Charles Ailes’s Memorial Service
15 July 2023
Masonic Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
The
Anglican Book
of Common Prayer
memorably
begins
its graveside service with the melancholy words uttered
by
the
suffering Job
found
in chapter 14
of
the book bearing his name: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a
short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut
down, like a flower; he fleeth as
it were
a shadow, and never continueth in one stay” (Job 14:1-2).
In
the New Testament, the author of Hebrews, shortly before the fall of
Jerusalem in 70 CE, wrote that “It is appointed for people to die
once, and after that to face judgment” (Heb 9:27, trans. JRM).
Needless
to say,
empiricism bears this transience
out,
acknowledged by everyone from Shakespeare1
to Kansas’s Kerry Livgren, who almost 50 years ago admonished,
“Give up your foolish pride/All that walk the earth have died.”2
We
may not like it, but we can’t avoid the single nastiest fact of
life:
Death is inevitable. It matters not whether one is good or bad,
rich or poor, educated or illiterate. Death
is the Great Equalizer. All of us will eventually
be
caught in its lethal trap.
If
this
is true, and we all know that it is,
it
matters greatly
how we come to terms with death,3
and
how we respond when we inevitably
come
face to face with it.
In
our brief time this afternoon, I would like to draw your attention to
a passage in John’s Gospel that helps
us along these lines. I’m
speaking, of course, of the story of Jesus’ response to the
death, and ultimate
revivification, of his friend Lazarus in John chapter
11. There
we find Jesus to be, not only
the model of how to
respond to death, but also―and
more importantly―the
one who provides the ultimate solution
to the problem posed by death’s inexorability.
The
story is as famous as it is vivid: Lazarus’s
sisters Mary and Martha, because their brother had been taken
seriously ill, send for Jesus to come and, presumably, heal him.
Jesus, at this time staying across the Jordan River in Perea, about a
day’s journey from Bethany, deliberately delays coming for
two days,
stating
that Lazarus’s illness, though seemingly serious, “does not lead
to death,” cryptically adding that his friend’s plight “is for
God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it”
(John 11:4). By the time Jesus and the disciples finally arrive in
Bethany, Lazarus
has been dead for four days, and his sisters are seen
following
the cultural protocol by having mourners (some of whom may have been
of the "professional" kind) aid in their lamentation. The
ever-anxious Martha runs to greet Jesus, wistfully expressing her
faith by immediately saying to him, "Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died" (11:21). Jesus responds by
telling her that Lazarus would indeed rise again (11:23), to which
Martha shows her theological orthodoxy (Pharisee-style)4―with
perhaps a bit of exasperation―by
saying, in effect, "Duh! Of course I know he will be raised on
the last day; but
that
doesn't help Lazarus
or me
now"
(11:24). Martha
then sends for her sister, who proceeds to the tomb, along with her
retinue of
mourners,
to meet Jesus and Martha there. When Mary arrived, she repeated
Martha's sentiments (11:32) and, along with the consoling crowd who
followed her, continued to wail (11:33).
Jesus’
response to
this is
instructive. Most
famously, when he asked where Lazarus’s tomb was, Mary and Martha
gestured for him to “come and see” (John 11:34). At this, the
text says, “Jesus burst
out crying”
(11:35, trans. JRM).5
The
onlookers, correctly,
viewed
Jesus’ response as an expression of his deep
love
for his departed friend (11:36). Death, you see, hurts,
and that is true both for the one experiencing it and
those loved ones watching death
do its work. What
Jesus’ example shows that grief is real,
and that there is no shame in expressing it. Pretending death doesn’t
hurt, whether out of some faux-“spiritual” impulse or simple
repression, is no solution.
Jesus’
response goes beyond this, however.
When
Jesus saw
Mary and her companions
wailing, the
text says, in verse 33, that “he was greatly disturbed in spirit
and deeply moved” (NRSV). Many translations, such as the NIV,
follow the linguist Frederick Danker and
understand the text in the sense of Jesus being “deeply moved”
emotionally as a result of his seeing the mourners’ grief.6
That
goes without saying, of course. However,
I don’t believe this
gets to the heart of the matter. You see, the
first of
the two verbs
used here
by
John7
is
consistently used elsewhere,
not
simply to
speak of
strength of feeling, but rather
to
express anger;
indeed,
it was the
word
used
by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus to refer to the “snorting”
of horses when provoked to rage.8
Clearly,
it would seem, Jesus was moved to inner
indignation
over what, to him, ought not have happened. Now,
what caused
Jesus’
fury
and inner turmoil is not stated in the text, and so scholars
have
made
various suggestions. It
seems to me, however, that it is best to look behind
the mourning which called forth Jesus’ response9
and understand Jesus’ anger to be directed instead
at
what caused
Lazarus’s demise, namely death
itself.
