Summary: Christ unbinds us from painful and limiting memories.
Nothing brings memories to the forefront of the mind like a funeral visitation.
Few of us get very far in life without having had that experience -- making the doleful trek to a funeral home, or some other place where friends and family of the deceased have assembled. This get-together goes by various names: words as bland and innocuous sounding as the English language can offer up. Call it the "visitation," or the "calling hours" or the "wake." Call it just the "gathering," if you really want to be nonspecific. And many do, feeling that it's an uncomfortable subject.
Those events can be an awkward experience. A great many of us live lives largely unmoored from certain social conventions our ancestors knew all too well. Great-grandfather and great-grandmother knew what to do and say and wear to such a solemn occasion -- far better than we. The boldest and most gregarious among us fall into unaccustomed silence, timidly traversing the thick funeral-home carpet, into the large empty space where largely silent people are milling around or sitting on chairs arranged in rows.
Fortunately for the ill-at-ease, the bereaved family has thoughtfully provided a distraction and conversation-starter. Great-grandfather and great-grandmother never had much in the way of family photos to display -- and the idea of a slide show playing on a laptop would have been quite beyond them. But in the smartphone age, we have no shortage of snapshots to display. More than anything else in that elegantly appointed room, it's the pictures that summon the memories, and that's a good thing.
Baby pictures, graduation photos, wedding photos, unsmiling military portraits with a flag in the background. Group shots of people clustered together, so as to fit within the viewfinder. There are vacation snaps as well -- fun at the beach or the lake or the fishing hole or posing in front of the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. There are also the ordinary, everyday shots -- sitting at the picnic table or hanging wallpaper or just dozing in a favorite chair.
Those photo displays evoke a treasure-trove of memories.
It's good to remember. As we recall again the names of people we've known and loved, other reflections come back to us: a voice, a laugh, a twinkle in the eye, the gentle touch of a hand.
Yes, it's good to remember, but remembering can also be painful. If the loss is recent, it can be hard to even hear the name without a tear coming to the eye. Nothing unusual, there. This is how it should be. This is how we grieve.
Grieving takes time. Don't ever let anyone tell you how long you ought to grieve. It's different for everyone. Sometimes, though, it does happen that -- far from being a healing, restorative process -- grief becomes a heavy burden that's hard to let go of.
It's said that "time heals all wounds," but that's not always true. Many of us know firsthand that some memories are not so easily healed. Some memories deliver fresh pain as soon as they come to mind, even if they are years old. Maybe it's the memory of losing a loved one, or of a divorce or of some dream for the future that had to be reluctantly set aside. Maybe it's something we did or said that brought ridicule, shame or embarrassment. Maybe it's how we hurt someone we loved. Maybe it's how someone we loved hurt us, a very long time ago.
Wouldn't it be a great thing if we could experience the healing of memories like that? Wouldn't it be great if they could be stripped of their ability to cause pain, as a florist strips a long-stemmed rose of its thorns? Wouldn't it be a great thing if we could just move on?
It wasn't a memory that was very old, in today's Gospel lesson, but, for Mary and her sister Martha, it was like an open wound. Their brother, Lazarus, had been on his deathbed. Mary and Martha had sent an urgent message to their friend, Jesus, to come with all haste and make Lazarus well. But Jesus hadn't come.
Lazarus, their beloved brother, breathed his last. They bathed his body and wrapped it tightly in strips of linen cloth, soaking each layer with fragrant ointments and oils, as was the custom. They laid the body on a stone shelf in the family tomb and rolled the heavy stone to seal off the dark opening.
Not long after that, Jesus finally showed up. Martha saw him first. Each sister in turn said the same thing to him: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
Ouch!
Martha goes on to speak another line, one that sounds more hopeful: "But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him."
Martha and Jesus then engage in that famous exchange about life and death, in which Jesus says: "I am the resurrection and the life."
"Do you believe this?" he asks her.
Martha claims she does -- although it's hard to imagine she has the slightest inkling of what's about to happen.
Jesus simply asks for directions to Lazarus' tomb. You know how the story unfolds from there: They walk to the tomb, a crowd of curiosity-seekers trailing behind. He gives the order to unseal the tomb. He does it over Martha's objection that this is crazy, the body's going to stink.
Jesus barks an order: "Lazarus, come out!" And he does -- in a scene so eerie and frightening, it rivals any ghostly yarn you could spin on Halloween night.
Lazarus stumbles out of the darkness, like something out of a grade-B horror film -- "The Mummy's Curse," or something similar.
It's then that Jesus utters the words we ought to pay close attention to, in light of our talk today about the healing of memories: "Unbind him, and let him go."
Lazarus is living and breathing once again, but he needs one thing more. He needs his community of family and friends to take hold of those tight-wrapped linen strips and gently peel them away from his now-living flesh.
"Unbind him, and let him go." This is what we do for each other, when one of our fellow travelers on life's journey is incapacitated by grief or shame or loss. It's a vitally important mission of the Christian community. We reach out to a person whose life is bound up tight by bitter memories and begin the process of healing.
One by one, each cloth strip must be unwound. With each successive layer, a little mobility returns. The suffocating sensation of tightness goes away. The feeling of panic that comes from having one's arms strapped tight against the body disperses. Finally, the last winding-strip falls to the ground. There's the sensation of a soft breeze caressing the skin. What had once seemed to be nothing but rot and stench and decay has been transformed into life in all its fullness!
That's the gift Jesus Christ gives to you and to me. The raising of Lazarus, of course, is but a hint -- a foreshadowing -- of a far greater raising yet to come. Preacher and Bible scholar Fred Craddock has said that if you hold a light beneath a piece of paper with this story written on it, you'll see the resurrection of Jesus shining through.
He's right, of course. It's because of the resurrection of Jesus that we can boldly come into this place of worship, burdened as we so often are by painful memories, and know that we, too, will be able -- eventually -- to feel those burdens ease. It's not an easy thing to do. Often, it takes a great deal of time. But with the help of Jesus the risen one, we can do it.
The novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."1 That's the perspective of a Southern novelist of the early 20th century. Faulkner lived in a land of decaying antebellum mansions, of sharecroppers supposedly emancipated who for all practical purposes remained enslaved, of once-great landowning families who had fallen from their former glory, never to regain it. To Faulkner, the past was a linen winding-sheet: confining, constricting.
Jesus' word to us is different. We who trust him and call upon his name can graciously discover that the past is indeed dead and has become truly past. Before us lies a pathway to the future, with our Lord walking beside us on the journey.
How can we accompany him, how can we keep up, if our legs and arms are still bound tight by painful memories?
With his help we truly can learn to let them go. Sometimes we cling to painful memories for no better reason than because they're familiar.
Jesus wants us to be free. He offers us a different narrative than the self-destructive ones we're so used to muttering to ourselves. He invites us to dare to become whole. Whenever we gather at his table, he's the one who will be broken: "This is my body, broken for you."
This is what we remember around this table. It's the sacred remembering that makes us whole.