I’m looking at a painting of Lazarus stirring from the grave, about to climb out of a sarcophagus. It’s a painting by Vincent van Gogh, one which it has taken me 45 years to discover …
The scholars of art say Vincent, then recovering in a mental hospital from a breakdown, portrayed himself as Lazarus, thus the red hair and circumspect red beard, and used the painting to suggest his own sense of recuperation and returning to life in the world outside the hospital.
It’s a dramatic but colourful depiction, full of the yellow which scholars also say symbolised for Vincent the pulsating, radiating love of God, seen here as the sun – a vigorous yellow, orb-like eye watching, we presume with approval, the unfolding event below.
What strikes me most, however, is the distraught look on Lazarus’ face and the even more distraught visage of a woman who may be Martha, her sister Mary in shadowed prayerful piety ironically hidden in the foreground. This Martha’s arms are outstretched in shock, her mouth gaping in a cry of horror. She looks as if she has run to the tomb upon seeing her brother stirring.
I’m struck, also for the first time in 45 years, by the absence of the joy and celebration I had tended to read into the story. John in fact tells us little about the emotions of the event, other than Jesus’ famous lacrimosity, giving rise (no pun intended) in some translations of the Christian scriptures to the shortest verse in the bible: Jesus wept (in the NRSV translated as Jesus began to weep).
Then I begin to realise, Of course this is not the gay and carefree event so many assume it to be. This is the penultimate power of the Living God in action, as it were before our eyes. (The ultimate act of God’s power will be the resurrection of Jesus himself, the event which this raising of Lazarus foreshadows.)
To experience the power of the Living God is to feel unspeakable awe, the “fear” which strikes us mute as our scrambled brains, filled with empirical knowledge, try to come to terms with what is taking place. …For at the same time as God meddles with the supposedly natural order and obliterates our preconceived and pre-experienced notions of it, yet we are forced to continue living in this world, but now with additional information which defies everything we have ever seen or learned before.
Just imagine looking out the window and seeing someone we knew and love who has died, walking up the drive. How do we greet such a person when they knock on our door? What do we ask them? How do we establish their true identity? Much doubt (Darn, I knew I shouldn’t have had that last tequila sunrise) and many, many questions before we get anywhere near throwing a par-tay.
John is quite clear about the reason God raises Lazarus. It is so that all who witness not just this miracle but every miracle of Jesus, the Son, might come to believe in Jesus, in and through whom we find our salvation from the cul-de-sac of eternal death.
That’s a theological proposition.
But God never acts gratuitously. God is not into party tricks simply to impress people or get something really impressive on the divine CV. Nor is God into one-way, authoritarian relationships. Any miracle in which we recognise the presence and power of the Living God calls us into an action based on what we have witnessed or come to believe.
Certainly, God may be giving us yet another free gift, bestowing yet another blessing, but either or both are meaningless if we ourselves do not begin surfing the bottom line in response to God’s action.
That bottom line is simply to change our own lives. Chances are, that change will have a flow-on effect in the lives of the people and world around us.
Prosaic and challenging as the notion may be, if we are able to witness any miracle of the Living God and subsequently fail to change, then NO MIRACLE has actually taken place! All God has accomplished is indeed a party trick - a pretty impressive one, most like, but nothing worth so much as a text message.
Perhaps, then, part of the initial horror and strickenness of witnessing or participating in a miracle is the subliminal realisation that it will demand personal change. Because God is Spirit, as John reminds us, and therefore invisible, it’s easy enough to cruise along without anything more than cursory reference to the divine. But when the divine acts without ambiguity then suddenly we have to climb out of our spiritual hammocks, fire our life-coaches and begin to get real with God.
The real gift, however, in any miracle we witness is not the miracle itself but the realisation that the Living God invites us, in much the same way as those pulsating crescents of yellow in van Gogh’s painting, into God’s love. Again, we are not simply the passive recipients of God-action but people drawn in by God’s love arc-ing out from the center.
Such a gift in turn allows us to realise our inadequacy to respond fully. And the real miracle happens when we seek the life-giving Spirit who dwells within us and begin to use the Spirit’s power to effect the changes within ourselves which lead to changes in others and the world around us.
This remains the import of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, given fleshly form and spiritual life in order to give hope to the exiles in Babylon. But that hope – and the promise of return to Israel – are not for the purpose of reclaiming dirt and rebuilding dwellings. They exist in order to change the people, and that change in turn exists in order to change the world – for the better.
But when we accept the gift and the miracle without invoking the Spirit to help us change, we end up with situation Paul describes: a focus on human things, leading to our own and others’ death.
The Spirit, however, is lifegiving, precisely because the Spirit fills us with and at the same time leads us into the source of life.
Our own worlds are filled with miracles, divine gifts and blessings. How many do we recognise? It’s easy enough to measure – all we need to do is calculate the amount of change we have undertaken or become aware of consciously participating in.
The raising of Lazarus is so much a part of our tradition that it has become dead theatre and we sit back and politely applaud at the right moment. We know how to respond – but do we know how to change?
Every miracle of the Living God calls us to change in the power of the Holy Spirit. And we can posit a simple formula: miracle = change. No change, no miracle.
As we enter some challenging times, we need to start recognising some of God’s miracles within our own lives and our community. Let us be on the look-out. What miracles will we experience this coming week – and beyond?
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