Therefore, many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
What we heard today in our Gospel reading was around 800 words of an emotionally dense few days in the ministry of Jesus and some of his closest friends. If I were designing a lectionary I am not sure I would choose this lesson for the time of Lent, placing it here on the last Sunday before Holy Week. It isn’t a resurrection story, even though it can easily seem like one. Especially when paired with the Ezekiel lesson where the Spirit of God is putting flesh on dry bones and raising a whole valley to new life.
The sentence after the end of our Gospel reading today is this: But some of them went to Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. After the 800 or so words of our assigned reading there was a choice not to include 15 more. 15 words whose time is most certainly Lent. I am frustrated by that choice. I feel like the powers who chose the lectionary have wasted our time. I confess that I wrestle with timeliness. I was raised by parents who feel that if you are not very early, you are late. My rebellion in adulthood was to try to learn how to be exactly on time, which I still don’t accomplish very often. If I want to be fashionably late to a party, I have to schedule in that fashionably late time. And I still usually get there earlier. A Czech priest I knew had a nickname for me that meant ‘windy’. Because I am like the wind, always rushing.
Untimeliness is a place where I experience dissatisfaction and anxiety and even shame. Nurture or nature? Both. I am who I am. I come to every text with my whole life, we all do. I know I am reading more uneasiness and distress into this gospel than is probably really there. Yet when I imagine myself as Martha or Mary or one of their family and friends or neighbors...the people who loved Jesus and who have sacrificed and given much for his mission, I am bothered. I know Bethany is a dangerous place for him, Jesus was nearly stoned there.I know the cruel powers that he frightens are lurking. But if I knew Jesus delayed, when this was a life and death moment, and he seemed to pause intentionally?
If those moments where you are irritable because you are hungry is called hangry, what do we call those moments where you are irritated because of delay? danxious?
Some commentators fret that Martha’s statement, Lord if you had been here... isn't showing enough respect and is perhaps, whiney. Others say it is a very plausible interaction between family and friends. But, sometimes I don’t feel like she is nearly mad enough. Yet it is exactly that emotion that forces me to ask what do I believe about time and grace. What do I believe about God’s power over things that to you and me seem late or slow or dead? It forces me into the question of how I can be less than gracious when I measure Jesus by blocks on a calendar.
Our text today is in the heart of John’s gospel the very center of it is the foot washing and dinner that comes on Maundy Thursday, which is followed by the betrayal and cross and the outrageous shock of Easter. Words on a page the binding of papers in a book lead us into an assumption that one thing comes after the other, and the end is the most important part. Yet here in the gospel, the center of the story radiates meaning in all directions. Jesus has said ‘ I am the good shepherd.’ Today he says,‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ Strong echoes of the name God gives of himself when Moses asks. I am who I am, or perhaps it should be translated I will be who I will be. God is unbound by all the ways and means we crush each other with our definitions of alive and dead, black and white, on time and late.
My reading my frustrations about timeliness into the text is my issue, not God’s, except that God loves me, loves us, all the way through it, even when my doubt is dead wrong. God comes to us, holds us in the pauses and gaps, steadies me in my danxious moments that cause me to rush and push. When I pile all my calendaring into this gospel lesson I don’t see that everything else is taken care of over those four days when Lazarus is in his tomb. People are fed and sheltered.
Community gathers and attends to its duties. Everything was fine, not perfect or comic, but more than good enough.
A thin Christian practice believes that God is a genie, that Jesus is manipulatable by human timelines. A thin practice is one governed by being easily anxious and hoping for a shiny road and simple answers. The Jesus I know and follow isn’t thin. The thick texture of holiness he invites us into has curves I cannot understand and a pace that is not ours. Gods Spirit fill's those moments that feel like a delay with sustaining dense muscular grace, even in the dark valley that lay ahead in Holy Week.
We may not want any difficult three or four days ever. And when they surely arrive, we may want them to be done as soon as possible. But God is with us and for us in this, densely holding us beyond all our concepts of time and space. I don't know what time looks like to God. I imagine it like the cosmos itself or sci fi movie versions of interwoven dimensions going in every direction. I do trust that God’s time doesn't go left from right, it doesn't match with my to do lists nor fit in the grids on my devices, and will not be rushed by my coffee fueled pace.
The center of Jesus’ being is the same as God’s being, that is the good news of this day and all time. This Trinitarian center is the time and home of our true dimension. Sometimes I confine myself, and sometimes I try to confine God on the wrong page. Jesus challenges my issues around rushing and timeliness that only seem to make me feel satisfied, but ultimately leave us less at peace, needlessly exhausted, and further from the God who calls himself ‘I am who I am’. My work in Lent every year is to move from these false calendars to the true dimension of time and space where Jesus holds, guides, and forgives me, especially the rushing judgy danxious with him parts. I am the resurrection, and the life, he says.
Therefore, many of the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
Lent 5 A RCL
St. Paul's Episcopal Church
Walla Walla, Washington, USA
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