The Good Shepherd Speaks in the Dark
In his 2007 book The Wild Places, nature writer Robert MacFarlane describes the experience of taking a walk outside in the dark:
“To be out by night in a forest, by a river, on a moor, in a field, or even in a city garden,” MacFarlane says, “is to know it differently. Color seems absent, and you are obliged to judge distance and appearance by shade and tone: night sight requires an attentiveness and a care of address undemanded by sunlight.”
One of the most profound experiences of my life with God occurred one night when I heard the familiar words of Psalm 23 read aloud slowly, deliberately, in the dark. I was in high school at the time, and I had read the Psalm hundreds of times. But when I heard it read that night, the words weren’t so familiar—I lost my bearings. What I heard for the first time was the collision between two lines that I had unthinkingly held separate in my mind.
He leads me in paths of righteousness / I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .
The same God who leads me to green pastures and beside still waters also leads me to a dark valley. I can remember the disorientation I felt during that season of my life. A few months earlier, in the summer before my senior year of high school, we had moved to a new town. Months later, I would move again to attend college. All those transitions were remarkably smooth, but they were still disorienting simply because they were transitions.
Perhaps you find yourself in a season of transition or disorientation. Perhaps the future seems especially uncertain. Maybe you’re having difficulty seeing much of anything ahead of you, let alone the Good Shepherd who leads you. And so there you are in the dark valley, asking: God, did I take a wrong turn, or did you? If you’re the Good Shepherd, why are you leading me to the valley of the shadow of death?
During Lent, we’ve spent time in John’s gospel looking at several encounters that Jesus has with people. Each of these encounters follows a similar pattern: A meeting followed by a misunderstanding.
In John 3, Nicodemus meets Jesus under cover of darkness looking for an explanation. Jesus says, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again,” and Nicodemus responds in confusion, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?”
In John 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well. During their exchange, Jesus tells her he has access to living water, to which the woman responds in confusion, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”
In John 9, Jesus meets a man blind from birth and intends to heal him, but the disciples misunderstand. They ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” As we saw last week, this question and the ensuing miracle lead to several more misunderstandings.
We arrive at John 11, the appointed gospel text for the fifth Sunday in Lent. Mary and Martha send word to Jesus that their brother, Lazarus, is ill. Despite the seriousness of Lazarus’s illness and Jesus’s love for the siblings, Jesus delays his coming. By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been dead for days.
The longer Jesus delays his coming, the more misunderstandings arise: Before Jesus departs for Bethany—where Martha, Mary, and Lazarus live—the disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean that Lazarus is merely sleeping and will recover (v 12), which is wrong (but also true in another sense).
Thomas misunderstands Jesus to mean that going toward Jerusalem (Bethany is only two miles from there) means they’ll all be killed by a mob (v 16), which is wrong, (but also true in another sense).
When Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again, Martha misunderstands him to mean the resurrection on the last day (v 24), which is wrong (but also true in another sense).
At the end of John 11, Lazarus is raised, but the actual act of Lazarus being raised happens in less than a verse. The preceding 42 vv. are a real mess, full of misunderstanding, disappointment, and disorientation. Mary and Martha both greet Jesus separately with the words, “Lord if you had only been here, my brother would not have died.” Later, some among the crowd accompanying Jesus to the tomb say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Perhaps Mary, Martha, and the crowd find themselves asking a similar question: If you’re our Good Shepherd and friend, why are you leading us to the valley of the shadow of death?
We can perhaps hear echoes of Israel’s wilderness wandering and the people’s complaint. If you’re our deliverer, why are you leading us to die in the wilderness?
“Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
Even though he struck the rock so that water gushed out
and torrents overflowed,
can he also give bread
or provide meat for his people?” (Psalm 78:19-20)
A brief survey of our Scriptures suggests we shouldn’t be surprised when the Good Shepherd leads us into dark valleys. Today’s Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 37 begins:
The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley full of bones.
As it turns out, this image in Ezekiel is consistent Spirit’s activity elsewhere in Scripture. In other words, the valley of dry bones isn’t some brief, unplanned detour. Instead, the valley is the place where the Spirit does his best work.
