Sermon for Easter 6 – 22 May 2022: NT – Romans 6, 5-11; Gospel – John 11, 17-27

Sermon for Easter 6 2022 – preached by Fr. Leonard at St. Thomas Anglican Church on Crete. (The Readings are not those for Common Worship as St. Thomas’s is using an alternative lectionary for a season)

 

It is interesting that you have been sampling an alternative lectionary for your Sunday diet of readings here at St. Thomas’s; a lectionary that favours perhaps less well known readings about women in the scriptures. These may feel like passages of scripture overlooked in the Prayer Book or Common Worship Lectionaries.

Maybe I could begin with a few comments about this. Anyone in public life knows that the technology available to the vast majority of people makes the taking of photographs so simple and immediate. Celebrities, politicians, royal family members will all know what this is like – especially with the cult of the ‘selfie’. (By the way I like to think of Jesus Christ being God’s ‘selfie’ – but that is another sermon altogether).

With all this photography going on there are of course dangers. Technology allows for ‘fake’ photographs to be created as well. You can take one person’s face and put it on the neck of someone else, or you can remove someone from a photograph, or even add them to a photograph to give a false impression. ‘Air brushing’ is what this is called, I think.

Well, air brushing is not new. Perhaps not with photographs but with literature, it is possible to metaphorically ‘airbrush’ someone out of a story, and by doing so give the impression of absence or lack of importance. It is possible to make a case that this is what has happened to women in the stories of the Christian tradition, in particular given the male balance in terms of authors of the books of the bible. Patriarchy exists in many guises, and it could be argued that history written by men gives the impression that women had no influence, power, or presence. This is by no means only historical – the imbalance exists in our own day, and the historic ‘air brushing’ of our Christian tradition underplays and undervalues the importance and the influence of woman.

Women play a significant role in the sphere of the life of Our Lord and today’s gospel is a good example of this. Mary and Martha, whose brother is Lazarus, feature highly in this gospel reading.

The setting is Bethany, a couple of miles outside Jerusalem. The village is nowadays a rather sprawling even quite ugly town. Interestingly, many of the Christian households have some sort of carving of St. George, who is a much loved saint, well beyond the shores of England.

The pilgrim used to be able to travel from Jerusalem to Bethany in a matter of minutes, now it takes considerably longer as Bethany is on the Palestinian side of the wall erected by the Israeli government, so you have to travel miles to the nearest crossing point.

The encounter between Martha and Jesus is part of a longer narrative in John’s gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, has died. The family is known to Jesus. On hearing the news of Lazarus’s death Jesus visits the family.

In conversation Martha and Jesus discuss resurrection. This should immediately make us sit up and think. In one of her replies to Jesus Martha says, ‘I know that he (Lazarus) will rise again in the resurrection on the last day’. We might be surprised to hear the word resurrection on her lips, as we have a tendency to think that resurrection is a possession of the Christian tradition. It is not. If we look at St. Paul’s great paragraphs on resurrection in the Letter to the Romans we learn a great deal, if we read it carefully enough. In 1 Cor 15, 13 the Apostle Paul says, ‘If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised…’

So Martha already believed in resurrection. It was part of Martha’s inherited religion, part of St. Paul’s inherited religion. So when Jesus says ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ she has no difficulty in making her statement of faith ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’

In many ways this is comparable to the faith statement of Thomas – ‘my Lord and my God’ (John 20, 28). Martha should get more credit for her words and for her belief in the Christ. Her faith is vindicated by the miracle of the raising from the dead of her brother Lazarus – a miracle – even before the resurrection of our Lord – a mystery, the mystery of the cross. Maybe the scant regard we give to Martha’s faith statement is part of the historic ‘air-brushing’ I referred to earlier, as in this story the attention quickly focusses on her brother Lazarus.

Martha and Mary are integral to the setting of the Lazarus miracle. The raising of Lazarus is a foretaste, a pre-figuring, or a typology, of the mystery of the Resurrection of Jesus, the mystery of the cross. We must be clear about the distinction between Lazarus and Jesus – for in the raising of Lazarus there is nothing in itself about eternal life, and one supposes that at some point Lazarus died. In the raising of Christ there is eternal life and a new creation in which we participate.

In the reading from Romans today, the Apostle Paul links our death to the death of Jesus – an experience that we as humans share with Jesus – but in sharing in his death, we share too in his resurrection.  This resurrection is a uniting σύμφυτος with Christ both in this world in our human condition, and in the divine condition to which we are called through death.

Our lives are shaped, even here and even now by sharing in the cross when we allow the old self to die within us, and permit the new self to be a reflection of the life of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.

The circumstances experienced in the east of Ukraine is a huge challenge to the heritage of our faith. As well as the horrendous misery and destruction inflicted on the Ukrainian citizenry, and the futile deaths of soldiers, on both sides, it beggars belief that children of the same God, and sisters and brothers in the same Orthodox tradition should find themselves embroiled in this carnage. To hear the Patriarch of Moscow re-invent language and circumscribe what is happening to fellow Orthodox believers in Ukraine is unforgivable and sinful. It will require heaps of faith, and buckets of God’s grace for reconciliation and redemption.

I think of the TV footage of the elderly women left behind in the Dombas region; the mothers of those young conscript Russian soldiers who have heard nothing of their sons for weeks and weeks and who increasingly are being returned to them in body bags; the wives who had to flee Ukraine leaving behind their husbands to defend their homeland. We hope and pray that history will not ‘air-brush’ these women out of the narrative – for this is a conflict not just about soldiers and combat.

 

The only hope to which we can cling is perhaps to be found in that statement of St. Paul in today’s reading from Romans: ‘We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death has no more dominion over him.’ (Rom 6, 9). This is our faith, and this we proclaim.