How Close is Jesus? (part 2)

In the gospel text for the fifth week of Lent (John 11:1-45), Jesus visits Mary and Martha in the midst of a hopeless situation. Lazarus has died, they tell him, and his presence on the scene is, by all earthly standards, too little too late.

At issue here is Jesus' timing. "If only you had been here sooner," Martha and Mary take turns telling him. Given the preceding events, their tone is likely not as wistful as we might be tempted to hear it. Mary and Martha had sent for Jesus while their brother Lazarus was ill, yet very much alive. As though Jesus himself were practicing responsible social distancing, he stays away for two additional days before traveling to Judea to be with Lazarus.

Thus, we can perhaps hear the tinge of anger in Mary's and Martha's respective "if only's."

If only you had been here to intervene at the moment things took a turn for the worse. 

If only your presence could've preceded death's final word.

As in the situation preceding Lazarus' death in John 11, adivine interruption in humanity's present circumstance would be most welcome. Surely our heartfelt intercession approximates what drove Mary and Martha to send for Jesus when Lazarus fell ill. Prayers for God's swift, visible action are found throughout Scripture, and we would do well to continue to entreat the heavens for the help we so desperately need. 

Perhaps, as we intercede for God's saving presence, we might take comfort in conceiving of God's action as more than that which descends from above to intersect with history. Prayer yields more than isolated, intermittent interventions of presence with a wasteland of divine absence in between. 

Contrasted with this vision of God as a cosmic sewing machine whose needle visits the fabric of human history from above at some points and not others, theologian Robert Capon suggests that divine presence might be better imagined as an iceberg present beneath the waters of history. The iceberg juts out of the water at certain points, but its visibility above the surface (or obscurity below the surface) has no bearing on its being  underneath history all along.

To illustrate, Capon includes the events of John 11 when he catalogs some of the points at which the iceberg of Christ's eternal, immanent presence "juts out" in the narrative of Scripture: "Jesus is present to the whole of history, whether at the raising up of Adam from the dust, or of Isaac from the altar of sacrifice, or of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, or of Lazarus from the tomb."

As the pinnacle of the Scriptural witness, Jesus seems uncomfortable with death, not because he's unwilling--he did, after all, die--but because, as Capon puts it, "Jesus never meets a corpse that doesn't sit up right on the spot." The dead whom Jesus encounters in the gospels, Capon continues, rise not because Jesus "does a number on them, . . . but simply because he has that effect on the dead."

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke imagines the scene in John 11 in his poem "The Raising of Lazarus." For Rilke, Jesus seems reluctant to perform the sign, not because he does not want to raise Lazarus, but rather because raising Lazarus might be taken as permission for all the other dead to be revived. After all, he has that effect on the dead.

Here's how Rilke imagines the scene prior to Jesus calling Lazarus forth from the grave: 

He stood tensed, entirely filled with that gesture
that rose in him and heavily, so heavily
lifted his hand--(no hand had ever raised itslef
this slowly, and with this much weight)
until it stood there, shining in the air--
and clenched into an upraised fist;
for he dreaded now that all the dead might
come rushing back through the suction
of that tomb

While every image or metaphor offered as an aid to understand Christ's presence falls woefully short of the target, we might find comfort in the notion of divine action as topographical. That is, as we run our fingers over the narrative of Scripture, or of our own lives, or of the events in the surrounding world, we can feel the contours of grace, mercy, and yes, even resurrection emerging above the surface. 

However late to the scene Jesus seems, however slowly he raises his hand, his fulness fills all in all.