Death Stinks

 John 11:1-45 All Saints  November 3, 2024

All Saints Shalom
Youram Raanan

 

Right before he gets to Lazarus tomb, Jesus talks to Martha.

She tells Jesus, “If you were here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

She goes on, “But even so, I know that God will give you

whatever you ask of him” kind of easing any edge off anything

that might have sounded like anger in her first statement.

 

After a little bit of an exchange,

Jesus says to her: “I am the resurrection and the life.”

And then he asks Martha: ”Do you believe this?”

 

Martha says she does believe.

Of course she believes.

She does believe, but her belief is not

changing the situation here and now

where Lazarus is most definitely dead.

 

It says that Mary, Martha’s sister didn’t go out to meet Jesus at first.

But when he approached the tomb and he asked for her,

she came out. She says the same thing to Jesus that Martha did.

You can tell they’ve been complaining with each other.

“If you were here, my brother would not have died”.

She doesn’t follow up her question with anything,

She might have been angry. It was a good question.

They had gotten word to Jesus when Lazarus was just ill.

But Jesus waited to come to him. She had a lot of reason to be angry.

 

When Jesus finally gets to Mary and the rest of the mourners

that are there to support her, they’re in front of the tomb

and they’re all crying. Jesus doesn’t look at them and say:

“If you really believed, you wouldn’t be sad”

He doesn’t say, “Don’t cry, he’s in a better place.”

Or “God just called another angel home”

or any of the other platitudes people give at a time of grief.

 

In the face of the very real death that surrounded them,

Jesus wept.

The shortest, most succinct sentence in the bible.

In the face of death of his friend, Jesus cried.

 

Then it says that Jesus was greatly disturbed.

The original Greek is “embrimōmenos” more than disturbed,

it’s agitated, angered, boiling mad.

 

Now I read one commentary who said that Jesus wept

out of frustration and anger at everyone’s lack of faith

But that’s just silly, isn’t it? We don’t see that anywhere else.

Whenever Jesus gets mad, he gets mad at the proud

and haughty people, not the mourning people.

 

Jesus was sad and angry. Death does that.

That sadness mixed with anger, at the whole injustice of it.

And the situation we live with every day.

His friend Lazarus died. Martha and Mary were in sorrow.

Jesus was human. Fully human.

And Jesus knows what we go through

when someone we love dies. Jesus wept.

 

Then Jesus tells them to take away the stone,

Martha, always the good homemaker,

tells him that it’s too late. He’s been dead too long, the tomb

smells of death and everyone will smell it.

 

Jesus knows the smell of death.

He knows what that tomb will smell like, and the tomb stinks.

Jesus knows. Death stinks.

Experiencing a loved one’s death stinks.

Waiting for someone to die stinks.

Watching someone weaken and wither away stinks.

Knowing someone who was once vibrant and energetic

turn into a shell of their former selves stinks.

Cancer stinks, Alzheimer’s stinks, ALS stinks,

and sudden, unexpected death stinks too,

heart attacks stink, car accidents stink, natural disasters stink,

gun violence stinks, mass shootings stink,

war stinks, bombing stinks, military aggression stinks,

Death stinks.

And the whole situation is sadness mixed with anger.

 

Even though we might believe in the resurrection

and the life of the world to come with all our hearts,

death and the process and experience of death stinks.

Here in this world life has not yet won out over death

hope has not completely won out over despair

We still face the realities of this world.

 

In this world, we know death.

We know what it tastes like, what it sounds like and feels like.

We know from experience that every life will end at some point.

And we know the sadness and horror of life cut short,

by illness, by tragedy, by accidents, by violence.

We know death. And we know death stinks.

 

Sometimes religion pits belief against reality.

Sometimes religion pits belief against sorrow.

Some people act as if people of faith,

are supposed to turn off our minds, and our hearts and live in denial,

like we are supposed to look at tragedy and sadness

in the face and smile serenely and say “we’re blessed.”

As if people of faith should never be sad.

 

But that is not what Jesus shows us in this story.

In the mourning, and the sadness, and the loss and the stink,

Jesus is there with us. Jesus weeps with us. God suffers with us.

If this was the whole story, it would be good news enough,

But it is not the end of the story.

 

The whole story is that at the door of that tomb

in that in-between time when reality

was slapping them all in the face,

Jesus yelled, “Lazarus come out of that tomb”

and the dead man did.

 

When each of them were full of doubt, and anger and sorrow,

Jesus brought a bit of the Kingdom of God into that place.

Jesus brought the smell of hope into the

stench that was in the tomb for four days.

Jesus brought some of that life to come right into

the hard world of reality, in-between time they were in.

 

On All Saints Day,

we remember those people that we have lost in this past year.

We grapple with the reality of this world,

the fragility of it, the finality of it.

 

We take this time each year to remember

how death stinks, and grieving stinks,

The absence of those who have left us

never quite goes away from us.

We know the smell of death,

the inevitable consequence of all life.

We weep along with Jesus. And Jesus weeps with us.

 

And the good news is that even in the stink of death,

God has shown us that there is more.

We have seen the hope of new life after the floods of hurricanes,

After the destruction of war, and after the reality of death,

New life is possible.

 

We believe in the hope of new life.

We believe in the forgiveness of sins.

We believe that good has the power to conquer evil.

We believe that the arm of the universe bends toward justice.

We believe that God can overcome the power of death.

so even though we have one foot in reality, we still live with hope

of the life to come.

 

We do believe that God has the power to make life out of death.

Here and now, God has the power to make changes in this world

to make justice and peace and to rebuild lives

We have seen it and witnessed it, like those

people standing at Lazarus’ tomb have seen it.

 

And we believe that even after death,

God’s love and power doesn’t end.

We believe that a time will come when the saints

of all time will be joined with God.

When we will know fully of God’s love,

when we will all eat at God’s banquet table

united with one another again.

 

Right now, we are living with the stink of death.

But we are also living with the

one who is the resurrection and the life.