The Violence of Love

 John 11:1-45  March 26, 2023

Oscar Romero
Bishop of El Salvador

 

Like the woman at the well,

The story of Jesus raising Lazarus 

only appears in the gospel of John.

 

Miracles for John are always more than just miracles,

they are signs of something larger.

They point to something about Jesus and

they are there to show us something about the activity of God

and the Holy Spirit in our world.

John actually calls them “signs”

So what is this miracle showing us?

Jesus brings resurrection and life, obviously.
But not just that, there’s more to it.

To decipher it, we have to review the story a little.

There are a bunch of different details to look at,

but I specifically want to look at Jesus

interaction with Martha.

 

So Jesus is in another town and he gets word

that his friend Lazarus is very ill.

Now , you think he might go quickly to see him and help him.

It says Lazarus and Mary and Martha were special friends of Jesus.

He had gone to help other people,

you might expect that he would have made

a special effort to go and help Lazarus. But no.

Jesus takes his time and stays a while longer wherever he was.

 

So it’s four days after Lazarus is dead,

for four days Mary and Martha were grieving over their brother.

And when Jesus arrives at Bethany,

you can kind of feel the anger in the air.

Martha meets Jesus on the road and says,

“If you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

I mean she’s seen him cure so many people before,

so many strangers, he could have come and helped his friend.

 

So Jesus tells her “Your brother will live again.”

And Martha tells him:

“I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”

 

Now, Jewish people at that time believed

in the resurrection on the last day,

It was what the Pharisees were teaching,

So Martha is giving this line back of normal rote stuff

everyone would have been taught in their

religious education classes.

“Yes, yes, he’ll rise on the last day. I know eternal life.”

She may have even been annoyed by Jesus religious response.

 

And I can completely understand that if she was.

When someone dies, lots of people’s inclination

is to tell the person who is grieving

“It’s okay, your loved one is in heaven now”

or “God needed another angel” or some other platitude like that.

But telling someone those things are not usually consoling.

Especially when the death is unexpected, or the person is young,

their loved ones still have to remain here,

and deal with the pain and loss,

and pay the bills, and live alone,

and raise the kids by themselves.

Practically speaking, saying to someone,

“Your husband, or brother, or wife, or child is in heaven”

is not comforting in every situation.

And it wouldn’t have been in this one.

 

But it’s apparent that is not what Jesus meant.

Jesus doesn’t quite correct her, but he says,  

 “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Jesus is saying, while I’m here, new life is possible.

He’s not talking about the after-life

He’s talking about resurrection here and now.

 

And that’s exactly what Jesus does.

 

Jesus calls to the previously dead man:

“Lazarus come out” and Lazarus walks out,

his body still wrapped up in the cloths

he was buried in, and Jesus tells the rest of the people to

“Unbind him and let him go”.

 

And that is the sign that this miracle points to in John’s gospel.

Jesus is the resurrection and the life.

Not only in some point in the future,

but right here and right now. 

That doesn’t mean that Jesus is literally bringing

dead people to life these days, that’s never

been a ministry of the Christian church,

but the gospel of the unconditional love and forgiveness of God

has the ability to bring people, communities, and the world

back to life, right here on earth in this realm

in real time, all the time.

 

And when religion doesn’t get in its own way,

the community of Christ can be part of that.

Jesus gospel of love and forgiveness has the power

to empower and give life to the world.

 

So it’s sad and ironic that lots of people 

in the Christian church haven’t gotten past

the idea that Christianity is ONLY about the after-life,

and going to heaven or hell after you die.

That Jesus and his church ONLY have rule

over the after-life is a much safer story to tell.

It is not disruptive to the status quo.

It leaves the powers of this world to run everything here.

But this sign of the raising of Lazarus  points to the fact

that  Jesus means to bring resurrection and life right now.

 

And according to John’s Gospel, this was the very last straw.

This was the thing that pushed the religious

leaders over the edge.

This was the moment, hearing about this miracle,

that convinced them that Jesus needed to die.

 

But some people went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 
So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council and said,
“What are we to do? This man is performing many signs.  
But one of them, said to them, “You know nothing at all! ⁵⁰ 
You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man 
die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.

So from that day on they planned to put him to death.” 

This is how the world reacts to resurrection and new life.

This is how people react to God’s presence in the world.

It’s controversial, it’s dangerous, it’s a scandal, it’s a threat.