From the beginning of our Scriptures, we find the Spirit dwelling in deep darkness, bringing order to chaos. In Genesis 1, the earth is described as formless and empty. Darkness covers the surface of the deep, and there we find the Spirit of God inhabiting the darkness, hovering over the waters (Genesis 1:2).
Fast-forward to the gospel account. The same Spirit who hovers over the waters of creation also rests upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan River. From there, the Spirit leads Jesus to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil (Matthew 4:1).
The Spirit, it seems, has a habit of shepherding us toward disorienting darkness rather than away from it. Emptiness, dark valleys, wildernesses of various kinds—the Spirit does not bypass these places. We lose our bearings in these places, but God’s Spirit is at home.
Perhaps you’ve lost your bearings in some way. Perhaps you’re facing a job that didn’t pan out, or an unexpected layoff, or a retirement that didn’t look the way you imagined. Maybe you’ve had your trust betrayed, or you’re struggling to relate to a family member who just can’t seem to keep it together, or a son or daughter who can’t find their footing. Maybe you’re facing an unexpected diagnosis or a chronic health issue. Maybe your journey toward becoming a parent has been complicated. Maybe, like Mary and Martha, you’re grieving the loss of a loved one.
As Psalm 23 reminds us, even though we walk in the dark, the Shepherd who leads us also comforts us. You and I might lose our bearings, but God does not. When we lose our bearings (and we will), God’s Spirit is there, as Paul says in Romans 8, interceding for you with groans too deep for words.
God speaks into the deepest darkness we know—the wordless darkness of death. And his word pierces the silence of that wordless darkness so that we know we’re not alone. What word does he speak in the dark valley? When we ask, Lord, why have you led us here, he responds, as he so often does, with a question:
In the valley of dry bones, the Lord speaks to Ezekiel and asks, “Can these bones live?”
In Bethany, the Lord comforts Lazarus’ grieving sister with the words, “I am the resurrection and the life,” then asks, “Do you believe this?”
We may lose our bearings, but God does not lose his. The darkness is where he does his best work, words of speaking light and life:
In Genesis 1, God speaks into the darkness and says, “Let there be light.”
In Genesis 15, God speaks to Abram in the darkness and says “Count the stars—so shall your descendants be.
In Romans 4 and Hebrews 11, the writers of what became New Testament Scripture refer to Abram as “as good as dead,” when he received the promise. They cite this nighttime scene in Genesis 15 as proof that “God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
In Psalm 139, the psalmist says that just because we’re lost in the darkness doesn’t mean God is.
Where can I go from your spirit? If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and night wraps itself around me,” even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
No darkness in which you find yourself today is out of range for God’s voice. God does not lose his bearings.
And the good news doesn’t stop there: When we lose our bearings (and we will), God speaks so that we might know where he is.
In John 11, Jesus follows up his question to Martha, “Do you believe this” with a question addressed to the entire crowd of mourners: “Where have you laid him?”
Chromatius, a fourth-century bishop in Italy, likens Jesus’ question to the crowd in John 11 “Where have you laid him” to God’s question to Adam in the garden after he and Eve disobey. God asks, “Where are you, Adam?” According to Chromatius, God asks this question in the garden “not because he was ignorant of where Adam was but that he might therefore question him so that Adam would openly confess his sin . . . It is the same here. He does not ask because he is ignorant of Lazarus’s whereabouts but so that the crowd would follow him to Lazarus’ tomb.”
I don’t think it’s an accident that closer Jesus gets to the tomb, the more people he gathers.
When Jesus asks the crowd, “Where have you laid him?” the people respond by saying, “Come and see.” This is not the first time this phrase appears in John.
Jesus uses the same words to call his first followers in John 1.
Philip uses the same words to call Nathanael to follow Jesus.
The Samaritan woman uses the same words to call her village to meet Jesus
Here, the crowd uses the same words to invite Jesus to the tomb.
Come and see. Because Jesus leads us into the darkness and doesn’t abandon us, we can issue this invitation back to Jesus to accompany us into our darkest places without fear.
Somewhere underneath this exchange between Jesus and the crowd in John 11, I wonder if we might hear the exchange between God and Adam in Genesis 3. Today, Jesus calls to us in whatever darkness we find ourselves. How will we respond? Will we hide, or invite him to come and see?
