5th Sunday of Lent – March 17/18, 2018 – Reflection
“When He had said this, (Jesus) cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” (The Gospel of John)
Power is big and loud and brash.
Power puffs out its chest to appear bigger and badder.
Power shouts and threatens and ridicules and spews vitriol and venom.
Power intimidates and bullies and demeans and destroys.
The Soviet Union’s Khrushchev cried out, “We will bury you!” to the nations of the West.
Adolph Hitler sent his Nazi Stormtroopers to break glass and beat up the innocent and then sent his panzer divisions to break bodies and bulldoze nations as millions cried out, “SiegHeil!
Mao ushered the Cultural Revolution into China’s many thousand year old culture to silence dissent, remove opposition, and destroy an ancient culture with the shouts of his Red Brigade.
Every dictator, every maniacal conquering soldier, every frenzied zealot cries out in speeches and rallies, in assemblies and parades of might, in propaganda and prediction, one way or another, they all cry out, “We will bury you!”
At the end of His earthly life, as the powers of Rome and the Jewish Temple joined forces in an unholy alliance, Jesus was shouted at: “Crucify Him!”, they cried out. “We have no king but Caesar … crucify Him!”, they cried out. “He saved others, let Him save Himself and come down from that cross if He is who He says He is!”, they cried out.
Once again, power: loud and brash and big; shouts to get its way; shouts as power always does, “We will bury you!”
Jesus, who did not “deem equality with (the power of God) something to be clung to, but rather emptied Himself, taking on the form of a slave,” cried out into the darkness of the grave, “Lazarus, come out!”
Jesus, fastened by spikes to that tortuous tree erected by power, cried out, “Father, forgive them!”
Jesus, as power claimed its victory in His ignominious and total defeat, cried out, “Father, it is finished; into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Power cries out and calls for death.
Jesus cries out and calls for Lazarus to live, for God to forgive, for the Father to accept a Son’s love to the end.
Jesus once told those who would follow Him: “You know how the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you!”
For Jesus, and for those who bear His Name as Christians, power is in giving: giving life; giving mercy; giving love; giving self. And whatever power that gives us, it is not the power to shout or intimidate, to threaten or destroy. It is the power of the cross, “whose message is foolishness to those who are perishing … for Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
Today, Jesus stands at the tomb of our fascination with worldly power that leads only and always to death, and calls to us that we might instead walk and live under the banner of the cross. He cries out into the darkness of our hearts of stone, “Come out!”
“This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him”
Listen … listen, and live!