Jesus
was enraged because, seeing the grief expressed by Lazarus’s family
and friends, he sensed death’s
oppression, what
John Calvin called its
“violent tyranny” over humanity.10
Death,
we
learn from Jesus’ example,
is always
worthy
of grief. It is worthy of rage. Death,
in John’s view,
is the defining feature of the kingdom of Satan, whom John’s
Jesus
calls “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Indeed,
the
Bible consistently
portrays
death as an interloper
disrupting God’s good designs for his creation. As
such, death must ultimately
be
defeated.
It must be
destroyed.
It must itself,
as the English poet and preacher John Donne, wrote, die.11
And
this is exactly what was promised in the Book of Daniel, when it
explicitly put forth the prospect of the resurrection of the
righteous to eternal life (Dan 12:2-3). Such
was the hope of Lazarus’s sister, Martha, who
confidently, if with an air of disappointment,
proclaimed her faith that Lazarus would “rise again in the
resurrection on the last day” (John
11:24).
This
ultimate
defeat of death is the point of the Lazarus story. As we know, the
story comes to a climax when Jesus commands
his dead friend to come out of the tomb, and he does so, head wrapped
up,
feet and hands bound (John 11:43-44). Now we
must realize that Lazarus
himself
was
not “resurrected” per
se.
Presumably
Jesus
raised him back
to the same mortal life he had before he died, and
ultimately found his way back to the grave.
But
for
John, Lazarus’s
resuscitation and revivification is intended
to be understood
as the seventh and climactic “sign” in
a series of mighty works designed
to reveal Jesus’ glory and elicit faith in him as the bearer and
bringer of “life.”
This
symbolic
significance is
made clear in Jesus’ conversation with Martha before he raises
Lazarus. After her confession of belief in the (future) resurrection,
Jesus responds: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those
who believe in me, even if they die, will live.
And everyone who lives and believes in me will never, ever, die”
(John 11:25-26, trans. JRM).
The
restoration of Lazarus to life, in
other words, was a vivid
picture of Jesus’ power as
the agent of resurrection and the one who not only, as John put it
earlier in his Gospel, possesses the divine life (John 1:4; 5:26),
but also conveys
eternal
life now to
those who believe in him. Jesus
himself was raised, as John says, “on the first day of the week”
(John 20:1), the start of the promised new creation. His resurrection
is, as Jesus himself claims in John 14:19, the guarantee of his
followers’ future
resurrection. But the
defining characteristic
of John’s Gospel is its
argument that Jesus, through
his death and resurrection, has
brought this promised future,
and the “eternal life” proper to it, forward into the
present.
Earlier
this week, Charles’s son Ben, my son-in-law, told me that Charles’s
favorite verse of Scripture was John 3:16: “For
God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not
perish but may have eternal life” (NRSV). In a real sense, the
Lazarus story may be viewed as a narrative illustration of that
verse. The raising of Lazarus both foreshadows the future
resurrection and pictures the giving of spiritual resurrection life
even now to those who believe. For
John, such belief in
Jesus involves a confessional
element, an assent to various propositions about who Jesus is. In his
statement of purpose for the Gospel, John says he wrote that people
might believe “that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God (John
20:31), the very confession Martha makes in our story (11:27). But
such confession transcends the boundaries of Jewish Messianic
expectations of the time.
For John, Jesus was not only the “Lamb of God, who takes away the
sin of the world” (1:29), but also the eternal “Word” (John
1:1), the self-expression of God, who took on human flesh (1:14) to
reveal God to humanity as a human being,
and who manifested his glory supremely on the cross (12:23; 13:31).
But
John is most famous for his speaking of “belief in (or
into)”
(πιστεύειν εἰς)
Jesus,
which he does 37 times. Such
belief is not only
assent to such propositions
about Jesus, necessary
as they are. It speaks of a
relationship between
the believer and Jesus―a
relationship that involves
entrusting oneself to
him, personal commitment
to him, even allegiance
to him. It is, in the words of the British theologian Anthony
Thiselton, a “nailing of one’s colors to the mast as a
self-involving act of Christian identity and commitment.”12
The
Lazarus story tells those of
us who
believe that, though we still
live in this world of
sickness and death, Jesus the resurrection and the life has
guaranteed that ultimate future when, in the words of John the
Theologian at the end of the 1st
century CE, "[God]
will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no
more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore,
for the former days have passed away" (Rev 21:4, NRSV).
To
God alone be the glory.
