Can These Bones Live?

Ezekiel 37:1-14 & John 11:1-45

Mortal, can these bones live?

O Lord God, you know.

The hand of the Lord brought the prophet Ezekiel into the valley of the shadow of death. The valley full of bones, dry and still and long dead, a sight which makes our haunted houses and metaphorical closets look like the child’s play that they are. The spirit of the Lord takes Ezekiel to a place of deepest desolation, and asks him a question. And what a question it is.

Mortal, can these bones live?

I do not have the patience of a mystic or the wisdom of a prophet, so I think I might have assumed it was a trick question. Rhetorical, maybe. These bones, which have long been separated from one another, long been empty of the delicately balanced systems that maintain life- can they live? The life force that once animated them is long gone, and most of the relevant matter has long since returned to the earth to feed infinite other life forms. These bones might as well be made of plastic, or paper, or metaphors. There is no life in them, no substance, no potential beyond further decay and dust.

Mortal, can these bones live? No Lord, not in any way that I can imagine with my mortal mind and my admittedly limited medical knowledge. No Lord, not in the way that they once did, not in the way I want them to again. Death has beaten us here, Lord. Surely there is nothing here left to raise.

Blessedly, Ezekiel was much better at talking to God than I am. Ezekiel heard the question and answered “O Lord God, you know.” Very clever, if a bit of a dodge. The prophet knows what Jesus’s disciples would someday learn, that every question from the mouth of God is more than it appears. So God sees Ezekiel’s clever and faithful response, and gives the prophet a task. Prophesy, Ezekiel, to your audience of bones and ashes and dust, and see what I will do. See what the God of the universe can do with these bones.

And so Ezekiel prophesies, speaking the promises of God over the valley of the shadow of death. As he speaks, the bones come together, bodies reconstituted from dust and air and lonely rubble. Sinews and flesh and skin, decay recoiling and death reversing until Ezekiel stands amidst a people on the verge of being born again. But there is no breath in them, no spirit to animate them, and so Ezekiel calls upon the breath of God which breathed over the waters when the world was new, and that same breath fills the empty places until life overtakes the valley. Where there were only dry bones and desolation, Ezekiel witnesses a resurrection.

It is only after Ezekiel has experienced this that God lets him in on the greater story, the message the prophet must take back to the family of God. The Israelites are heartbroken, desolate, and hopeless in their exile; they are the walking dead, moving through the world as if they have already left it. Just as he spoke God’s word over the lifeless bones, Ezekiel is sent to speak God’s life-giving Word to a people lost in the shadow of death. God promises through Ezekiel to open up the graves of God’s people, to raise them up and restore them to wholeness in community with one another and with the land. If these dry bones can live by the will of God, how much more will God do for God’s own people. This is the message Ezekiel brings to the exiled and scattered people of Israel, that they will be restored.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Ezekiel prophesied resurrection to a nation, a multitude of people. Jesus fulfilled the promise of resurrection in one family, in the body of one man, a beloved friend. Where Ezekiel comforted a grieving community, Jesus embraces two weeping women. In their anger, in their grief and doubt, Mary and Martha speak honestly with Jesus. If you had been here, Martha tells him, Lazarus would still be alive. If you had been here, Mary wails from the ground where she has fallen to her knees, Lord my brother would not have died. The great healer and teacher whom they have come to know, come to love and trust and treat like family, comes to them in their grief and these two sisters let him have it. They know, they believe without a shadow of a doubt, that Jesus could have healed Lazarus of the illness that ripped him from them. Mary and Martha are in the valley of the shadow of death, and that is where Jesus meets them, where he embraces them and walks with them down the lonely road to the tomb. In the valley of the shadow of death, Jesus weeps for Lazarus, and for Mary and Martha in their heartbreak, and for the community that gathers to grieve. Jesus who knows what is coming, who knows that he will embrace Lazarus again before the sun has time to set, still weeps and is moved in his soul by the absence of his friend. God’s own heart knows what it is to be broken.

Can these bones live?

Lazarus has been dead and buried for four days, the process of returning to dust already beginning. The reek of death is in the air they breathe, and Mary and Martha and the on-looking crowd are all equally assured that Lazarus is truly, fully, entirely gone. We need not labor under any suspicions of comas or medical explanations. His bones may not yet be dry, but his lungs do not breathe, his heart does not beat, decay has begun. Jesus might as well be gearing up to give a sermon to a pile of dry bones.

And the bones do live, after all. The dead man comes out of the tomb, still wrapped in the shroud his sisters lovingly laid over him in a final act of care. He is unbound, and let go. Lazarus who was dead is alive again, and just to prove the point, he shares a meal with Jesus in the next chapter. Many who see this miracle begin to believe, as Mary and Martha and Lazarus do, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. The grave is opened, and because of it sometime later some faithful women are led to another tomb to find another stone rolled away. The second tomb is empty, but they’ve seen this before. All that will be left in that second grave are the grave clothes, the defeated death that once bound Lazarus and Jesus and no longer will bind any of us.

Can these bones live?

Yes. The resurrection is not a metaphor. It is a part of our history, and our promised future. It is a part of our ancestry, and the single flame in the dark night of so many souls. It is the prophecy that came to a devastated and exiled people, and the song of a people captured and enslaved. It is why we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death and not be afraid. It is how we survive the separation of death and still make our song at the grave.

Can these bones live? With God’s help, they can, and they will.