Passion Sunday by Fr Jack

Ezekiel 37.1-14

St Paul’s Letter to the Romans 8.6-11

St John’s Gospel 11.1-45

The music today has been stripped back for Passion Sunday. Likewise, the images are now veiled until the Triduum. Our bellies have been fasting for weeks. Now our senses are fasting too, so that the glories of what is to come can be experienced even more fully.

The solemn plainchant of William Byrd’s Christus Resurgens (today’s Gradual Anthem we heard before the Gospel) soon breaks open, and it’s as if Jesus is dancing a jig as he emerges from the empty tomb. Except today’s resurrection is not Jesus of course, but His friend Lazarus.

In the Eastern part of the Church, our Orthodox brothers and sisters keep the Saturday before Palm Sunday each year as ‘Lazarus Saturday’. Every year, 8 days before, Christ’s Resurrection is foreshadowed in the raising of Lazarus.

St John wants us to see this. Jesus has power over life and death. Today Lazarus retains his grave clothes, he will need them again. He will die again. Jesus, on the other hand, when He rises during the night of Easter, folds up the ‘napkin’ (as the King James Version wonderfully has it) and leaves it in the empty tomb, He will not need it again.

The King James Version also really wants us to notice that Jesus has power over death in today’s account. Lazarus has been dead several days, and, as the text has it, ‘he stinketh’ when the tomb is opened. I love that.

A couple of other things to notice in today’s Gospel before we step back and get a sense of the landscape on this Passion Sunday.

One is friendship. Jesus has gone to be with His friends: the siblings, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. He does this a lot. Jesus makes a priority of time with these friends, coming back to their home several times that we hear about and possibly many more besides. He loves them, and they love Him. Yes as the Lord, but also as His friends.

Sometimes in the history of our Christian family story we have somewhat over-egged the ‘marriage’ pudding, and made it seem as if the only or best way of being a Christian is to live a life like a 1950s American Nuclear Family billboard advertisement. Sometimes we’ve made biological family the only important-seeming relationship. Or we’ve over-egged the celibacy pudding, and the highest way of being a Christian is holy solitude and singleness. But look at Jesus (always a good idea). Jesus lavishes time and love on these friends of His. His affection and at-home-ness with these friends is a beautiful model of Christian life. Just as holy, just as important, just as real, just as God-given and God-blessed: loving, deep friendships. Take that away today.

And there’s more. ‘Jesus wept’. ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς in Greek. Famously, the shortest verse in the KJV of the Bible.

But the sense of the Greek here is not the loud lamentation of grief, as one would expect in Jesus’ culture, and is used elsewhere in Scripture at sad moments. After all, Jesus is about to raise Lazarus. This grief of the Lord, some commentaries suggest, is His grief at the power of death, the rule of satan over humanity; and the failure of those around Him to understand what Jesus has come to do. He weeps at the darkness of this present age, and He comes to bring the light; and in Lazarus we see a first shining beam of that light.

Now let’s step back and see all this coming together on this Passion Sunday. The Prophet Ezekiel six centuries before Christ has already given us ‘dem bones, dem bones’ (as some of us may have sung as children), which is also a prefiguring of God’s resurrection power. And not only God’s power over life and death, because perhaps that’s obvious: God is God. But God’s disposition, God’s character and desire. God befriends, as we’ve said, as today’s Gospel shows us. God also brings life and blessing: resurrection, wherever death has held sway. Jesus weeps and then resurrects. In the deserts and dead places of our life and world, God’s character is to bring streams of life-giving water. That is just the kind of God, God is.

St Paul is saying something similar in his letter to the Romans today. Flesh decays. If all your sense of self, your identity and hopes and all that you hold to in this life, is of this body, of the here and now, then you are investing in what is already doomed. Because all of it will end up as dry and dead as Ezekiel’s valley. But if we look to Jesus, if we see the world, us, life and everything with His eyes, then our vision (being of the Spirit, St Paul says) is clearer. Then our flesh will decay (and we are allowed to be sad about that, just as Jesus weeps today), but whilst honest and sad, it is no longer our everything. Money, status, autonomy, power, health, looks… life itself. All will come and go. And the flesh will die in lots of metaphorical ways, and in the obvious straightforward one.

But if, in the meantime, we have become friends of Jesus and are growing in the Spirit, then it will be different for us. Then we see that there are worse things than death.

This sense comes through very strongly in today’s hymnody. Those magnificent words of Bianco da Siena ‘Come down o Love divine’ we sang in place of a psalm today. ‘Dust and ashes’, yes, but the ‘yearning strong’ that far outpaces ‘human telling’, the grace and life of the Spirit, an ‘illuming’ not subject to the rule of death.

And Charles Wesley’s words with which we began the Parish Eucharist today. The sense of personal faith, personal conversion of life, a real friendship with Jesus, is so strong. In a couple of months time we will mark 24th May with our friends at Wesley’s Chapel. The day John Wesley (Charles’ brother), as he wrote in his diary, felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’. This moment is sort of the birth of Methodism, a moment of radical personal conversion for John. It happened in our parish, just under the old Museum of London on this corner of the Barbican.

John Wesley wrote in his diary:

‘In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society [a sort of prayer meeting] in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’

What John doesn’t tell us is that Charles had had a moment of similar enlivening conversion a few days before. As we sing today: ’O love divine, what hast thou done! …My Lord, my Love is crucified’. John and Charles’ grandfather was vicar here at St Giles’. They sat in these pews, and used the same Book of Common Prayer we do today, and they want us to know, they long for you and me to know that we have been bought with Jesus’ blood. And my, ‘even mine’, yours, even your life has been saved from the law of sin and death by what Jesus has done, will do in a few days time this Passiontide, the great mysteries that we are being invited to live again. ‘A thing’, indeed, ‘most wonderful’.