Mean Time

Mean-Time

Lent 5, Year A. Ezekiel 37.1-14, Romans 8.6-11, John 11.1-45

In the past weeks, life and the absence of life have become a matter of such sharp urgency that they dominate the considerations governing our daily lives, our hourly choices. An entire world economy has been all but suspended, we adopt new language and practice (such as “social distancing”) as normal and necessary, and we begin to understand that this meantime may be longer – and meaner – than we had thought.

It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Ezekiel introduces us to the bonescape in the midst of which the hand of God has set him down. “It was full of bones… and they were very dry.”

It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Paul opens the question of the relationship (or not) between flesh and spirit.

It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that we witness grief, hard words, the promise of life – and the almost ghoulish fulfillment of that promise – that follow the death of Lazarus. “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The death in these tableaux is real and painful. The bones, very dry. The flesh, cut off from what gives life. Jesus, in tears. This death is not something we can skim, like an unpleasant paragraph. We aren’t allowed to close our eyes and ask someone to tell us when it’s over. Not just in these words and the images they evoke, but across the whole reed of scripture, the power of death sounds its relentless note. The binding of Isaac, the death of Absalom, the beheading of cousin John, Jairus’ daughter. Words from the bonescape, reports of dispirited flesh, and the emotional maelstrom that surrounds the death of Lazarus – these are part of a movement across scripture that brings into focus death’s power to undo. These dizzying few weeks of COVID-19 call for  our close attention, not least to the death in our midst and the ancestral witness of scripture to its destructive power.

That destructive power has yet to reach its fullness, either in the progress of the COVID-19 virus or in the dreadful story that will unfold as Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem. It is a story in which all the powers of death rain down on the body of a rabbi whose witness to compassion, love, healing and justice have made him a lightning rod both for hope and for hatred. Women will weep, men will distance themselves. The story will end with the death of Jesus, with the power of death ascendant. Bones for the bonescape. A dying man gives up the spirit and his flesh fails. Community scatters and hides.

Running underneath all this, the aquifer of living water, of another story. This other story is older and newer all at once. It is a story of love both vulnerable and resilient. As that love begins to poke up through the ruins, it unmasks the power of death to separate flesh from spirit, to fill the bonescape, to rule by fear, unmasks this all as a meantime thing.

It has, however, been the meantime for a very long time. Persecutions and crusades, plagues and Inquisitions, empires and colonial arrogance, genocides, apartheids, wars, and environmental violence have been littering the valley floor with bones for a very long time. It takes tenacity to live purposefully in such a meantime. It takes courage to live by a promise that can sometimes seem so distant as to be fanciful. Living in the meantime is a spiritual vocation, hard work. It is not enough to wait passively for the promised future, nor is it true or faithful to deny the mean-ness of the time. I wonder if, by words and acts of love and service, by our witness to spirit and justice, we might become, for the world, a present expression of God’s promise that the time of death’s ascendancy, however long and however mean, is a meantime across which we can journey with hope.