As If Death Does Not Matter

Three years ago today the unthinkable happened.  As Kathy and I were packed up for our trip to the airport after a perfect visit with my family in Phoenix, my cell phone rang, and we learned that our niece had been killed in a horrible traffic accident. 

In three weeks or so the unthinkable will be remembered in Christian churches across the globe.  The only Son of God, sent to save mankind from our self-destructive path, will be humiliated, tortured, and hung on a cross as a spectacle.  And he will die.

This Sunday’s Gospel, a foreshadowing and harbinger, is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus.  Martha and Mary were upset with Jesus, the great healer, for not coming to save Lazarus from death, failing to show up to heal him.  We know the story.  Jesus raises him from the dead.

Yesterday morning I met with the group of men, husbands and fathers who look at the Gospels for help in playing those roles as we should.  One of them, Rick, a young father with two toddlers, found it interesting that before raising Lazarus from the dead, he asked Martha whether she believed that he was the Son of God.  She said she did, and in the moments between her expression of belief and her brother returning to life, this young father said that Martha had come, in her faith, to realize that it really didn’t matter whether Jesus could do anything about her brother’s death.   Rick considered the possibility that if Martha really believed that in that faith would be acceptance of everything, freedom from distress, even in the face of the death of her brother.

I came home from the meeting thinking how clever these gospels leading up to Easter are, how they give us three weeks to get used to the idea that death is not all it is cracked up to be, so that when Jesus dies, we will look beyond his death, and ultimately beyond our own.  My head could get around that, and I smiled.  

But just now, as I left a message on Mollie’s parents’ phone trying to express inexpressible feelings of condolence, I felt the reality of this in my heart, that the journey to accept death and not blame God is a tough one, perhaps because it is so unthinkable.  Maybe that’s why sitting in the story and becoming Lazarus, or Jesus, or Mary, or Martha might help us get beyond our heads, that grace might find some fragile foothold, someplace in the broken soil of our hearts in which to dig roots of hope and healing, where death doesn't matter.