The Rev. Noah Van Niel
The Chapel of the Cross
March 29th, 2020
Lent V: Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; John 11:1-45
You’ve heard, this past week, a lot of talk comparing our current national situation to a war. It’s been used as people talk about our “common enemy,” and as a rationale for why extreme government intervention is needed. It’s been used as a rallying cry to pump up production of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers, and to inspire us to make individual sacrifices for the greater good. It’s also been used to describe the eerily empty cityscapes and avenues across the globe, normally teeming with people and vehicles, now deserted. But there is another aspect of this metaphor of war that, for me has proven most apt in these difficult days: death. There’s the literal death count, going up by the day; the bodies piling up outside overrun hospitals and the stories of friends and relatives falling ill and dying, which are circling ever closer to home as the numbers increase. But just as troubling is the inescapable, oppressive prospect of death hovering around each of our lives in a way it never has, at least in my lifetime. An invisible adversary is on the prowl and everyone, everything is a threat. Every time I step outside my house I find myself hyper alert to where am I going? What am I touching? Who is near me? It’s an awful, exhausting feeling. And makes me behave in ways I never have: doing the odd dance of keeping wide distances should I cross another’s path; the donning of armor in the form of masks and gloves to go about daily routines. All of this done because anyone, or anything we touch could lead to our death. I’ve never been in one, so I’m speculating here, but that’s what I imagine it feels like to be in an active war zone: the prospect of death hiding around every corner. Of course the reality is for most of us death is not around the corner. Even those who may contract this disease are likely to suffer only mildly, if at all. Yet the specter of death hovers over those lives just as much, because the prospect remains that this unseen contagion will turn us into killers by making us a “vector,” one responsible for spreading the virus and unintentionally causing the death of another. All of this is undeniably terrifying—both the getting and the giving—and so we live now, in this constant state of fear.
Fear is a corrosive emotion. It eats away at you, burns you up. That’s something Howard Thurman talks about in his book Jesus and the Disinherited, the book we have been invited to read as a parish and as a diocese this Lent (remember Lent??). Thurman is talking about the constant fear that the poor, the dispossessed, the disinherited live in, not the fear during a viral pandemic, but the root of that fear is very much the same: a threat to one’s life. He calls this fear “one of the hounds of hell,” and likens it to the very air you breathe closing in around you, “like the fog in San Francisco or in London.” “It is nowhere in particular yet everywhere,” he writes. “It is a mood which one carries around with himself, distilled from the acrid conflict with which his days are surrounded” (26-27).[1] When I first read those lines a few weeks ago, I didn’t really know what he was talking about. But now I do. But even more troubling, Thurman reminds us, is the long-term impact of this fear on our minds, bodies, and souls. “The effect of fear [on us],” he writes, “is nothing short of disaster in the organism. For studies show, fear actually causes chemical changes in the body, affecting the blood stream and muscular reactions.” It takes you over, essentially, like a virus, it eats away at your nerves and slow poisons your soul and becomes, “finally,” he says, “death for the self” (35).
We don’t know what illness killed Lazarus. In 1st century Palestine it could have been pretty much anything. Death was easy to come by back then. But we do know that when Jesus hears that his friend is sick he acts in a very peculiar manner. He stays away. Not as an early form of social distancing, but because he has a point to make. And the point was not raising Lazarus from the tomb. It actually comes a few minutes before, when he is talking to Martha, outside the village. The philosophy of that time held that on last day all the faithful would be raised in a kind of corporate resurrection when heaven and earth became one. But Jesus says we don’t have to wait that long. He says to Martha, “No, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” This is his point: that he is master of both the living and the dead and faith in him changes our relationship to death. In other words, Jesus came not to take away death, but to take away the fear of death, and break the power that fear has on our lives. That is his point. That is the gift he came to give us. Often it gets overshadowed by the dramatic flourish at the end of the story but the calling forth of Lazarus from the tomb is just the exclamation point at the end of this sentence, used to drive home the message. For Jesus, miracles are always meant to communicate something, not to be ends in themselves. And this miracle proves what he says, that he is the resurrection and the life and therefore, we have nothing to fear. “Do you believe this?” he asks.
Our answer to that question is being tested in this moment. Because in these times of panic and pandemic, to claim that belief, to rest secure in that promise will require a war of sorts, but an internal one, not just an external one. Yes, we have to rout the enemy of this virus from our communities but we also have to rout the enemy of fear from its encampment in our hearts, lest we die within, and without. As Howard Thurman wrote, “Nothing less than a great daring in the face of overwhelming odds can achieve the inner security in which fear cannot possibly survive.” And to me that great daring is, that with the fear of death pressing in on us from every side, we choose to believe as an act, of defiance and defense, that Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life. For to the extent we believe that to be true, we are, in Thurman’s words, “unconquerable” (45-46).
We are all
taking many drastic steps to combat this virus, and difficult though they are, they
will save lives, God willing. So let’s keep our social distance but let’s not be
blind the toll this virus could take on our inner lives as well; how it could
corrode our souls. For, left unchecked, the long-term ramifications of this
acidic atmosphere of anxiety on our humanity, could be even worse than the illness
itself. In this moment of crisis, we must remember and believe that Jesus is
the antidote to fear. Not the antidote to death, but to the fear that the
prospect of death instills in us. So let
us fill our hearts so fully with faith in Him that there is no longer any room
for fear to move in. Let the white hot light of resurrection burn away this fog
in which we are living, that we may live unbounded and free. Because Jesus came
not just to give us eternal life in the age to come, but life, abundant life,
free from fear, here and now. And so my friends, wherever you are right now, and
however you are hearing this, hear and hold onto these words comfort and
courage straight from our Savior’s lips: Do
not be afraid.
[1] Thurman, Howard. Jesus and the Disinherited, Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996.