All Saints 2009

All Saints Day 2009 (Pentecost 22 Proper 26)
"See how he loved him".

Jesus is love in human flesh.

Jesus just doesn’t have love, show love, or act in a loving manner. He is love. The Bible teaches that only love is eternal. Heaven and Earth were created in a moment of time and will at the appointed time come to their fulfillment and end. Love never ends.
Love never ends because love has no beginning. Love is eternal.

God the Father is the one who loves and he loves eternally. God the Son is the Beloved and he is the Beloved eternally. God the Holy Spirit is the personal power and presence of love and his personal power and presence are also eternal.

Jesus came to earth to restore the one thing that brings meaning and purpose to life. That one thing is eternal love. That love comes to us in the personal presence of the eternal Beloved, Jesus Christ.

Lazarus was Jesus’ friend.

As the eternal Beloved Jesus offers his friendship to all people everywhere. As we see in scripture and experience in our lives, many people reject that friendship. Some reject Jesus completely. They want nothing to do with him. They say: stay away from me.

Others want Jesus to be some one other than who he is. They say, I will be your friend only if you drop this idea that you are the Son of God. Be a prophet and I will listen to you. Be a teacher and I will study your words. Be a myth and I will tell your story and sing songs about you. Be who I want you to be and I will honor you, when it is convenient to me.

Still others wanted Jesus to give them rewards. Give me power and I will follow you. Give me wealth and I will proclaim your greatness. Give me pleasure and I will claim your name as my own. Give me what I want when I want it and I will be your friend.

Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus had a very different response to Jesus. They valued him for who he was. They valued him, not as some false image or some insistent demand they brought before him. They were happy just to invite him for dinner and sit in his presence.

We know no detail about Lazarus’ friendship with Jesus. From the scant evidence in scripture we know that Lazarus and his sisters were devout Pharisees. They believed in the resurrection. They practiced sacred hospitality to strangers. They expected the coming of the Messiah. They were rich. And, they enjoyed Jesus’ friendship.

When Lazarus unexpectedly falls ill his sisters send word to Jesus to come to heal the one he loves. But, Jesus delays for two days and does not arrive until Lazarus has been dead for four days. The sisters are overcome by grief and very plainly tell Jesus: if only you had come sooner. If only you had been here. You could have healed him. But, you delayed. You delayed and your friend whom you loved is now dead. Dead is dead. There is nothing that anyone can do.

Even the Pharisees who believed in the resurrection understood that dead is dead. They did not believe in an immortal soul that survived death. The life is the breath and when a person breathes his last breath there is no more life. There is no more person. For Mary and Martha, Lazarus had ceased to exist.

How Jesus responds and what he did reveal the Great Mystery of human existence and Divine Life.

First, Jesus wept. He cried. He grieved. He knew that death was never part of God’s plan and purpose for humanity.
Jesus in his pre incarnate form was there in Eden when Adam and Eve walked in the beauty of holiness. He invited them to make the one real choice that would seal their souls in union with the Eternal Life of God.

He warned them that the choice to separate from God was real and held a terrible consequence. That consequence was death.

He witnessed the choice humanity made to separate from God. He immediately set into motion the plan to restore what humanity rejected. And he knew the terrible price he would have to pay to accomplish that plan.

Now, at Bethany, Jesus stood in the presence of death. Death was not new to Jesus. He had grown up in a world where infant mortality rates were high and life spans were low. As a child and a teen he had attended more funerals than weddings. This was why he had come into the world. He had come because the human race had separated from God. Humanity had separated from the one thing that is eternal: love. And so, humanity now experienced the consequence of separation: death.

Jesus wept. He wept for Lazarus who had died. He wept for the family who grieved. He wept for the people who lived in fear that death was a punishment. He wept for his followers that they still did not receive him for who he was. He wept because he knew he would call Lazarus back from Paradise, from the place of the righteous dead.

He wept because he knew that the choice of eternal life is the choice of love. That choice must be real. The reality of that choice is that some will accept the gift Jesus brings and some will defiantly reject it. He wept because he loved.

Love always conquers death.

Jesus’ love for his friend Lazarus defeated death that day in the tombs outside Bethany. But, many more people in Judea and Galilee had died and were buried. Many more families grieved. Jesus wept for them as well.

Jesus knew the only solution to death was for him to embrace death.
Jesus experienced death on the cross fully and completely, universally and personally. On the cross, Jesus experienced human sin, human separation, and human death. Jesus knows what is to die. He knows this not just in the abstract. He knows this not just in the experience of his own death.
On the cr
oss, Jesus took upon himself both the universal and the particular sin of humanity. On the cross, Jesus took upon himself both the universal and particular death all people experience.
No one dies alone. Jesus is always there. Always. No one dies un noticed. Jesus not only witnesses the death he experiences the death. On the cross, Jesus personally experienced the death of every human being who has ever lived and will ever live.

He did this so he could transform death back into life. The way of transformation is the Way of Divine Love. That love is eternal. Even death cannot over come it.

It is the teaching of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church that all who are baptized in Christ are one with Christ and live with him forever. Our hope in the face of death is the love Christ brings to us. That love is eternal. Even death cannot dissolve that love.
Jesus knew that even though he was restoring life to his friend for a few more years in this world, it was only a foretaste of the eternal life Lazarus had already received when he embraced Jesus as Lord through faith, through hope, through love.

The gift of God is the love of God. The love of God is Jesus Christ. Jesus is the eternal Beloved of the father.

In Bethany that day, the crowds recognized this reality when Jesus wept. They saw the compassion of God in Jesus tears. They witnessed the power of God as Lazarus came out of the tomb, his arms and head still bound by the grave clothes.

Many believed in him at that moment. Many recognized that the love of God was not just a concept or an impersonal force but fully present in Jesus Christ.

They had said: see how Jesus loved Lazarus. The love precedes the miracle. The love comes to us now in the waters of baptism and in the blessed sacrament of the altar. As we behold the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion claim the reality as you remember the words of the crowds that day in Bethany. See how he loved him. See how he loves you. He loves you with an everlasting love. He is here fully present for you. Receive him by faith and know the reality of eternal love in the living Lord Jesus Christ, this day, now, and forever. Amen.