Sunday 3rd November 2024
Wisdom 3, 1-9
Revelation 21, 1-6a
John 11 32-34
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
Today is All Saint’s Day - a feast day, when we celebrate the many inspirational ways in which men and women through the ages have lived and died in ways which make the light of Christ real for us in a world which can seem perilous and bleak. Just when the days grow shorter and the increasingly dark evenings may seem depressing our readings today invite us to wonder at the ways in which God invites us to see flickerings of that same Christ-light in our own humanity, our own potential for becoming saint-like, ‘sparks in the stubble’ as the writer of Wisdom’ puts it; an image which suggests how saintly lives can set fire to even the darkest, driest and most un promising places.
I remember a few years ago going to the British museum to see an exhibition about St Thomas A Beckett and being puzzled by the kiss marks on the glass cabinets containing his relics. One held a piece of his skull, rescued by monks in Canterbury cathedral after his assassination 800years ago whilst saying mass and venerated ever since, as you could see from the lip prints on the glass case.
At the time I couldn’t understand how a tiny piece of bone could inspire such love. And this love isn’t just something people feel for saints whose relics have been venerated for hundreds of years; contemporary saints can inspire similar adoration. Earlier this year there were reports of thousands of people queuing at churches and cathedrals across the country just so that they could come into the presence of a reliquary holding a tiny part of Carlo Acutis, a teenager who died in 2006 and was beatified by the Pope in 2020, making him one of the first saints of the 21st century. I used to find this sort of veneration of parts of saints- their fingers, their hearts, their bones, unsettling and strange, and yet thinking about today’s readings I wonder if the fact that they’re bits and pieces of human bodies is their point; these relics remind us that even though we ourselves may never be remembered for our saintliness the physical remains of human beings like Thomas A Beckett and Carlo Acutis hold out to us the promise that in our own fragile physicality we, like them, can still ‘run like sparks through the stubble’, setting the world on fire by acting in ways which are Christ-like.
Jesus certainly understood the intimate connection between our physical flesh and boneness and the presence of God. In John’s account of the raising of Lazarus Jesus’s own fragile humanity is at the forefront of the story. John tells us of His tears, of His being ‘deeply moved’ and ‘greatly disturbed’. Jesus’s grief is something we can all relate to. We all know what it is to mourn the death of someone precious, to have that sense of immense sadness for the passing of someone who lived and has gone and whose life mattered to us. If we had any doubts about the earthy reality of what’s happening Martha’s use of the word ‘stench’ forces us to see Jesus’s actions as taking place in our own very real world of bodily decay and emotional desolation. But Jesus invites us to see God as present in the very things we like to block out, whether it’s the realty of our own physical decay or the disturbance grief brings. This is our world; a world full of physical and spiritual obstacles which come between us and God in much the same way as the stone in the Gospel blocks Lazarus’s exit from his tomb. We all have our own ‘stones’, those big seemingly unmovable obstacles which in our minds stop us from believing fully perhaps, or loving others, or maybe letting go of our doubts or our sadnesses. In John’s Gospel Jesus’s reassurance that if you believe you will see the glory of God is followed instantly by the removal of the stone. And as the stone rolls away so we see that glory revealed in the miracle of Lazarus emerging from his tomb. ‘Unbind him and let him go’ says Jesus, offering us as well as Lazarus the promise of being liberated from the darkness of our doubts and fears. Lazarus, we know, will one day die again, but his emergence from the tomb is his response to being called out of the darkness he’s been trapped in by the light and love of Christ. The release from the tomb, from being imprisoned by the stone and all it represents, is not just for Lazarus, it’s for Mary, for Martha, for the doubters who ask why Jesus could not keep Lazarus from dying, and for us, reassuring us that the love that causes us to cry for those we mourn is also liberating because it comes from God. Lazarus has been resuscitated and will die again, but in his return to life and his answering of God’s call to live he foreshadows Christ’s own resurrection. This love, which is God’s call to us as his creation, frees us from the darkness of the tomb and all the things that worry us and cast us down, and promises light, hope and transformation. In Revelation this sense of God being present in everything that makes us human, everything that defines our mortality, is put very beautifully in the words
‘See the home of God is among mortals’ . The promise in Revelation of a new heaven and a new earth is kept later in John’s Gospel when the stone that covers the entrance to Jesus’s own tomb is rolled away to reveal that new creation in all its wonder and glory. The story of Lazarus doesn’t offer us a pain-free future; like Mary, Matha and Jesus himself we’ll always have tears, we’ll always have all the burdens which come with being human, but Jesus tells us if we, like Martha, can believe in Him then we too will see the glory of God, not in a far away future but here and now, even as we’re weeping with sadness or aching with the things that weigh us down physically and spiritually. And here the saints, in all their frail humanity, help us to see how faith can help us come through those challenges.
In his poem ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird Seamus Heaney tells the story of St Kevin, who imprisoned in a tower is only able to feel the warmth of the sun by stretching one hand through the tiny window of his cell. One day a blackbird settles on his palm and makes her nest and lays her eggs, and the poem tells how Kevin feels unable to draw his hand back.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
The poem tells how the saint’s love for the life of the bird and its young inspires him to suffer for its sake -even though he must be in agony
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms….
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
This is saintliness again as flesh and blood, not the saintliness of a piece of bone or tissue but the saintliness which comes when we put others before ourselves, when our own love inspires us to suffer and endure so that others can thrive and live, and when we live guided by the truth that Jesus commands Mary, Lazarus and all of us to accept, that God is love, and present in us and in everything around us, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
Amen.
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