FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

All Saints Sunday - B - November 4, 2012  John 11: 32-44
(Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21: 1-6a)   

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

10/29/12 

The Feast of All Saints interrupts the flow of the lectionary -- at least in the Anglican way of doing things. The readings appointed for the feast day usually 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. Its 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.

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 do 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.

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 for 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 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.