“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

That line, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”, is spoken twice in the story - once by each sister. It is fraught with emotion; the voice of grief – the mourning of a beloved brother. It is an accusation: “if you had been here” - that is to say, you were nothere when I needed you. It is a question - if you had been here would he still be alive? “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Mary and Martha – are grappling with loss in the face of their faith in Jesus. It’s the sentiment behind every moment of grief, failure and disappointment; the regret of our impotence thrown like small stones at the window of the heavens – at our perpetual disappointment at life, ourselves, and others. It’s the voice that rings through history at the suffering of war, of earthquake, of failed revolutions, of disease and famine and drought and fire and flood, of school-massacres, pointless terrorism, torture and execution.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

We are told that Jesus is “Emmanuel”: God with us. Jesus reveals God as love and promises to be with us to the end of the age. We come to church, we share the Eucharist, in faith that this is true, but can we resolve this with our experience? If faith is to be real it has to honestly make sense of our experience; it has to be able to give a shape to how we see the world and so it has to contend with this question that returns to us time and again:

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”

Where were you? In my moment of need, where are you?

This story is the Christian attempt to make sense of this question. And because of this – because it is an attempt to justify the ways of God to man, it’s full of contradiction. It’s the last and greatest of Jesus’ signs – the end of his public ministry. It demonstrates his omnipotence: his power over life and death. But it’s the only real moment of humanity, of emotional turbulence within the whole Gospel.

Two weeks ago, we heard the Samaritan woman who caught Jesus tired and thirsty, but even then it was the encounter, not food, drink or rest that sustained the indefatigable Jesus. Last week the Gospel was the crucifixion. Jesus is almost superhuman to the end in this Gospel. There’s no agony in the garden, no “Lord, Lord, why has thou forsaken me”, Jesus is in control – he has foreseen this: from the cross he organizes those who follow him, and speaks to fulfil Scripture.

Strangely though it is this moment, the raising of Lazarus, at which his divine power is apparently most on show that he is most human. He is ‘greatly disturbed in spirit’ and ‘deeply moved’, ‘again greatly disturbed’, and in that shortest verse in the Bible, we are told in a better translation, “Jesus wept.” What the Gospel does is to confuse our sense of what is divine and what is human. Because at this moment which puts on show his miraculous powers he is grieving and weeping. And at the climax of the Gospel, the moment from which all Christian theology unfolds, there is no miracle at all, just a man put to death. Strangely Jesus is most human when he is most divine; and most divine when he is most human.

And I think, even at our most faithful, we’re mostly with Martha as she tries to make sense of the death of her brother. Jesus speaks to her the words of faith: “Your brother will rise again.” And in our faith we manage: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” This is faith deferred. Hope deferred. This life is much as we expect, but in our faith we think that after death we might understand better; see that miracle; meet God; we are waiting for God; hoping but not expecting; that after the ordinary experience of suffering and death, we might see God.

But Jesus says to her “I am the resurrection and the life.” The present tense tells us that even in death life is already present. A second contradiction that where the evidence tells us that life has ended, that this person is no more, they are alive in Christ. They are already at peace in God’s kingdom. The resurrection is with us here, now. And over the years the paradox has been strengthened by the weight of those enchanted words:  “I am the resurrection and the life”, the words which begin every funeral. Words of faith in the face of death that this is not the end.

Our instincts tell us that God is on the side of the young and beautiful, the healthy, vivacious and rich – this is where you find God – we know God’s presence by his blessings. We think that faith is like the lyrics to a Destiny’s Child song: ‘After all of the darkness and sadness/ Still comes happiness/ If I surround myself with positive things/ I'll gain prosperity.’ But Jesus is not the light of the world because he makes things beautiful, because everything he touches turns to gold; it is because he reveals the divine in the human, and our humanity in God. It’s because he promises that when all hope is gone, when all is corruption, God is at work, God is present. And even though Jesus dies young, tormented and tortured, this does not make him any less loved by God.  It shows that God’s love and presence are found in the darkest parts of our lives.

This repeated refrain, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”, (a line perhaps spoken between the sisters frustrated by Jesus’ absence), is a form of protest, of faith struggling to grapple with reality. It may remind us of Moses arguing with God, of Jacob wrestling with God, or Job picking his scabs in the desert.  It reminds us that while God wants us to have life in abundance, God is most present when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, have torn what is most dear to us. And that when pretense and ambition and appearance and pride have been stripped away, it is then God is closest to us. And if, then, we can still love – then that is when we are closest to God.

It is that A-level philosophy moment when people often reject God as incompatible with the suffering they imagine in the world. Christianity turns this problem on its head. It answers that suffering is exactly where you find God. Not the neat god of comfort, the god who solves problems, an easy God; the God who is super-human or in-human; but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who suffers on the cross, the God who takes suffering so seriously that it is the means by which he demonstrates his love for the world.

We have now entered Passiontide, which if we take the Christian journey seriously is the holiest time of year. It’s where we take time to reflect on the nature of suffering and love, and – if we dare to have faith find in them the revelation of God, for which the Church has for thousands of years now found the basis of prayer, service and praise. I am the resurrection and the life. Dare we believe it? Rather than seeking God in perfection, in power, in beauty, might we instead find it in suffering, in weakness, and in our mortality?