This is the invitation of Lent: to invite Jesus to come and see what we insist on hiding.
Come and see. Lord, come and see our secret pain. Come and see our sin and unfaithfulness. Come and see the losses we grieve. Come and see our deepest vulnerabilities. Come and see what we’ve relegated to the darkness; come and see what we cannot, what we insist on avoiding.
When Jesus appears to the disciples after his resurrection, he will say to Thomas, “Come and see my wounds.” If you’re out of words to pray today, you could do worse than praying Jesus’ words back to him: Come and see my wounds.
We’re mostly helpless in the dark, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. Precisely because we don’t have our bearings in the dark, we learn to rely on the voice of the only one who is on speaking terms with the dead—the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name.
In John 5, Jesus says, “The hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out.” A short time later, we find Jesus at Lazarus’s tomb:
Jesus says, “Take away the stone,” and Martha responds—and I think we can all agree that the King James gets it right here—“He stinketh.” In other words, she says, I know we invited you here, but this is not going to be pretty. Jesus responds with reassurance, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
And when they roll away the stone, Jesus prays a prayer that suggests his main concern in this entire narrative is not simply the sign itself, but the crowd present to see and hear it—the same ones who have been waiting in darkness, confused by Jesus’s absence.
Whether you’re a fearful disciple who showed up late or a grieving sibling who never left Lazarus’s side, Jesus invites you to hear the orienting word he speaks in the dark.
Whether you’re a sympathetic mourner or skeptical onlooker, Jesus invites you to hear the orienting word he speaks in the dark.
Before speaking into darkness of Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus prays to orient the crowd to the loving attentiveness of his Father:
And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go” (John 11:42-44).
Again, Jesus speaks into the darkness to show that it has not overtaken him; he is active there. He also speaks into the darkness to invite the participation of the onlookers. In raising the dead, Jesus does what only he can do, but he stops short of doing everything that’s necessary. He leaves to the crowd the intimate, vulnerable, (perhaps even unpleasant!) task of unbinding the one who has been lifeless in a grave for four days.
As people of the Spirit, that intimate, vulnerable, (perhaps even unpleasant) work is ours to do today. Christ intends for us to move from being mere observers standing at a distance, to step toward the darkness. He intends for us to become active participants in the life-giving work he accomplishes in others.
Even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we do not have to fear evil. The death in which we walk is Christ’s death—the death that swallows up death. Because Christ has entered first into the darkness of death, we don’t have to fear evil.
And make no mistake: Christ’s activity does draw the attention of evil. When Jesus speaks into the darkness, he does so not only to comfort us and to invite our participation, but to confront the evil one! When Jesus raises Lazarus, he does more than just restore a dead man to his grieving community. Jesus raises Lazarus in an empire that executes dissenters on roadsides. Death is a visible reminder of who’s in charge.
It’s worth noting that after the miracle, things get much darker for those present at the tomb. When Jesus commissions his followers to unbind Lazarus, he situates them in the crosshairs of evil. As one commentator it, after Lazarus rises, “Hope does not remain a private comfort. It becomes a public task.” Shortly after the miracle, the authorities seek to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. In performing this sign, Jesus is not just restoring hope; he’s confronting the powers—a confrontation that will be on full display when he is lifted up on the cross.
Because we know Jesus does not shy away from death, we can trust his ongoing activity in our own lives and in the lives of others when it seems darkest.
When Jesus speaks the word that summons the dead—a word that only he can speak—our task begins.
If that description of being surrounded by disorienting darkness sounds familiar to you, Jesus offers you hope . Can you hear his voice calling you to believe in him?
Jesus stands at the tomb and addresses his attentive Father as a beloved Son. If you’ve lost your bearings and run out of words to pray, can you hear his voice praying for you? Can you hear his voice orienting you to the Father’s loving attention? Come and see, he says.
Jesus instructs us to step toward the darkness to free those he has raised to new life. Can you hear his voice summoning you? Perhaps there are those in your life who don’t currently know Jesus as the good shepherd, for whom the darkness seems especially disorienting. Perhaps he’s calling you to be the kind of person from whom others don’t have to hide. Perhaps he’s calling you to imitate him, someone who offers a comforting presence in the dark, someone to whom can feel comfort to say, “Come and see.”