In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.Today’s celebration of the raising of the Holy and Righteous Lazarus reverberates with joy, as a foretaste of Pascha, but only as a partial one, in as much as the flesh and bones of Lazarus-of-the-Four-Days were still to once again feel the kiss of death, and to await the final resurrection to which the Lord’s Pascha calls each of us!
In this “little-Pascha” at Bethany, the excitement of a four-day-dead corpse wondrously restored to life by being powerfully and authoritatively ordered to come out from the tomb, sets the scene for the wild excitement of Palm Sunday, as the news of the miracle spread, and the worldly expectations of the populace of Jerusalem and its environs became a frenzy.
Buoyed by the raising of Lazarus the crowds were ready to cry and chant “hosanna”, and “Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord!” yet in their excited frenzy they had little understanding of Who the wonderworker of Bethany really was.
They failed to truly recognise the nature of His entrance into Jerusalem, and that the Saviour Who went to His voluntary passion possessed the authority over life and death, as had already been shown in those commanding words, “Lazarus, come forth!”
Unlike those who waved branches and spread their cloaks before the Messiah, we know the tortuous and painful events that will unfold in the coming week, and we understand their meaning.
We understand that the Lord rides into the Holy City not to overthrow worldly powers and establish an earthly kingdom, but rather to open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
The bloody and humiliating spectacle of Passion Week that shocked, confused and scandalised the very same people who rushed to Bethany to see the risen Lazarus and to shout “hosanna”, convinced many of them that the Saviour was a failure and even a fraud, Whom they would call the authorities to crucify.
They clearly forgot the image of the Suffering-Servant and the prophetic words of Isaiah concerning the Messiah, “He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
The excited crowds failed to understand, that the prophecies and figures of the Old Covenant had already told of His approaching blessed silence, humility, sacrificial love and obedience in the days following the raising of Lazarus and the entrance into Jerusalem.
“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”
In His sacrificial suffering, every blow, every wound, every insult convinces us of the absolute power of Christ’s love to destroy death and shatter the gates of Hades, and having called Lazarus from the dead, the Saviour’s own willingness to enter into the darkness of death, allowed Him show the power of His self-effacing love to not only destroy death, but also to renew creation and raise it to the very heights of heaven.
The mocking and torture, the spitting, insults and punches, the whipping, the crown of thorns, the Cross, the nails, the spear and death – were all endured so that the wonderful but incomplete and partial resurrection of St Lazarus might be superseded and replaced by resurrection to the eternal life of the age to come.
Such was the Saviour’s love for Lazarus, His friend, that He wept and was seized with sorrow, temporarily overturning death for the sake of His love, but this raising was also for the sake of His disciples and those who crowded around Him, as a concrete demonstration and promise of the resurrection of the dead.
But, the events of Passion Week would even more forcefully demonstrate the power of this Divine Love, as the Saviour offered Himself, so that what Lazarus received as a prophetic foretaste of the resurrection, would be a common gift for all of humanity: not as an earthly reprieve, but as the blessing of eternal, heavenly life.
It is by the Lord’s tasting the very death from which He had called His beloved friend that we receive His calling to this new and eternal life.
Unlike the branch-waving, hosanna-shouting crowds, and also unlike the devil and murderer-of-souls, we know that the Saviour, Who today called Lazarus from the tomb, used His own flesh and humanity as the very bait that would be deadly poisonous and would choke Hades.
We know that in swallowing Him, as the earth quaked, the sun was eclipsed, the Veil of the Temple was torn asunder and the bodies of the saints arose, Hades choked on Christ our Life, and could not endure the body of the Word-Made-Flesh, but spewed forth the righteous dead as the Giver of Life stripped it bare.
As Christian’s, like Lazarus, we too have received a foretaste of new life in as much as the risen Saviour has called us by baptism into His death and resurrection.
Lazarus came forth from the tomb and the darkness of death, but we have come forth from the waters of baptism, having been baptised into the dying and rising of Christ.
Through that baptismal descent, the Lord has called us to die to the old man and be restored to newness of life in the power of His resurrection, as children of the resurrection, even though we still abide on earth.
But for what have we emerged from this death to the old me and new life in Christ?
To what life have we emerged from our baptismal foretaste and calling to the resurrection?
Lazarus emerged from the tomb for a life of devoted apostolic ministry, preaching the message of Christ, the Light, the Way, the Truth, the Resurrection and the Life, but has the renewing power and grace of our baptismal resurrection given us drive, direction and the desire to reflect the risen Lord in our earthly lives?
After that first Pascha, the righteous Lazarus, laboured not only in the light of the Lord’s third day arising, but also in the light of his own earthly taste of restored life-in-Christ, with the ultimate meaning of his new life in Christ being the resurrection of the age to come.
Though none of us have received the cold kiss of death, and the embrace of the grave, as did Lazarus, our baptism nevertheless calls us to live in the light of the resurrection of Christ, every hour and every day of our lives in Him.
We must ask ourselves how our earthly lives have been changed by the resurrectional vocation of our baptism, and its call to heavenly life, and whether we are striving and struggling towards the reality of the resurrection in our daily lives, knowing that there is also a resurrection to a life which will not be with the risen Lord, “those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation” among the goats on the left side?
We must live and struggle in the light of the resurrection, hoping to abide with the Lord, with Lazarus and the company of the saints who died and rose in Christ.
Through the intercessions of Thy beloved friend, St. Lazarus, О Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.