Sermon preached at Evensong on the Third Sunday of Easter 2025

Over these last weeks of Easter, we have been focusing on the Gospel accounts of the first Easter morning, and the events immediately afterwards. Today, we take what might at first glance seem like a step back into the drama of Jesus’s earthly ministry. Many scholars refer to the Raising of Lazarus as the centrepiece of the Fourth Gospel.[1] This story, which we heard read as our second lesson tonight, completes the so-called ‘signs’ of Jesus’s ministry. These signs are pointers, starting with the transformation of water into wine at the Wedding at Cana, which leave us in no doubt as to who Jesus is. After Lazarus has been raised, the movement begins to kill Jesus, and we will ultimately see the divine glory unveiled one final time in Jesus’s flesh as he dies on the Cross. But this story is the centrepiece of the whole Gospel, fizzing with themes, images and symbolism which resonate into the life of the Church over 2000 years later.

Jesus has arrived at the home of the holy family of Bethany. Mary, Martha and Lazarus are his friends, and the two sisters have been trying to get Jesus to come because Lazarus is sick. There is so much in these relationships from which one could build a Christian theology of friendship, affection and hospitality. But by the time Jesus has got there, Lazarus has already been dead for four days and there is a stench. The point here, is that Lazarus is past revival. Jesus himself weeps alongside the sisters, who remonstrate with him for taking so long to arrive when things could have been very different indeed. The drama of this story is profoundly human: Jesus shows his own humanity, and his solidarity with all those in every age who feel the inevitable pain of the death of a loved one. And yet, it is also a story with profound cosmic resonance. At the heart of the ordinariness of this scene, is Easter. And in the age which reads this story, Easter can be the ordinary shape of the life of the world. This is the mystery – the gift – which lives right at the heart of every Christian proclamation. 

One of the characteristics which makes this story so remarkable is that scenes and signs are colliding into one another here. Immediately after Jesus – whom we are told is ‘greatly disturbed’ – asks Martha to remove the stone in front of the tomb, the account becomes one which reveals the glory of God. It becomes an opportunity for the expression of deep faith, and encounter with the divine life which permeates the entire Gospel. When Jesus summons the dead man out of the tomb, St John tells us that he does so in a specific way with a ‘loud voice.’ In John’s multi-layered writing, this ‘loud voice’ is a reference to the beginning of creation, when in Genesis the Lord ‘speaks’ creation, ‘Let there be light!’ Here is the beginning of the new creation. Lazarus’s resurrection is the foreshadowing of Christ’s own resurrection. We see it first here! Jesus’s raising of his dead friend is a commanding moment, a recreating moment, a moment where the shape and potential of temporality takes on new contours. We also know from later in the next chapter that Jesus’s celebratory status amongst the Jews was in part due to this event. Lazarus himself becomes at risk from the chief priests precisely because his story was becoming so convincing amongst the crowds. 

This is Easter in ordinary. Yes, the breaking in of a thoroughly new kind of life in the midst of life. This is the first full glimpse of the new creation where death itself will be destroyed. But persecution begins from here, too, because the kind of life Christ promises was and is a threat to those who would rather collude with the status quo. In order to experience Easter in ordinary, the new humanity into which every Christian is baptised is called to some kind of defiance of the old order. The late great German protestant theologian Jurgen Moltmann, concluded a lecture here in Westminster Abbey back in 2020, with the cry, ‘Life must be lived, private, public, and political life! Life must be lived today in defiance of terror and dangers! Life, one’s own and common, universal life, must be lived in defiance of universal death!’[2] Moltmann was discussing what he called ‘a culture of life in defiance of the deadly threats of this age’ social, ecological, technological. Humans have a responsibility to be humane, courageous and hopeful, taking responsibility for the choices – private and public – which we have to make. At the heart of our corrosion, believed Moltmann, was a ‘terrorized consciousness’, paralysed by fear and catastrophe. 

The story of the raising of Lazarus gives us several remedies for this dangerous and deadly culture of death. First, above all else, is the great sign and promise of Jesus’s resurrection. Christ’s victory over death was to destroy death’s power from the inside. No longer should this ultimate shadow over the world possess the world. Although seeing beyond death is beyond the limits of ordinary sight, the sight of faith, our senses, and the sheer communion we share in Christ with the living and the dead, renew us in the hope that God has abolished any kind of permanent separation between human frailty and the overwhelming depths of his love. For this reason, we are called not to be afraid, but to step into new situations geopolitical, environmental, technological and social, with the confidence that comes from Christ’s resurrection. We will need to be defiant of cultures, philosophies, politics and social groupings which seek the dominance of aggression and intimidation, in a joyful attitude of service and love. 

This may sound like an extraordinary ask. But the context of the story of the raising of Lazarus reveals another remedy, too. At the heart of this story is friendship: Mary, Martha, Lazarus and Jesus show us a kind of friendship which is buffered and battered by blame, grief and anger, and yet underpinned by affection and deep love. The new kind of life we are called to receive in Christ, is not just a macro, universalised, cosmic series of changes to wider culture, it is also one we are called to receive in the matter-of-factness of our friendships, our relationships, and how we treat one another in small ways, too. Through these contexts, as we build small communities and networks of reconciliation and affection, we step out in the hope to which Christ calls us. We testify to cultures of life, instead of colluding with cultures of death. 

Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. ‘Already there is a stench’, Martha tells Jesus. The site of the new creation is a putrefying corpse which needs unbinding, and liberation. The work of Easter is not managed in a controlled environment. It is the deepest kind of engagement with the world’s woundedness. Christ is authoritative, but tender. Commanding, yet releasing. We will not learn the meaning of Easter until we have recognised our own need for transformation and healing. Then we will be able to hear Christ’s voice calling our name – as he called Lazarus – summoning us to life.