Jesus is summoned for a sick friend but upon arriving “found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.” When Jesus tells Lazarus’ sister, Martha, “Your brother will rise,” she mistakenly thinks Jesus means a “resurrection on the last day.” He does not. Together they go to the tomb where Jesus “cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands.” “Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”
The Lenten journey reminds us we can be free of the disease and death that bind us in the U.S. Empire. We can especially be free of the disease and death to which weapons bind us. When healthy people create a healthy society, they work for human rights. Not so sick people, they work for gun rights. Sick people laud guns and those who spread the disease of gun deaths, ‘good guys with guns.’ But, ‘good guys with guns’ are like ‘good undertakers with diseases.’ A ‘good’ undertaker, armed with a deadly disease and trained to inject people, can bury more people for the state. But that is insane. No healthy state would arm people with a disease and train them to spread it. Only an unhealthy state would do that. It would claim its undertakers must spread disease since other undertakers from other states try to spread disease and bury us. If innocent people die, in unconscionable numbers, and essential life resources are misused, it is the price people must pay to be kept safe by heroes. No – to all of it – innocent people need not die, it is not the price, they do not keep us safe, and they are not heroes. A healthy society heals undertakers and creates antidotes for the diseases. A healthy society spends resources and training on doctors, nurses, and other health professionals and mission them, at home and abroad, with resources to heal diseases. A healthy society disbands a platoon of disease injecting undertakers causing death. So too a a healthy society disbands a platoon of good guys with guns causing death. We can reject their claims that they can kill more people, that they need to kill because others try to kill us, or their rationalizations about the innocent dying, or their waste of resources. No – to all of it – they need not kill, innocent people need not die, it is not the price we need to pay, they do not keep us safe, and they are not heroes. Good guys with guns are a sick platoon of death spreaders lauded by a sick society. A healthy society, certainly one that calls itself Christian, would heal the soldiers and eliminate the weapons. It would spend resources and training on new classes of peacemakers, mental health workers, teachers, social workers, and neighborhood youth organizers and mission them, at home and abroad. We would not denigrate such people, nor underfund their work directed at healing warmaking. Yet so many people, self-titled christians especially, in empire’s across the world promote the disease and death of soldiers and their weapons. They force millions of our brothers and sisters to live, suffer, and die inside this very certain and never-ending pandemic of guns every day. Thus, an empire like the U.S. will always have little to no money for Covid-19 tests, ventilators, and health care while it will always spend billions upon billions of dollars on guns. Always humanity is collateral damage to the warmakers. Soldiers, in suits and in fatigues, with their gun disease, bind us incessantly to death. We must be untied from them; for a fuller social rising is ours, now.
“Yes, there is worse than death.” Said Lazarus… there is nothing that is good for you in dying while you are still (alive), never go back to that again…you are not to learn by going back… I may say that Jesus is not afraid… I cannot tell you what Jesus saw this morning in my eyes. I do not know. I cannot yet say… why it is that I am here again, Or where the road leads. I do not know. I know that when I did come back, I saw His eyes again among the trees and faces.” (Lazarus – Edwin Arlington Robinson)
Prayer: Spirit of Peace, strengthen us to create a healthy society.
Question: How does this unhealthy Empire keep me dying while I am still alive?
March 29, 2020 Gospel John 11:1-45 Fifth Sunday of Lent