All Saints: The Gospel turned on its head

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 24:1-6; Rev 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.

I would dare to say that in this Gospel are most of the themes of John’s Gospel. But it is a world made strange. It is the Gospel turned on its head.

In John’s Gospel there is a preoccupation with where Jesus is from. John 1 – spoiler alert –  The Word was with God. The correct answer to where is Jesus from. But then Philip announces the Messiah as Jesus of Nazareth; to which Nathaniel replies ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip: ‘Come and see’.

After the feeding of the 5000 many reject Jesus for saying “I am the bread of heaven” because they say they know his father and mother. They know where he is from. Nazareth. And later they will say: ‘Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee.’

Finally, at the end of the trial sequence, Pilate asks Jesus ‘where are you from?’ Jesus gives no answer.

This is mirrored when Jesus speaks of returning to the Father. The crowds and then the disciples, famously Thomas: ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?’

The Gospel consistently separates the worldly from the spiritual, like goats from sheep.

Where is Jesus coming from and going to? From Galilee to the Cross? Or from the Father to the Father.

Then a second motif:  Come and see. At the Call of the Disciples in chapter one it occurs twice: the invitation to follow Jesus. Then in chapter 4, the Samaritan woman, now a disciple, calls others to Come and See. Curious? Come and see.

A third motif. The Gospels have different Christologies, different inflections on who Jesus is. The fourth Gospel is written for one reason, which its author helpfully tells us: That ‘ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.’ But the Gospel says more: We have all those ‘I am’ statements I’ve spoken about before, hidden declarations of the divine name; And that prologue: ‘the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ Finally, Thomas faced with the resurrected Christ declares without ambiguity:  ‘My Lord and my God!’

But here it’s: Jesus wept. In one of those moments when you need the King James Bible for its poetic understanding that this verse is deliberately a short punch: Ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς Jesus wept. This is supposed to be the big miracle – the final sign; the revelation of divinity… but we encounter Jesus’ humanity –  he grieves, he weeps he knows pain like us.

So what on earth is going on with the single line I began with: Jesus asks: Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Everything is reversed. It is Jesus asking where. It is the crowds, calling disciples. It’s Jesus as a man.

Why is this? My instinctive sense is that it’s because at this point we’re dealing with the News of the World. i.e. Not the Good News. We are going to the known place. The place of this world. The place which those who are of the world call others to. It is the place of death. It is godless.

This moment, then, is a microcosm of the Gospel. From the prologue we know that in him was life and that life was the light of the world. He has declared himself ‘the bread of life’ and he will declare ‘I am the resurrection and the life’.

This is the moment that Jesus takes the Good News into the News of the World and overturns it.  Lazarus, come forth! Life out of death –  The revelation of God.

For the Gospel of John, then, there are two paths. There are those who will say, Jesus came from Nazareth and went to the cross. They will invite you to follow them and they will lead you to the tomb of a man.

Then there is the way of Jesus Christ. Who has told us that he came from the Father and returned to the Father. He invites us to follow him, the way, the truth and the light. Where he is revealed as God, being one with the Father.

But this passage does more. It prepares us for the final revelation of God on the cross.

The raising of Lazarus is a sort of mythological event. High drama. It is the act of a powerful god. Lazarus, come forth! Loose him, and let him go. Jesus as played by Charlton Heston. We understand it as revelation of divinity by power. Life from death. But instead John foregrounds Jesus’ humanity. He weeps.

It’s placed almost by way of contrast, next to the cross. Superficially, we have comparable miracles. Days later a person is raised from the dead. But everything in John’s Gospel points us to the cross, and not the resurrection. It is the hour for which he has come. On the cross his words are not, ‘my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’ but: ‘it is accomplished’. He is in control. He’s not weeping – Here is Jesus in his divinity: The cross, not the resurrection, is the revelation of God as love.

And it’s this strange compounding of humanity in omnipotence; And in control in extremis and death; That John conveys his identification of love with God.

Since the book of Acts, Christians have never been a magical cult who went around raising corpses from the dead. But they have been a people prepared to die for one another and for the good news they received that God is love and we ought to love one another.

They are then a people who found divinity in the most human of realities. A reality which has never been far from Christians.

When we read Jesus asking: Where have ye laid him?  They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. We are perhaps also hearing the imagination of the church in faith that Jesus has gone to their brothers and sisters; In the knowledge that Jesus would weep also for them and for all who die in the faith; And that we too might looking forward to that moment when the voice calls out: ‘Lazarus, come forth!’

So on this All Saints’ day, we pray for the church, past, present and future; We listen again for that voice calling “Come and See” on his journey from the Father to the Father; And we wait for that moment on the edge of eternity, when God shall call out our names, crying: ‘Loose him, and let him go.’ Amen.