UNBIND HIM!

Did you know:

That if all 600 muscles in your body pulled in one direction, you could lift about 25 tons?
That every drop of blood in your body passes through your heart once each minute?
That the speed at which nerve messages travel can be as fast as 200-400 miles per hour, making your nervous system faster than the world’s fastest computer?

And my personal favorite - that the mitral valve (in the heart) gets its name from the word “mitre” because, when viewed from above, it looks like a Bishop’s mitre?

I learned these and other fascinating facts about the human body when the Cathedral Youth Group visited the Bodies Revealed exhibit at the XL Center on Friday night. The exhibit, which consists of actual human bodies, was made possible because of the generosity of persons from China – persons who chose to donate their bodies to medical science for the purpose of study and education. The bodies are preserved by a process known as polymer preservation, “a revolutionary technique in which human tissue is permanently preserved using liquid silicone rubber, (which) prevents the natural process of decay.”

Unlike contemporary scientific advances that enable such preservation, and unlike the embalming practices of their Egyptian neighbors, in Jesus’ day Jews simply anointed their dead with perfume and wrapped them in bands of cloth. Burial takes place on the first day; by the third day, the body begins to decompose – resulting in an overpowering, nauseating stench. As Hebrew scholar, Andre Neher, notes in The Exile of the Word, Jews believe that the soul of the deceased hovers around the body for about three days, hoping to re-enter (it), but after the third day, when the soul ‘sees that the color of the face has changed,’ it leaves the body forever.

So when Jesus arrives four days after Lazarus’ death and burial, we can be confident that Lazarus is really, really, really dead. Not surprisingly, Martha seems a bit miffed at Jesus – “Lord, if you had been here . . .”
“If you had been here. . .”

How many times have you and I heard, thought or said those words?

“If you had been here . . .” Words which suggest Martha’s faith in Jesus’ power to heal, but words which also reveal her bewilderment at his delay – when he heard that Lazarus was ill, why didn’t Jesus drop everything, rush over to Bethany, and heal him?
Isn’t that the expected, the reasonable thing to do?
Especially for someone who says he loves Lazarus?

Jesus uses her concern to help Martha come to a deeper understanding of who he is. So, as New Testament scholar Tom Wright suggests, “instead of looking at the past, and dreaming about what might have been (but now can’t be), (Jesus) invites (Martha) to look to the future. Then, having looked to the future, he asks her to imagine that the future is suddenly brought into the present. . . The new creation, and with it the resurrection, has come from the end of time into the middle of time. Jesus has not just come . . . ‘from heaven to earth . . . he has come from God’s future into the present . . . (so) the resurrection is a person, and he is standing in front of Martha . . . challenging her, urging her, to exchange her ‘if only . . .’ for an ‘if Jesus.’”

At this point, Martha goes off to find Mary, leaving us with Jesus – the Jesus who invites us to ponder the same possibilities he posed to Martha:

If Jesus is really who he is revealing himself to be . . .
If Jesus is God’s son, the one who makes known to us what God is really like . . .
If Jesus is resurrection, the one who invites us to imagine God’s future, and then to behave as though that future is a reality, thereby bringing that future into the present . . .
If Jesus . . .

And what does it mean for us to be disciples of such an unpredictable, uncontrollable Messiah?
Of one whose behavior shows us that God’s timing is not our timing?
That God’s ways are not our ways?

Seeing things within the confines of human reason, Mary voices the same concern as her sister: “Lord, if you had been here . . .” Seeing the tears of Mary and the Jews who came to console Mary and Martha, the Son of God, the One who reveals God’s true nature to the world, begins to weep.

But, some will say, if Jesus is so concerned for Lazarus and his sisters, why did he not come sooner? Couldn’t he have avoided all this pain in the first place?

During the delay, perhaps, as Wright suggests, Jesus was praying for strength to face what he likely sensed would happen when he returned to Bethany – Bethany, a little town about two miles outside of Jerusalem – Jerusalem, where only recently, when he openly stated that he and the Father “are one,” the Jewish leaders had picked up stones to stone him. Because some of the Jews who are with Mary are from Jerusalem, it is very likely that word will get back to the religious leaders about the miracle that is about to take place. And, if you and I were to look up the verse immediately following the end of today’s gospel, we will find out what those leaders conclude after hearing about Jesus’ latest miracle.

But in spite of what is to come, in spite of the cost to himself, Jesus chooses to reveal to those present that God is really with him and in him – that he and the Father are indeed one. When he tells those gathered to remove the stone, Martha logically points out that there would be a stench. They remove the stone anyway – and Jesus immediately thanks God for having heard his prayer. Is it possible, then, that as Wright asserts, during the delay Jesus also was praying that Lazarus’ body would be protected from decomposing? So when Lazarus comes out, not only would there not be a stench, but his body would be whole – free from decay?

In spite of how hopeless the situation looked, Jesus did his part, Lazarus did his part, and the community did its part – and, together, they brought life out of death, hope out of despair.

Today, some of us are going to see the stage adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, a novel about an ugly little girl called Pecola. Set in 1940 in Lorain, Ohio, the birthplace of Morrison, the novel is based on an actual experience Morrison had with a classmate – an African-American girl who wished she had blue eyes so she could be pretty, so everyone would love her. In the afterword to the novel, Morrison reflects that “implicit in her desire was her racial self-loathing. And (Morrison adds) twenty years later I was still wondering how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale?”

Jesus calls the community to unbind those who are bound, to bring life out of death, hope out of despair.

Yesterday, some of us attended a presentation on the state of education in Hartford’s public schools. One of the presenters, Susan Eaton, described her experiences with Jeremy, a precocious, 8-year-old Latino boy whose “world (in the year 2000) consisted of his apartment, his school and the block he walked between home and school.” Jeremy was clear that he wanted to live elsewhere, but, when he began third grade, he hadn’t even heard of towns West Hartford, Simsbury, Avon or Wethersfield. One day, as he was going with his younger brother’s social worker to visit his brother and his foster family, Jeremy finally saw West Hartford. When asked what he thought of that town, Jeremy said glumly, “It’s so nice out that way . . . I couldn’t believe it was really a true thing.”

Jesus calls the community to unbind those who are bound, to bring life out of death, hope out of despair.

That does not mean demeaning girls with blue eyes or folks who live in West Hartford, and it does not mean giving blue contact lenses to girls with brown eyes, or relocating city boys to suburban towns. It means challenging the societal structures that lead to the desperation of the “Pecolas” and the “Jeremys” of our world – the ones who cannot unbind themselves – the ones who yearn to be free of what keeps them bound – ego-damaging beauty standards, fear-based housing discrimination, heart-breaking financial woes.

The “Pecolas” and “Jeremys” of the world need communities - communities that are
courageous enough to step forward,
daring enough to reach out,
caring enough to loose them –
communities that know that the same Spirit that empowered Jesus is the same Spirit that lives in all members of the body of Christ.

If you and I really believe that Jesus is resurrection, the one who invites us to imagine God’s future and then to behave as though that future is a reality, thereby

bringing that future into the present,
bringing life where there once was death,
bringing hope where there once was despair,

how many people - how many people - might this community unbind?