The Fifth Sunday of Lent and Crime and Punishment
Something needs to change. The world, us, or both, but something needs to change. That’s what Fyodor Dostoevsky thought when he wrote Crime and Punishment in 1867. That’s true today. People are filled with anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Deaths of despair continue to climb. Inequality is rampant. Humans are the extinction event for an ever increasing number of species on earth. We need something different, new life, to bring us back from the death around us. We need Resurrection. We need Easter.
The readings for the Fifth Sunday of Lent beautifully show why we need new life and what having new life means. Each of the readings are focused on resurrection, our ultimate hope. Reading them together is a sermon in and of itself. Each passage foreshadows the next, and each reflects on the passage that came before. I can’t really add to Ezekiel 37:1-14, Romans 8:6-11, and John 11:1-45, but I can’t help but talk about them (same with my fiance Amelia, who's take you should definitely check out). Together, they are the message of the Kingdom of God. The Old Testament reading tells us our natural condition and gives us a promise of new life. The lesson from the New Testament tells us our new status and reveals the promise fulfilled. Finally, the Gospel reading shows us the one through whom the promise is fulfilled, and the breathtaking reality of Resurrection.
The first reading, Ezekiel 37:1-14, is the striking passage the Valley of Dry Bones. The prophet Ezekiel is shown a vision by God. In his vision, a great number of the dead have withered and rotted to nothing but dry skeletons. The LORD asks Ezekiel, “Mortal, can these bones live?” The obvious answer is no. It's been too long, they’ve gone too far. Life is a distant memory. How could these bones ever live? And though we might deny it, we are these bones. The life we have is fleeting, and death hangs over us all. Any hope we have to change that is as small as the chance that the bone can live. But God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones, and the bones realign. Sinew, muscle, and skins reknit over the bones and the Lord tells Ezekiel to “prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” The prophet follows God’s word, and the dead bones are filled with life. And the LORD says, “And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live…” God promises through this vision that a time is coming, that even though we are dead, He will breath his Spirit into us, raising us up to new life.
The second reading launches us forward in time, into that age to come. As Paul writes in Romans 8, the promise given to Ezekiel is here. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.” God has breathed his Spirit into our dying bodies. And because that Spirit dwells in us, we are reknit together like the dry bones and born from above, as Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3. And this brings us to the Gospel.
What happened between Ezekiel and Paul? How did we go from death to life? How was the promise of new life, given to the prophet and testified to by the apostle, fulfilled? The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, came into the world. In John 11, Jesus proves that he is the power of new life. His friend Lazarus has died. Going to the tomb far too late, Lazarus’s sister’s Mary and Martha tell Jesus just that. You’re too late. Why didn’t you come earlier? Lazarus has been dead for four days, how can he live? And Jesus weeps. Feeling the loss of his friend, and his friend's loss of their brother, Jesus breaks down in tears. He loved Lazarus. Then, he goes before the tomb, tells the mourners to clear away the stone, and he calls out to the dead man. And “the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in grave clothes.”
The power of this Gospel reading, and this new life is what fills the brilliant novel Crime and Punishment. At the turning point of the novel we dimly see “in this impoverished room the murderer and the prostitute, strangely united for the reading of the eternal book.” The murder, Raskolnikov, consumed with his guilt for having cut down an old woman and her sister, asks the prostitute, Sonya, who sold her body to save her family, to read him the raising of Lazarus. Sonya reads this Gospel reading, and like Lazarus, the Word of God speaks to Raskolnikov, and slowly he emerges from his grave, into the light of life.
We are all the dry bones. We are all Lazarus. We are the murderer. As Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.” We are the prostitute. Again, Jesus says, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” We are all broken, sinful, and dying. We are haunted by anxiety and guilt, yet we continue to destroy ourselves, each other, and the world itself. We must change to live, but Mortal, can these bones live? Ezekiel replies with the only words he can, “Lord, you know.” And He knows. The bones can live, but only by a power beyond ourselves. Only by the Word of God calling to us can we come out of our graves. And freed from the grave, we live new, and eternal life, sustained and filled, not by bread, but the Bread of Heaven, the Word that comes from the mouth of God.
