John 11: 1-44
Homily by Colleen Hartung
April 2, 2017
To be honest, the story of Martha, Mary and the death and resurrection of Lazarus is not one of my favorites. I find myself aligned with the crowd and their question, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” And I just can’t quite wrap my mind and my heart around the idea that this family should suffer so that others might see and for the sake of glorifying God. But, lucky for me since I had this homily to do today, the reading from the Book of Ezekiel and the question God poses there, captured me. “Mortal, can these bones live?” And so in the hopes of finding a way to embrace the story of Martha, Mary and Lazarus as our given path to the end of our Lenten journey, I go first to where Ezekial’s image of dry bones takes me, to the room full of shoes in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.
When you round the corner after passing through a replica of one of the boxcars used to transport prisoners to the camps, you see this room full of shoes, encased behind a glass wall. There all kinds of shoes there; men’s loafers, women’s high heels and children’s booties piled in this expansive, disordered heap. On the wall behind there is a quote from a poem by Moses Schulstein, a Holocaust surviver. It reads, “We are the shoes, we are the last witness. We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers, from Prague, Paris and Amsterdam. And because we are only made of fabric and leather and not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.” At the peak of the gassings at Auschwitz, 25,000 pairs of shoes were collected each day. Standing there before all these shoes, the intimate particularity and enormity of this terror begins to take hold.
And the hand of God came upon me, and the spirit of God brought me out, and I was set down in the middle of a valley, a valley full of bones…. Then God said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the most high…. Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Holy One: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
At the beginning, when you enter the main exhibit of the museum you are invited to take an identification card that tells the story of a particular person who was rounded up in the Holocaust. “Each identification card has four sections: The first provides a biographical sketch of the person. The second describes the individual’s experiences from 1933 to 1939, and the third describes events they experienced during the war years. The final section describes the fate of the individual and explains the circumstances—to the extent that they are known—in which the individual either died or survived” (Holocaust Museum Website). You turn the pages of the identification card as you move through the three major sections of the exhibit so that you don’t know the fate of the person that accompanies you until the end of your experience.
Sarah Rivka Felman was born in 1923 in Sokolow Podlaski, Poland. One of seven children, Sarah was raised in a Yiddish-speaking, religious Jewish home. Sarah’s parents ran a grain business. In 1930, Sarah began attending public elementary school. After graduating from middle school in 1937 at the age of 14, Sarah helped out her widowed mother in the family’s grain business. Two years later, Germany attacked Poland. German aircraft bombed Sokolow Podlaski’s market and other civilian targets. German troops entered the town on September 20 and burned the main synagogue three days later. The Germans then confiscated the family’s grain business. Over the next two years, the Germans imposed restrictions on the Jews, eventually ordering them to wear an identifying Jewish star on their clothing. On September 28, 1941, the Germans set up a ghetto and concentrated the town’s Jews there. About a year later, on the most solemn holiday in the Jewish religion, the Day of Atonement, the Germans began to round up the people in the ghetto. Those who resisted or tried to hide were shot. Sarah, her mother and younger brother were herded onto the boxcar of a train.
Part of the main exhibit in the Holocaust Museum is this tower of photographs taken between the years of 1890 and 1941 in the village of Eishishok, a small Jewish community of about 3,500 near Vilna in Poland. The tower contains hundreds of pictures of the residents from this community: portraits, pictures of people eating together, holding their children, getting married, celebrating and enjoying life with their friends. In September of 1941, most all the residents of this community were massacred by the Nazis . Of the 500 who escaped the massacre only 29 survived the war. You pass through this tower three times as you move from floor to floor of the exhibit so that walking the pathway through that tower begins to feel like turning the pages of a family album. Their lives, the ordinary happening that made up their days begin to seem familiar. The last time you pass through it you exit the exhibit and turn to the last page of your identification card.
On September 22, 1942, Sarah Rivka Felman and her family were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. She was gassed there shortly after arriving. She was 19 years old. (Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.)
As you leave the museum, holding your identification card, you carry in your hands a life. And you can’t shake this sense of being inhabited. You know that this story of a particular person has come to live inside of you. And the questions of how and why and what now echo in your head and in your heart. The front page of the museum guide reads, “The museum is not an answer. It is a question. And the question always is: What is your responsibility now that you’ve seen, now that you know?” Which takes me back to Jesus standing before Martha on his way to Lazarus’ tomb.
Martha says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.” And Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.” And Martha answers, “I know that he will rise again on the last day.” And Jesus says to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Biblical scholars note that in the Gospel of John there is a consistent distinction between zoe, eternal life and psyche, (psoo-khay) or natural life. Here the word is zoe or eternal life. And for the Johannine Community and the author of the Gospel of John, eternal life is not just or even most importantly the eschatological, future resurrection to which Martha refers. Rather, it is something they see and come to know in the present moment because of their relationship with Jesus. Brought together into new life by their love for Jesus they become like Jesus, livers and proclaimers of his love in community with each other in the present moment so much so that they will die for all believers like Jesus died for them.
And so Jesus says to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” And Martha answers, “Yes.”
Jesus moves from there with Martha, Mary and their friends to Lazarus’ tomb and he calls Lazarus back to life. Many see what he does and they believe. Yet this event or vision does not change the natural order of life and death. Lazarus will ultimately die as a martyr, because of illness or of old age. We don’t know. And the bones of our dead from so many tragedies are still scattered across the planet and empty shoes still haunt us. Death, tragic and common, is after all part of living, a part of a natural life as the writer of the Gospel of John would name it. But the questions remain, passed down to us from generation to generation. “Mortal, can these bones live. Do you believe? And what is your responsibility now that you’ve seen, now that you know?” And in this day and age where truth and credible witness and genuine prophesy have lost their public value and become difficult to discern, these eternal questions loom large. They make demands on us in the here and now. And if we take today’s scriptures seriously they call us to a fullness of life that requires us to prophesy, to bear witness and testify and to live the love of Jesus actively in the face of recrimination from family and friends, in the face of hardship and oppression and even, for some of our fellow human beings, in the face of death. In other words, they call us toward the end of our Lenten journey that takes us inevitably to the foot of the cross.