“Take Away the Stone”

“So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’” (John 11.38)

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You don’t have to be dead to be in a tomb. While we think of a tomb as a place for the dead, many people who are still alive find themselves in a tomb. The person buried under a mountain of debt knows what a tomb feels like. The single mom who works two jobs to keep food on the table for her three small children wakes up every morning in the darkness of a tomb. The ninety-year-old woman who has no family and whom nobody even remembers if she is still alive sits in her room alone, staring at the emptiness around her, and she asks herself if these four walls are all that different from the tomb that awaits her.

A tomb is any place where life has been sucked out, where darkness has replaced any chance of light, and where despair has become the only feeling left. And while you might still walk on two legs in that tomb, every step is work, and while you might still breathe air through your nose in that tomb, every breath is labored. People with dead spirits are buried in tombs just as often as people with dead bodies are.

On this Fifth Sunday of Lent, the Scriptures have a tomb at the center of the story that is told to us. And, as with every other tomb, this tomb is a sad place, a place where hopes are buried, a place where tears are shed, a place where tomorrow has died. A young man named Lazarus lays in this tomb, while his two sisters, Martha and Mary, broken-hearted and grief-stricken, sit at home asking themselves why life is so brutal, so difficult, why so unforgiving. 

The sisters wait in the silence of their parlor, a painful quiet in this place where a week before had been the sweet sound of their brother’s robust voice, and while their eyes stare into space, their minds are flooded with memories of Lazarus, the younger brother who as a boy made friends with mischief as easily as he did with his neighborhood buddies, the young man who over the years grew strong and fearless, so protective of his sisters, and then the last days as he sweated and suffered through the agonies of dying, his heart too strong to let go, his eyes filled with pain as he saw the end coming.

 They sent word several days before to his friend, the Galilean Teacher, telling him, “The one you love is ill,” a message of urgency and of need, as we all do in dire circumstances, when the task is too great for one set of hands and the burden too heavy for one back to carry. But he is too late, and now the body of Lazarus rests in the dark and dampness of his tomb, a cave in the side of a rocky hill, the opening sealed with a stone too heavy for thieves or thugs to move.

 All of a sudden, someone rushes into the house with the word that the Teacher has arrived. The sisters meet him on the pathway, wiping away tears from their eyes with their hands, their voices breaking as they say to Yeshua bar Yossef, their brother’s closest friend, “If you had been here, our brother would not have died.” Seeing the tears flow down their faces and their hearts break before his eyes, he “became perturbed and deeply troubled,” moved to his depths by their loss and his loss.

And Jesus wept. It is the shortest verse in all of Scripture, but it is also the most human verse, saying in the fewest words what it means to be human in a world where promises are broken, where sickness strikes, and where death robs your spirit before it takes your body. The Galilean Teacher stands before the sisters, sharing in their grief and their loss, so many tears flowing down his cheeks that those standing nearby say, “See how much he loved him.” With grief this deep, no words can be found, and so tears must speak for the heart that is broken.

Some moments pass and the Teacher asks to be taken to the tomb, “a cave,” we are told, “with a stone laid across it.” There he stands, “perturbed” the Scripture says, which, if it’s anything like we feel in those circumstances of helplessness and hopelessness, means his distress is so great his hands are shaking and his feet are unsteady.

And like we do as we stand before a tomb, he prays, because there isn’t a thing left that a person can do except pray, wanting someone greater than us to make right all that has gone wrong, begging someone stronger than us to share some strength so we can stay on our two feet, asking someone who is smarter than us to show us how to make sense of the senseless.

He prays, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me,” a prayer with a level of trust most of us can’t muster, unsure as we are that our prayers are heard, assuming many times they are not, nothing seeming to change after we have prayed them. There is a pause in his prayer, as he draws the last words from deep within his soul, and he cries out in a loud voice, with a conviction so strong you would think it could shatter the stone in front of him, “Lazarus, come out!”

And it is that prayer, shouted in pain from the pit of a wounded spirit, that reaches to the high heavens, breaking the barrier between the impossible and the possible, heard by the One who has power even over death, moving him to bend down into the barrenness of that burial place, breathing new life where there had been nothing but stale death, doing as he had done on the first day of creation, doing as he does every day, making all things new. God entered the godforsaken.

Suddenly, miraculously, incredibly, Lazarus again stands in front of his friend, a friend who would not take impossible for an answer, who summoned all the powers of heaven to lend a hand, and who showed in that definitive moment on which side the God of Love always stands. “Untie him and let him go,” Yeshua says to those nearest to Lazarus, those few words a vindication, a validation, a victory. 

Scholars tell us that the raising of Lazarus is a preamble to the raising of the Christ on Easter, which is a promise of our own resurrection from the dead, when the chains of death are broken and our own bodies walk out of the tomb, death finally put to death. This is the Easter message. This is the Christian hope. This is the last prayer we will ever pray from our parched lips, that we also will be untied from death and let go to live again.

Yet, there is more, because with the God of life there always is more, and that more is his relentless infusing of life into every tomb, every circumstance that tries to snuff out our spirit before our bodies are dead, righting the wrongs in our world that wrap around us like burial cloths.

Yes, the divine spirit from which all life comes wants to rescue us from the darkness outside us and from the dread inside us, refusing to let us lose hope even in the most hopeless of times, when the will to live is at its lowest and when the thread of hope is at its thinnest. 

“Lazarus, come out!” When we find ourselves in one of the hundred and more tombs that try to bury us alive in this world, whether it is the tomb of fear, or the tomb of heartbreak, or the tomb of despair, we must listen closely for those words of life that can and will penetrate even the thickest walls or the greatest stones, urging us to breathe, to believe, and to break free. Listen for those words and you also will rise from the tomb.

–Jeremy Myers