Standing Under the Scriptures
March 16, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Instead of the Passion Narrative, as in the past, the readings chosen for the services this Sunday are simply Zechariah 9.9 and Matthew 21.1-11, which contains Zechariah 9.9, essentially.  For our class, however, they will be

Matthew 21.1-11: Jesus rides into Jerusalem.

Psalm 22.1-21: This is what the lectionary prescribes to go with the Passion Narrative

I would now say a word to you as voyagers.  Several of you have expressed appreciation for my leadership of our class.  It is time, I think, that I express my appreciation to you, especially those persevering in attendance, for constituting the class.  Biblical exploration such as we are doing is not always easy.  It demands application, and although it often leads to fascinating discoveries, it does not always.  But it is important, indeed vitally important.  And only in conjunction with you can I fully engage in it.

The importance of what we are doing appears, I think, in last Sunday’s discussion.  It was of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley, or plain, of dry bones (37.1-14) and of Jesus’ bringing his friend Lazarus back from the dead (John 11; we went all the way to verse 54). Both readings concern a revival beyond any human possibility.  The Ezekiel passage is one of the best known in the biblical literature, and rightly so on account of its striking imagery and inherent significance.  (It is actually the Babylonian exiles that the prophet has in mind; cf. the preceding chapter and verse 14 itself: “…I [the Lord} will place you in your own land…”)  But because we felt constrained to move on the Gospel reading, we limited our time on it.  Accordingly, we might review it now.

I spoke of how from an early age, meaning before current controversies had surfaced, the dry bones put me in mind of the Episcopal Church (now styled TEC).  The preaching, the response of the people, their relations with each other often seemed very dry.  To be sure, the present division has engendered passion and heated argument on both sides.  But that this constitutes a revival of TEC may be doubted.  I would see it in terms instead of Jesus’ chilling parable about the unclean spirit who goes forth from a man to seek rest and, not finding it, returns with seven other spirits more evil than himself (Matthew 12.43-45, Luke 11.24-26).

This being so, the question of TEC’s revival remains (“Son of man, can these bones live?”).  For the answer let us look at the passage.  Ezekiel is commanded to prophesy to the bones, to speak to them the word of the Lord.  This causes them come together and sinews, flesh and skin to come upon them.  Finally breath enters them from his prophesying to the four winds, “and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude” (in Hebrew breath and wind and spirit are the same word).  So the revival of TEC is to come out of the breathing of the word of the Lord, “revelation as attested in Scripture,” upon it.  But only if we inhale his word can we breathe it out, so as to meet TEC’s urgent requirement.  And this is what we are doing in our class.

With regard to the raising of Lazarus, we looked at the whole of chapter 11, virtually, because with John’s Gospel, unlike with the Synoptics, it does not seem possible to take pieces of it (pericopes, to use the technical term) in isolation.  Instead it seems to be woven seamlessly, rather as with Jesus’ robe which the Roman soldiers cast lots for at his crucifixion.  The central importance of Lazarus’ raising for John is evident from its position just prior to Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem and from the response of the Pharisees to it, which was to convene the council that decided finally on putting him to death.  And the claim that it puts forward, namely that Jesus is able to raise believers from the dead, is basic to the Christian message.

Still I did not feel quite the same satisfaction as I did after our discussion the previous Sunday, when I thought that we had really come close comprehending the passage.  As you will recall, this concerned Jesus giving sight to the man blind from birth, the dawning on the man of Jesus’; identity, and his persistence in his testimony to Jesus despite the opposition of the Pharisees, to the point of his being expelled from the synagogue.  And we saw how this would have had an important meaning for our hypothetical Johannine community of perhaps the early second century, out of which we thought John’s Gospel to have come.  For converts, to whom Jesus had given spiritual sight, may have gone to it from neighboring Jewish communities, with which it was in conflict.  And these would have been subjected to similar tests of opposition and exclusion, to be sustained by Jesus in the end.

But then it occurred to me that this same Johannine community could provide the final key to the Lazarus story.  From John’s Gospel we may infer that it was deeply spiritual in its devotion to Jesus.  We may infer also that it was an embattled community, from John’s many accounts of conflicts with “the Jews” (sc. the religious leaders).  A factor in this conflict, even the main one, would have been the community’s claim of resurrection of the dead, of eternal life, through faith in Jesus.  Yet John does not shrink from asserting this claim.  It runs through his Gospel (cf. 6.54: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood will have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.)  And it is stated frontally, as it were, in chapter 11, both as what Jesus says, in “I am the resurrection and the life” (verse 25), and as what he enacts, in the raising of Lazarus.

What these things mean for us is that “the words of eternal life” are indeed given to us, in Scripture.  They are of incalculable importance.  And we must never retreat from them, whatever the pressures upon us.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted