Ash Wednesday and celebrated on Good Friday.

 Again and again we realise that though we experience death and life as opposites, in reality they belong together.

 I don’t think any of us really want to live for ever though there are moments when we might think we would like to. Perhaps you remember a moment of perfection, a sight or an experience which you just wanted to go on and on. But it never does. And that is because we live in time and time moves on, we can never stop it. Gradually we become aware that there’s not much point in living for ever if it means an endless extension of time in which our joints ache more and more more, our memories get worse and our chance of annoying all our relations increases. Life without death is meaningless and yet so is death without life.

 The reading from Ezekiel is about the death of a nation, the end of a culture, of memories, of a whole people reduced to dead bones by their exile from their own land. And the story of Lazarus, closer to home, is the story of heart-rending personal loss. Lazarus is dead. He will never come back. We will never be able to talk to him again, never hear his footsteps, never hear the maddening little tune he whistles under his breath.

 Ezekiel confronts us with a kind of social grief, a loss of identity. The whole people of Israel have reached a point where they no longer matter to anyone, even to themselves: ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’. Think, today, of those peoples and nations and communities with shared memories and powerful traditions, who find themselves cut off, without hope, no longer counting for anything or mattering to anyone. In my BBC days I remember making a film in the North East about the end of whole communities as the coal industry was decimated, and shipbuilding and steel. Others might feel the same about the Church, that somehow their day has passed and the things which now preoccupy the Church do not speak to them of God: ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost’.

 It is easy at such a point to lose faith, to look at the devastation of a dream or a way of being Christian and to wonder whether it can ever live again; whether it should ever live again. Whether God cares, about the values, the memories, the music and the rituals that once conveyed a whole way of life. The prophet is told by God to prophesy to the bones; to talk to the dead as if they were alive, and then to call upon the wind, the breath, the Spirit, to enter them again. The prophet is called on to do more than reverse the process of death, he is to make its creation happen again. So the bones stand up with their muscle and skin, ‘…and the breath came into them and they lived, a great multitude.’

 That’s the vision, the hope. But even as we hear it we know that not all dying cultures will live again, not all who have lost their homelands will enter them again, not all who have lost patterns of prayer and worship will stand up as a great multitude.

 What is promised here is not an extension of life as it is. What is promised is that God’s Word does not lose its power. God calls into his people into new life, but it always is new life, not simply the old continued. That great rattling and banging of bone coming to bone and the wind coming with breath is noisy, strange and unexpected, as messy, and perhaps as painful, as birth. The new life that God promises is not the old revived, it is something entirely new. A wise Methodist pastor once wrote of the work of God, ‘God does not use the same mould twice’. In making and remaking humanity there is always creativity, always surprise.

 And it is with that in mind that we turn to Lazarus. Here is the death in the family that everyone dreads, the rending apart that makes us cry out, ‘Why, God, why?’ Jesus does not say why, he never explains anything in this story; he simply asks for faith from Mary and Martha as he wrestles with his own grief. The raising of Lazarus is meant to point us to the resurrection that lies ahead for Jesus; the resurrection in which Lazarus and we ourselves and all our loves are finally included.

 But as for Lazarus himself, he is not resurrected here, but resuscitated. We assume he goes back to his old life, but also that he will have to die again. Yet Jesus gives him back to Mary and Martha and to us, as a sign, pointing to that final resurrection in which there is no reversal, because all are made alive.

 These readings chosen for the start of Passiontide invite us to realise that the cross and resurrection are not just things that happen to Jesus, but things that happen to us in our everyday living and dying. The cross is etched into us, as it was at our baptism.

 This is a time to calls to mind before God our fears and hopes, both for our whole community and for our deeply personal and private lives. And then to centre our hopes and fears on Jesus. May these dry bones live. Lazarus, come out. The Canon Precentor, who is a medievalist, told me that scholars used to suggest that Jesus called Lazarus by name because if he hadn’t, all of the dead would have come out of their graves and that might have been a problem. Let us spiritually stretch ourselves this Passiontide to recognise the cross in our lives day by day and to share our grief and sorrow  with Jesus. But also to accept, by faith, that the cross is a key that unlocks something new, something we have no right to,  and no natural reason to expect, except by the promises of Jesus.

 Each of us has our cross to bear. And our cross points beyond itself, beyond futility, beyond despair, beyond the grave and gate of death. Look at the inscription around our baptismal font, words from the 4th century Bishop of Jerusalem, Cyril, who describes the font as both a tomb and a womb. A place of death and a place of birth.

 This is why the ancient refrain rings us into this season: ‘We glory in your cross, O Lord, and praise your holy resurrection, for by thy holy cross, joy has come into the world’.