"Lazarus, Come Out!"

The account of the death and resurrection of Lazarus reaches its pinnacle today in the daily lectionary of the Treasury of Daily Prayer. I’m conducting a funeral today, and nearly all of our Louisiana internments are done in above-ground tombs, in many ways like the tomb in which the body of Lazarus lay. It is a fitting and poignant moment during the committal to stick my arm inside the tomb and place my hand on the casket one final time, pronouncing a blessing, and praying the Lord’s Prayer. It is a reminder that we stand with feet on the temporal earth, but we reach our hands prayerfully toward the eternity that Jesus has won for us. For death cannot coexist with Jesus. Those who believe and are baptized will rise again, called out of their tombs by name - and the command of Jesus: “Unbind him, and let him go” will resound from Jesus to all of us.

The raising of Lazarus is not only a pitched battle between our Lord and the enemy - an event leading up to the death and Resurrection of our Lord - it is also a preview of our own resurrections, and those of our loved ones.

Imagine not finding relevance in that! Imagine being so small-minded as to have to look for ways to make the account actually matter to people! Imagine the hermeneutical gymnastics required to force this beautiful miracle of Jesus into the service of unrepentant sin!

Jesuit homosexual activist Fr. James Martin has written a new book on our Lord’s miracle of the raising of Lazarus. This article reveals why properly interpreting the Scriptures is so important. The hermeneutic of Social Justice is merely a rehash of the Social Gospel - one that reduces the eternal and transcendent to the pettiness of worldly politics. The Social Justice interpretation is even worse than the old Social Gospel approach, for in our day and age of wokeness, our Lord’s victory over sin, death, and the devil isn’t merely reduced to socialistic political activism based on the unbelief in the literal account, it becomes something even worse: license for sin. And only unbelief in the account on its face can cause anyone to scramble for what the true message of the text is.

This approach to Scripture demonstrates the mindset of the liberal theologian, the higher critic, the Seminex viewpoint, the lens of the Social Justice Warrior. It is illustrative.

James Martin was asked, “In what ways might Lazarus' story be particularly relevant in our current day and age?”

The question itself is revealing. How can anyone - especially a Christian - even ask such a thing? For the raising of Lazarus took place only a few days and a couple miles from where our Lord would die for the sin of the world, defeating sin, death, and the devil, and His own tomb will have the stone rolled away, with Jesus rising from the dead. Moreover, who has not had to struggle with death? How can the resurrection of Lazarus not obviously be relevant because Jesus literally raised a man from the dead, and will do the same for us?

But Martin’s answer is interesting:

At first glance, the story of Jesus raising someone from the dead (one of three times he does this in the Gospels, by the way) might seem to have little relevance to our daily lives. Yet this story can speak to all of us, since all of us have things that keep us bound or unfree. 

The book's overarching theme is how God calls each of us to let certain things "die" (perhaps an old resentment, an overweening ego, a desire always to be right) in order to follow God more closely. At various points in our lives, God calls us out of our "tombs" and into new life.

This account, says James Martin, “might seem to have little relevance to our daily lives.”

Unless one believes that this story did not really happen, is merely a metaphor, or is intended as a statement of Social Justice - how can anyone say such a thing? How can a parish pastor see the text in this way? How can a man who confronts death as part of his daily, weekly, and yearly work possibly have to strain to make the text relevant? Has this man never conducted a funeral? Comforted the mourning? Ministered to the dying? Has he never had a loved one die?

I think the answer is found in the next question, and in Martin’s answer: “You do a lot of advocacy for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics in church life. Do you find that this Gospel story speaks to the liberation of marginalized peoples?”

There it is.

If you don’t really believe that Jesus raised Lazarus, if you think this is not really true, you have to give it some kind of political or social relevance by means of a strained application. And far from pointing people to our Lord’s victory over death, Martin takes the bait. For this is his real passion: defending deviant sexuality and trying to make it comport with Scripture and the doctrines of Christianity:

Absolutely! In fact, the actual words that Jesus uses at Lazarus' tomb in Bethany, translated in the simplest way from the Greek, are "Come out!" (I told my publisher that if that was the title people would misinterpret it!) But the invitation to "come out" and embrace who you are, celebrate your gifts and accept how God loves you, is something that many marginalized people will understand. Of course we're all called to conversion and to look at our sinful patterns, but the deeper invitation is to accept God's love as you are.

I don’t know how it is possible to miss the point of the Word of God any worse than this. This is why the Battle for the Bible had to happen half a century ago. And this is why we must not permit wokeness to hold sway among our pastors and laity, our professors and our seminarians, and in our publications. This is why we need to uphold the Scriptures as inspired and literally true.

There was a final opportunity for James Martin to confess the hope of the Resurrection, and he squandered it:

What do you hope the reader takes away from this book?

That even though we're not Lazarus and shut away in our tombs in Bethany 2,000 years ago, there are parts of us that need to "die" or be "left behind in the tomb" in order to experience new life. And that at key moments in our lives God offers us new life and new possibilities, saying to us, as Jesus did to Lazarus, "Come forth!"

How sad. How impotent. Such a missed opportunity to proclaim the Gospel. This is where the critical hermeneutic ultimately leads.

St. John’s account of the raising of Lazarus is a source of hope in the face of our world of death. Through these inspired words, the Holy Spirit gives “faith to the bereaved… the assurance of a holy and certain hope and in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love who have departed in the faith. Lord, have mercy” (Funeral Service, Pastoral Care Companion, 117).

While James Martin wants to mock the words of Jesus into a kind of perverted pride in sinful behavior and the impetus to resist Godly repentance, understanding this account as a literal work of Jesus is ever-relevant because it is true - even as is our Lord’s Resurrection. This truthfulness of the Word of God leads us to pray with boldness and confidence - even in the face of death:

O God of all grace, You sent Your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, to bring life and immortality to light. We give You thanks that by His death He destroyed the power of death and by His resurrection He opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Strengthen us in the confidence that because He lives we shall live also, and that neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come will be able to separate us from Your love, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen (PCC 119).