Abstract
Dem bones in that desert sure were dry. Now a heap of bones scorched for years under a frying sun is no deader than the man or woman who drew their final breath a moment ago, but those bones seem a long, longer way away from the life they once carried. And to someone who feels they are not living life, what they long for can sometimes seem just a breath-width away and it can sometimes seem they are so far away from living at all that it’s a hopeless task to try to start again. Grief, frailty, debilitating shame, exclusion by others, can all make a life feel as ossified and deserted as the bones in the song. But Jews and Christians thrive on this reading, because we love our miracles big and unlikely, and we love to think there is no distance too great for us to traverse in finding our way back to being alive by the power of God. Bringing that lot back to life took a lot of clattering and jostling and jigsawing, and a lot of yucky blood and sinews, and a lot of zipping skin. And if God can do that…
The bones reflected the distance from home of exiles who would be tempted to give up hope for a promise they might never see in their own lifetime, reflected the helplessness of those whose hold on their faith in the future was the last tiny unsnapped sinew of the broken body of God’s special people. Even reaching the point of hearing a promise of new and greater life it can still seem just as useless because it sounds so unlikely, so unachievable. The problem is not always getting people within earshot of God’s promises, but getting them to be bothered to reply when it seems such a waste of effort in a world that seems beyond saving. One by one by one, people silently say ‘thanks but no thanks’ to a promise that is too big to start out on in a life that is too far gone to redirect. All that clattering of bones and shlurping of blood in the desert is too much to contemplate for their one life already half-lived. Thank God for those who choose instead to sing the song and dance the dance of dem bones, in all sorts of ways.
And thank God for those who don’t do anything one by one by one, who don’t fixate on just their own mortality and just their own salvation and just their own bones and just their own new lives. They are those who love the Church and the world, and who relish the vast scale of that desert scene, the enormous army that was created when the song was sung and the dance was done and the anatomy was breathed into life. This is the vision that tells us we are not all alone on our adventure, we are not isolated from everyone else when we face God. This is the vision that tells me how dangerous is that most beautiful line in any hymn, at the end of I vow to thee my country, which says of Heaven ‘And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase’. No, here we have a clutter and a clatter and a noisy crowd of newly-wakened soldiers, saying I shudder to think what to each other, and checking their kit with all the clashing and thumping that always involves. We do not do this alone.
Lazarus, Jesus’ dinner-party friend, did not do death alone. He had mourning neighbours and interfering sisters bustling about making it all very busy and complicated. And eventually, eventually, Jesus was there too. And about time, wouldn’t you say?… But on the fourth day you’re no more dead than you were on the first, I guess, just as you’re no less dead than the bones in the desert. But you can appreciate the impatience of the two sisters, whose separate and identical accusations of Jesus’ lateness to his face so clearly betray some muttered conversation between them before our scene began to play.
Now Martha knew what she thought about death and resurrection. Her reputation had been set by a single incident where she upped the ante on fuss and the hospitality, and made reflective Mary look a wee bit fey by comparison. Maybe that’s what Martha was like indeed, preferring things big and busy. She’d have loved the army raised out of the desert bones, and probably would have tried to feed them. The big drama of a final resurrection on a last day did it for her spiritual imagination, and that’s where she started from as her sisterly heart was breaking with her grief. And there’s a lot to be said for that kind of belief: it’s comfortably distant in its implications, safely beyond the scope of our current lives when we might have to do something difficult about something important; it’s far enough away that we wouldn’t be around to be proved wrong in our faith and confidence, perhaps.
Jesus Christ, in his predictably unpredictable way, resurrected one life and did it straight away. Read this story literally if you can or figuratively if you like, but Jesus was completing this story utterly at odds with Martha’s hope, utterly beyond anything she could dare to ask, utterly more personally and immediately than their religious system could cope with there and then.
The moral of these stories: believe literally in conjuring tricks with bones? Don’t get stuck there; go deeper. The moral of these stories: expect the unexpected?
When your life seems irrecoverable, after a disaster or a terrible sin or a crippling tiredness of spirit, be sure that there is no distance God cannot overcome to restore you to a life you cannot imagine and dare not dream of. The rebuilding may not be a pretty sight, and the new you will probably contain lots of humility because you looked such a mess back then. And while the disaster or sin or tiredness may ensure the new life is very different from the old, it will be life to the full.
When your soul is self-absorbed, worrying about your one-to-one encounter with Christ - who knows where or when that will be -, be deafened by the sound of the multitude that surrounds you, who share your bleakness and share your glory, share your sinfulness and share your salvation. If you do not do meet with God as part of the Church along with all the rest of us, surely you should be too afraid to face the truth alone.
When you hold the Gospel story at arm’s length, convinced that its promises will be fulfilled only in some future time as remote from you as the Bible times are from us today, brace yourself for signs and challenges, calling and conscience, that break suddenly and directly into your life all the way from God, all the way across merely a breadth’s width. Not for you is the decision when you will receive astonishing gifts, or where, or what. Not for you is the decision whether to opt out and stay ossified…