Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifth Sunday of Lent 2026

Hidden behind those politicians looking so very self-assured in the North Transept, there are yet more monuments. And among them is one of the highlights of an Abbey tour. It’s the tomb of Elizabeth Nightingale and her husband Joseph. The story is that, in August 1734, a flash of lightning brought on a premature birth and Elizabeth died as a consequence. On the tomb, she is carved collapsing on her husband. He has his left arm around her and with his right arm he is desperately pushing away the inevitable. Below him, emerging out of the grim, black doors of a tomb, is the skeletal figure of death holding a spear. Joseph has no chance. This battle is done and decided. Death will win. 

Death as a thing to be feared. Death as the thing you can do nothing about. Jospeh Nightingale knew all about that and so did Roubiliac who created this masterpiece. That idea, that death threatens, was commonplace once. Our churches insisted that we should think hard on the moment death comes. Memento mori it said on tombs, ‘remember that you must die’. The church thought about death and about how to die – ars moriendi – the art of dying. It wasn’t all morbid and defeatist, there was christian hope, and there was promise, but there were also worms and skeletons and there was dread. Dread abounded, death strode the aisles and the apses. Skulls grinned at the inevitable outcome.

And it wasn’t just human fear that drove that, it was theology. In Scripture, death is a punishment. It is the punishment that Adam and Eve receive stealing the apple. Taking the here and now they lost the ever after. It was in Eden that the death sentence was first pronounced:

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Genesis 3:19

The bible says is that death is the wrong ending to our human story. It is something at odds with our instinct, but it is inevitable. That is why, in the Psalms, death is feared

My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Psalm 55:4 

Death is a trap; a snare to fall into - Psalm 18. In St Paul’s hands death is the enemy. I Corinthians 15 insists death is actually the last enemy. Paul knew Genesis and believed that death is the consequence of sin; he called death the wages of sin – that is Romans 6 (v.23 see also Romans 7:13).

This is the language, this is the bleak belief, we need to have in mind when Christ comes to Bethany, to the grave of Lazarus,

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. John 11:17 

Lazarus was dead, really dead and this trip to Bethany was a grim prospect. Jesus was walking into Lazarus’ death and possibly his own - going to a place where the Jews had tried to stone him. The journey was doom-laden and the disciples set off with the words of Thomas ringing in their ears,

"Let us also go, that we may die with him." John 11:16

And yet, at Bethany, Jesus challenges death and death’s finality. He breaks in, like a burglar – ‘take away the stone’. That is too much even for Lazarus’ sister, Martha, she protests,

"Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." John 11:39

Martha protests. She belongs to the school of Nightingale and Roubiliac where death is always the victor. There is a script and it is as if in the beginning was the word and the word was ‘No’. It is the way it works; it is the way it always works. It is the same voice we hear when Christ is told it is ‘not lawful’, or it is not in ‘the tradition’. The woman caught in the act of adultery ‘must be stoned to death’. It is the valley of dry bones. It is the triumph of the inevitable over the possible, the certainty that there can be no Sabbath morning. It is the fixed, the final, routine without possibility, life without hope. It is death and its dominion. And, while we may talk about death in quite this way anymore, this idea has most of us by the throat. The world feels intractable and the mood shifts to despair.

At which point, allow me to introduce the caterpillar of the pine processionary moth. You should be wary of my introduction, you do not really want to meet one of these little blighters, they are mildly poisonous and very destructive. They are called ‘processionaries’ because the caterpillars travel in columns nose to tail. Early in the twentieth century, the scientist Jean-Henri Fabre put a few of these caterpillars on the rim of a large plant pot and watched them follow each other. They marched in a circle for a week. It was an experiment that prompted a wonderful bit of writing by Annie Dillard,

I want out of this still air. What street-corner vendor wound the key on the backs of tin soldiers and abandoned them to the sidewalk, and crashings over the curb? … It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. … [The fixed] is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread.

The fear of the fixed, the dread of Jospeh Nightingale, the word ‘No’ that was spoken at the beginning and echoes on. That is what Jesus meets at Bethany. That is what he defies as he cries with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" (John 11:43). And it is the same voice that whispers in our ear that the world is on fire and we are lost and doomed. It will be war, not peace; power, not democracy. Ever Lent, never Easter. There is a new fatalism abroad that says the Caesars and the Pharoahs always win. Death’s dominion and the answer always ‘No’.

At Bethany, Jesus does not just perform a might miracle, raising Lazarus from the dead. At Bethany, he overturns every assumption that we will be defeated, that power and forces will get the better of us. At Bethany he beats back all that is literally dead certain. This is nothing less than a new creation. John, writing his gospel, wants us to know it. This, he says, is the last and greatest of the signs that Jesus performed. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is put to death because of so many things he has said and done. John will not have that. This moment, this raising of Lazaraus, this resounding ‘Yes’ to life is what condemns Jesus. It is the thing the Caesars and the Pharaohs cannot bear. Because here is possibility drowning out the drumbeat ‘No’ that insists on prohibition, impossibility, fate, and control. This is the reason that Jesus will be crucified and this chapter of John closes with Caiaphas declaring that this Jesus must die.

The raising of Lazarus declares who Jesus is - not just a worker of miracles, but a very different way of living and hoping. It’s a devastating irony, That Jesus gives life and is instantly condemned to death. As Charles Causley explains.

He came to a very bad end.
He was charged with bringing the living to life…

It is interesting, isn’t it, that religion so often becomes a way of saying ‘Don’t do that’, ‘No’ and ‘absolutely not’. Idris Davies once described an imaginary nonconformist Capel Calvin,

There's holy holy people
They are in capel bach —
They don't like surpliced choirs,
They don't like Sospan Fach…

They don't like beer or bishops,
Or pictures without texts,
They don't like any other
Of the nonconformist sects.

We stand this morning at the beginning of Passiontide. In the days to come, we will walk closer and closer to the cross of Christ. We will see what power and control, will do to the one who brought the living to life. We will hear the resounding ‘No’ of the Caesars and the Pharaohs. Then we will step into the Easter Garden. Our Bethany and God’s great ‘Yes’ to life. There is a sabbath morning after all. The wilderness will blossom, the lame will leap, the dead will live, and suddenly there will a highway where once no path was found. Today and in the days ahead we must give voice to that hope. Our world lives in dread. We must dare to imagine this new creation, we must name it and proclaim it, and we must believe we will live. Not ‘No’, but ‘Yes’. Not power, but hope. Not death, but life.