Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-53

Fifth Sunday in Lent | March 26, 2023 | Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:1-53 | Paula Murray |

The forty-day season of the Church year that is Lent is variously described as a Christian boot camp, a journey with Jesus to the cross, and a time of deepening commitment to our Lord.  However we describe it, Lent is a time of preparation; we are preparing for Jesus’ passion, crucifixion, and ultimately, His resurrection.  It is penitential in tone, hence the purple vestments on the altar and the ambo, as we are much aware of those sins of ours which led to Christ’s willing sacrifice of His sinless and holy life for our salvation.  We come to the last of the Sundays in Lent this day.  We are not quite done with Lent itself; Palm Sunday is also a Sunday in Lent.  We are done with Lent on Maundy Thursday because every Sunday is considered a festival of the resurrection of Christ, so Sundays are not penitential in nature but are always celebratory.  Consequently, the forty days of Lent do not count the Sundays that occur during the season.  They are in Lent but not of Lent.  We see a similar pattern with the Sundays in Advent, although Advent has largely lost its once penitential character.  Does that matter to you?  I assume, maybe wrongly, that it does not.  I assume you are thinking something like, “in”, “of”, or even “after”, what the heck difference does it make, anyway?

Well, actually, it matters at least a bit, because during the first half of the Church year we are following the life of Christ, from His birth to His ascension, and the second half we are learning what it means to follow Him after His ascension, after the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to be the advocate and aid for all baptized believers.  This second half of the year is referred to as the non-festival season because we do not observe the two major festivals of Easter and Christmas then, and while that is true, still, we enjoy an absolute feast of biblical readings those Sundays after Pentecost that speak to us about living lives that are made extraordinary by the life giving and life renewing breath of the Holy Spirit.  On this fifth Sunday in Lent, we get a pre-Pentecostal foretaste of that Spirit graced life in the readings of the day.  So, maybe that in, of, and after stuff matters rather more than we previously thought, for what could mean more to us than knowing that God’s Holy Spirit guides our days, protects us over the course of our nights, and breathes new life into us when we take our last breaths?

Oddly, neither the Old Testament reading from the prophet Ezekiel nor the reading from the Gospel of John seem, at first, anyway, about new life or renewed life, as we may prefer to think of it.  For almost all of the very lengthy passage from the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John we hear of the coming death of Lazarus, the death of Lazarus, and people’s grief over the death of Lazarus.  Oh, and there is the disciples’ confusion as to whether Lazarus is sleeping or dying.  We do not get to the actual resurrection of Lazarus until we come nearly to the end of the reading.  The Prophet’s words, with which we begin the morning’s readings, are similarly mournful, and bring us to a dry valley filled with yet drier old bones.  This is a vision from God, so while Ezekiel does not stand in that valley he yet sees it.  There are many thousands of these old, desiccated bones; they fill the valley.  But worst, they are unburied, their bodies left to rot where they fell, an enormous transgression against faith and a stain on human decency.  These bones are likely the remnants of soldiers, perhaps those of Israel, who lost a great battle against foreign oppressors, a loss so great there was no one left living with the strength or the means to bury the fallen.  Given this is the prophet Ezekiel’s book, the oppressor was the empire of Babylon, and as the victor of the war fought with Israel, forcibly ripped many Israelites out of their land and sent them to Babylon to live in exile.  From about 586 BC to 515 BC or so, the exiled Israelites mourned the loss of their land, their temple, their families, and sought to make sense of this great catastrophe that had befallen them.  Where was God, when the Babylonians attacked His holy city of Jerusalem?

He was where He had told Israel He would be through His prophet Ezekiel.  If Israel had listened to Ezekiel early in his prophetic career they would have known why God had withdrawn His favor and they fought their much larger and much better equipped enemy on their own.  Ezekiel spent his early years warning Israel that their faithlessness to the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would lead to their ruination.  Let us hear the prophet himself for ourselves.  “The Word of the Lord came to me,” said the prophet, a word recorded in the sixth chapter of Ezekiel.  “Son of man, set your face toward the mountains of Israel and prophesy against them, and say, You mountains of Israel, hear the Word of the Lord God!   The word of the Lord came to me: ² “Son of man, set your face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them, ³ and say, You mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God! Thus says the Lord God to the mountains and the hills, to the ravines and the valleys: Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places. ⁴ Your altars shall become desolate, and your incense altars shall be broken, and I will cast down your slain before your idols. ⁵ And I will lay the dead bodies of the people of Israel before their idols, and I will scatter your bones around your altars. ⁶ Wherever you dwell, the cities shall be waste and the high places ruined, so that your altars will be waste and ruined, your idols broken and destroyed, your incense altars cut down, and your works wiped out. ⁷ And the slain shall fall in your midst, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”  This is no pretty prophecy promising a blessed assurance, but rather a blunt warning of the consequences of willful idolatry and sin.

