FINDINGS II
All
Saints Sunday - B - November 1, 2009
John 11: 32-44
(Isaiah
25: 6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21: 1-6a)
 By Harry T. Cook
10/26/09
RUBRIC
The Feast of All Saints when it occurs on a Sunday
interrupts the flow of the lectionary. At least in the Anglican way of doing things,
the readings appointed for the feast day take preference over that particular
Sunday's propers. The Revised Common Lectionary provides three sets of All
Saints' propers, one for each of the years A, B and C.
One stated purpose of All Saints' Day is the celebration of
what the baptismal creed calls "the communion of saints," which we may take to
mean the totality of what humanity has been and done, is being and doing and
what it shall become and accomplish. "The communion of saints" appears in the baptismal
creed as an extension of the Holy Spirit. Historians say the phrase was added
in the late fourth century perhaps to give a clearer explanation of the nature
of the church. It's meaning, though, is somewhat problematic.
One way of interpreting the phrase is how Protestants have
done so since the Confession of Augsburg in 1530 in which the church was
"congregatio sanctorum," or gathering of the saints in the assembly of
believers. An earlier, if not the original intent of the expression is that the
Church Militant has a connection or a "communion" with the Church Triumphant
and particularly with the so-called "holy martyrs" whose blood was said to be
the seed of the church.
A commonality among the living based on shared purpose and
intention may be a decently contemporary way to interpret "the communion of
saints" - ones who take to heart the admonition to treat others as they
themselves wish to be treated and to intend to make that principle operative by
turning the other cheek, walking the second mile, etc.
Such an ethical approach to communion or connection with all
people transcends ideological, cultural, racial and sectarian boundaries along
the lines of Paul's vision of "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female."
The human genome is a telling feature of the "communion"
that obtains, at least hypothetically, among human beings. The astonishing
proposition that any individual is separated by only six degrees from knowing
every other individual suggests that all people are related even as blood is
interchangeable according to type.
WORKSHOP
John's outr� story of the raising of Lazarus may seem an odd
choice for an All Saints' gospel as it is placed in the narrative just prior to
Jesus' final entrance into Jerusalem. Fully nine chapters ago near the
beginning of Jesus' public career (by John's reckoning some three years before)
Jesus is said to have disrupted in a fairly effective way the apparatus of
Temple sacrifice. The synoptic evangelists suggest it was that event that
brought about Jesus' arrest. Obviously for John, that is not the case./* For him it was the "raising of Lazarus."
Why? Perhaps because in the mind of the Fourth Evangelist nothing Jesus has
been depicted as saying or doing to that point was enough to justify his detention,
"trial" and execution.
If this countercultural figure, already trouble for the
religious establishment in its delicate negotiations with the Roman proconsul
and his cohort, could bring a dead person back to life or even perceived as
being able to or actually to have done so, that would be more power than could
be allowed to roam free. It must be contained or done away with.
The Lazarus story stands alone in the gospel canon, though
both Mark (5: 35-43) and Luke (7: 11-17) have similar stories: the former the
raising of Jairus' daughter and the latter the widow's son at Nain - both
reminiscent of the story of Elijah's resuscitation of the widow's son (I Kings
17:17ff). Mark has Jesus say the daughter was "not dead but sleeping" and Luke
already had the widow of Nain's son on his bier, but does not say he was
"dead." John, upping the ante, goes all the way and has Martha say that her
brother has been dead for three days and thus did his corpse "stinketh."
Some commentators take the raising of Lazarus to be an
artifice John created as a prelude to Jesus' own fabled resurrection, his
engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the force of death, or, as Jesus' humble
prayer at 11:41 indicates, the deity he called "Father" working through him to
transform death into life.
It may be that the editors of the RCL thought the Lazarus
story, with its graphic image of the possibility of uniting the living with the
dead in such a way that the dead become for all intents and purposes living, to
be an appropriate gospel for All Saints.
The Isaiah reading, common to the burial office and requiem
eucharist, uses imagery that reminds one of the kind of exultation a family or
a community would experience at such a reunion. The reading from the Revelation
of St. John the Divine extends the promise that "death will be no more" and
that all things are being made anew.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
If I were to be offering the homily at an All Saints liturgy
this year, I would draw on personal experience in my own extended family and
the various separations that have occurred in it caused by death or fissures in
relationships. I would account for the confusion and sadness those separations
brought. I would testify to the similarity in feelings between losing a friend
or loved one to death or to irreconcilable differences. I would reprise family
celebrations of the past when we were happy altogether and altogether happy,
and confess that I did not then appreciate how dear those occasions would
become in memory as one or more of those once gathered at the table were lost
to me.
I would not for one moment take the Lazarus story out of the
categories of myth and metaphor, but I would use it by drawing attention to the
real grief and anger expressed by John's character Martha: "If you had been
here, my brother would not have died" (11:32). We grieve loss and separation
for whatever reason, and we are inclined to blame someone or something. Only
blessed memory can compensate the loss that death exacts, but human
relationships sundered through differences and anger can be repaired and
restored, and when that happens it can feel as if someone had come back from
the dead. Not only they but we, like John's Lazarus, are unbound and set free
from that death-like experience of loss.
A modern parallel to the Lazarus story is the saga of Alfred
Dreyfus, his wrongful conviction on bogus charges of treason, his sentence to
life imprisonment at Devil's Island and his being called out of that tomb by a
mandate for justice. Dreyfus was as good as dead on the far side of the
Atlantic until he wasn't. He was given back to the family both he and they
thought he had left forever. It was not Jesus who was "not there" when Dreyfus
was effectively interred, but justice.
It is said that the Jesus figure variously accounted for in
the Christian tradition died, executed by powers that could not otherwise
contain him. In the years following his death, the partisans of his ethical message
persistently refused to accept the finality of that death by spreading his teachings
of justice and peace far and wide. It is the church's vocation ever to unbind
and set free that message, that it might produce the kind of effect John
imagined Lazarus' exit from his grave would have had on all who knew of it, and
the actual effect Dreyfus' release had on his family.
*Fredriksen, P., From Jesus to Christ (2nd
ed.), 2000, Yale University Press, pp. xx-xxiv
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