You! Dry bones! Hear the word of the Lord. Wait a tick, you’re not dead anymore?
John 11:1-45; Romans 8:6-11; Psalm 130; Ezekiel 37:1-14
You know, while for the most part I really like the NIV, sometimes other translations of the Bible just do certain things better. For example, in the King James Bible, verse 39 of today’s gospel reads: “Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” It’s just … so blunt. I love it.
You can’t forget though, that at this point Jesus is already four days late, and he just kind of hung out for two days before even setting out for Bethany. Somewhat understandably, Mary and Martha were a little cranky. Twice Jesus was told, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Even the other mourners gathered were bitter towards Jesus, saying, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
But then we get to the scene in question. Jesus says, “Open the tomb”. Martha says, “But, Lord, it’s going to smell bad in there.” Then, Jesus (remember when I mentioned this last week) says a prayer and yells, “Lazarus, come out!” And out he came, still wrapped in the grave clothes, but very much alive.
But the gospel isn’t the first time God has given life to people that were dead for a while. In our Old Testament lesson from Ezekiel, God takes dry, bleached, bones that have been sitting out in the sun for a while. God commands Ezekiel to tell the bones to return to life. Ezekiel does so, and as he is prophesying, the bones knitted together, and flesh skin covered them back up. Then the breath of God entered them, and a whole army rose up.
Now, unlike Lazarus, Ezekiel’s experience was more than likely a vision, but do any of us really think such a thing is beyond God’s power? The whole idea is, God can take something as dead as dead can be and restore it to life. But there’s more than one kind of death that Scripture talks about. There is physical death, which, as far as I can remember, only two people in all of Scripture didn’t experience, and then there is a spiritual death.
The spiritual death is quite a bit more insidious. It’s usually not very obvious, and therefore much more dangerous. Because spiritual death is brought about by sinfulness, we’re usually blinded to it by that same sinfulness. Listen to what Paul says in Romans 8: “The mind of the sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so.”
When someone is spiritually dead, they stink just as bad as Lazarus in the tomb, only the stink isn’t from decomposition, but from sin. And the person who is spiritually dead can’t even smell it on themselves. “But,” as Paul continues, “if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to you mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”
You see God doesn’t want us to smell like sin. It’s kind of the last thing he wants. Instead, he wants us to, to take the analogy a little too far, take a shower with forgiveness-soap. It sounds a little silly, but if we physically smell, the best way to fix it is to take a shower, right? Sure, if you’re in a pinch, you can put on extra good-smelly-stuffs to try and cover it up, but that’s all it is, a cover-up. The bad smell is still there, and when good smells and bad smells mix together bad things happen.
The same thing happens with sin. Too often we try to cover it up, but no matter how much we try to cover sin up with good-smelly-stuffs, it’s still there. The only way to get rid of it is to confess to God that we sinned, and then he takes our sin away. Just like trying to cover up bad smells, trying to cover up our sin just compounds our sinfulness.
Because of Christ, we don’t have to cover up our sin. In one of Martin Luther’s most misunderstood quotes, he says, “If grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here, we will commit sins. But no sin can separate us from Him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day.”
Now, what Luther isn’t saying is to go out and sin. But what he is saying is that when we do sin, admit it! Don’t hide that you are a sinner, because no amount of sin will separate us from God. That’s why we rejoice in Christ, because he has won the victory over sin and death, so that we don’t have to worry about either a physical death or a spiritual death anymore, but instead are washed clean in His blood and set apart for eternal life in the world to come.