When the church remains safe behind its doors,

talking just about the after-life, everyone is fine with it.

 

Even when it’s spouting off it’s tough discriminating

rules and regulations, judgments, and condemning

people and groups of people to hell,

even when it calls for killing and death,

everyone seems pretty comfortable with that,

because that is business as usual.

 

But when the body of Christ comes out of the

safety of the church with words of empowerment

and new life for the previously bound,

when that new life threatens to upset the

status quo of society, then there’s trouble.

Then people get upset.

People got threatened and upset at Jesus,

and they’ve gotten upset with other people who 

have used that power to unbind and release the oppressed and hated too.

 

In the 1970’s Oscar Romero was appointed arch bishop of

El Salvador. The ruling classes were happy.

He was a friend of the rich oligarchy who ruled the country.

He was content to keep the status quo alive

even though it was crushing the El Salvadoran people

 

Poverty and hunger was rampant,

schools and health care for average people were abysmal

or non-existent, rents for farms were outrageous,

and poor people were taxed at a much higher rate

than rich people. And to keep all this in place,

corruption and voter suppression was rampant.

 

Meanwhile, through paramilitary groups,

the government was putting down

any kind of opposition or any type of protest

they killed many of union leaders, activists, teachers, students and

anyone suspected of sympathizing with the peasants.

 

For a while Oscar Romero and the church did what the church

oftne did which was support the rich and powerful

and ignore the people.

 

But in March of 1977, Oscar Romero’s friend

Father Rutillo Grande was assassinated by

security forces in the village of peasants that he served.

The church requested that Bishop Romero to have the

funeral quietly in the small  province where

Rutillo Grande served, as to not bring attention to it.

 

But, against the wishes of the church,

Oscar Romero held the funeral at the

cathedral in San Salvador, the capital city.

 

People flooded into the mass from all over the country

and Romero spent the time afterwards

hearing stories of suffering from peasant farmers.

It was then that Oscar Romero was converted,

It was then that he could finally see,

and changed his life and the role of the church in El Salvador.

 

He left his comfortable Bishop’s palace,

and lived in relative poverty with the people.

And he started to speak out against the

war, violence, and injustice happening

during his regular Sunday sermon

He preached non-violent resistance and reconciliation

which was broadcast to all of El Salvador on the radio.

 

The Salvadoran government, backed by the

United States was wreaking havoc on the country

in an attempt to tamp down on protests and unrest.

 

On March 23rd, in his regular Sunday sermon broadcast,

Romero called on Salvadoran soldiers

to defy the orders of the government,

obey God’s higher calling, and stop carrying out

the government’s repression for them,

and stop killing their brothers and sisters.

 

The next day, on March 24th, 1980, 43 years ago this weekend,

Oscar Romero was presiding at a mass at a hospital

for terminal cancer patients.

After he finished his sermon, and stepped away

from the pulpit, Bishop Romero was assassinated.

He was shot and killed, right on the altar of a chapel.

 

In 2009, the state of El Salvador finally

admitted their responsibility in his murder.

  

A 12 year civil war would follow his killing

that caused untolled death and destruction

in that country, without the preaching

of non violence that Romero

 

Romero didn‘t want one side or another to win.

He advocated for a stop to the violence and repression.

He advocated for justice and peace and reconciliation.

he advocated for the liberation of all the citizens of El Salvador

who were bound by oppression and violence

no matter what side of the situation they were on.

What the church should be advocating for.

And that felt disruptive and threatening.

 

Romero called it the “Violence of Love“

which he said feels like violence because it upsets

the status quo and the social order of things.

It is this love, he said,

which left Jesus nailed to a cross.

 

He said “Let us not tire of preaching love;

it is the force that will overcome the world.
Let us not tire of preaching love.
Though we see that waves of violence succeed
in drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out;

it is the only thing that can.”

 

I was in El Salvador in 2017

and  Oscar Romero is honored and remembered.

His picture was in almost every church we went into.

There are murals of him on walls all over.

He’s still lives in the hearts of

the people there for doing what the church

should be doing: advocating for the bound and oppressed,

stepping into the complicated fray of life.

Bringing new life out of old, dry bones.

Jesus is the resurrection and the life.

And the gospel of love, forgiveness, justice, and reconciliation

that he brings has the power to raise and empower

the ones who were dead and forgotten

and condemned to new life.

 

And even though it might upset the status quo,

we, the church of Christ,

have been asked to be a part of

sharing this new life with others.