A point which exiled Israel finally came to understand after some seventy years of prayerful reflection on God’s Word and His steadfast faithfulness to a people more often compared by the prophets to faithless wives than loyal partners.  This is where we see a turn in God’s response to Israel; earlier God warned Israel of the consequences of their faithlessness and sin, but now, now that the people of Israel are broken-hearted and contrite about their sinful ways, God promises new life and a renewed joy.  This is where this morning’s reading comes in, at the 37^th chapter of Ezekiel’s book, where poor old Ezekiel stands above the valley of long dead bones and God says to him, “Prophesy to the bones.”  And the prophet said, “Right.”  No, really, God insists, prophesy to those ghastly remnants of long dead people as if they were still enfleshed with ears that can hear.  And Ezekiel complies with this odd request, for surely God is the answer to His own question, “Can these bones live” as the Almighty can, indeed, remake what He had before created, even if it is old and dead. So broken skeletons reassembled themselves, and sinew and then muscle and skin suddenly enfleshed them.  But it was not until Ezekiel prophesied to the breath, and the breath of the Lord, the Holy Spirit filled them, that they lived and stood, a great army of once insubordinate soldiers, awaiting the word of their Supreme Commander and God.  The once dead soldiers awaiting new orders are a literary illustration of what God will now do for a now thoroughly chastened Israel.  Through His aged prophet God says to His grieving people, “Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O My people.  And I will bring you into the land of Israel.  And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people.  And I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land.  Then you shall know that I am the Lord, I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the Lord.”

“Lazarus, come out,” said the Incarnate Son of God, and a man four days dead shambled out of his tomb, hindered by his graveclothes. Four days, because the Jews believed the spirit of a man was gone after three.  Four days, so that the corpse within the rocky tomb was well rotted and well on its way to being nothing but a sack of old, dry bones.  Can these bones live?  Yes, indeed they can, for the Savior of Israel and of the creation breathed in him the holy breath of God, nonetheless, some in the crowd attending the mourning sisters and Jesus were so lost to God that they determined at that very moment that Jesus, and Lazarus, must die.  At the moment of Lazarus’ resurrection, they chose to be exiled from God to preserve their power and position, wealth and status, all dependent, they assumed wrongly, on a Roman Empire at peace with Israel.  It is better that one man should die for the nation than that all should die, said the high priest Caiphus, who spoke of the geopolitical reality that he though ruled his day in much the same way the kings of prior to the conflict which led to exile in Babylon had thought.  This reality was no safer than the earlier one; Rome decimated Jerusalem a mere four decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection.  This is a reality which pays lip service to God but which is, practically speaking, atheistic, putting its trust not in God but in the ideas and acts of men. This is an exile of the spirit, one willingly undertaken by those who cannot imagine a God willing to renew His own creation.  But the old high priest was nowhere near as cagy and wise as he thought he was.  He was, in fact, an unwitting prophet, for the death of Jesus Christ did save the many, including all people who see and believe in His crucifixion and resurrection the end of sin and death.

Can these bones live?  Can we be made new?  The question only makes sense in the context of a world created and sustained by the Almighty God, Whose steadfast mercy, grace, and love is poured out for the salvation of all who believe.  It makes no sense at all in a world populated by imperfect and mortal people who have forced their nations into a spiritual exile from God, an exile with terrible consequences for all.  We see the cycle of faithlessness and human disaster repeat itself over and over in the Bible, and we see it repeated over humanity’s history, and we see it repeated now, even in our own time.  We have turned from being a culture that, imperfectly, celebrated God’s loyalty and life-giving love of His people, to a culture that denies the existence of God and feasts on the bones of its children.

Can these bones live?  Yes, but before there can be a spiritual revival in this country or any other there must be a spiritual revival in the Church.  That revival is not about liturgies.  It is not about music.  It is about the renewal of our relationship with Jesus Christ.  We are become dry bones, too close to dead in faith to breathe life into our daily routines much less the world around us.  Our faith is lukewarm and easily shaken; we choose to do things that God tells us are wrong; and we rarely consult Him in prayer when it comes to how we treat others and His Church.  Lent allows us the opportunity to immerse ourselves for a short period of forty days in the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ.  That is all well and good.  But let us make more of Lent and not less.  Let us extend its intensity, its focus on the disciplines of prayer and immersion in God’s Word,  generosity, and yes, even fasting, that we may, with the breath of the Holy Spirit, return ourselves and our churches and our communities to the Lord and our God, Who is loving and merciful, and live.