Mark 12:28-34
The Festival of All Saints raises a multitude of significant theological issues that preachers may wish to address. No matter what, the result must be the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection. In some ways, All Saints is the church’s once-a-year funeral, and funerals – far from being about sadness, or even primarily about the person who died – are Easter events that are about the resurrection. All Saints, then, is all of these things mixed together.
In 2023, Jesuit priest James Martin’s book Come Forth: The Promise of Jesus’ Greatest Miracle proposed that the raising of Lazarus was the single most important miracle that Jesus performed (this book, by the way, is excellent for a parish study during Eastertide). A harbinger of the resurrection to come, theologians have split hairs about the difference between a “resurrection” (Jesus) and a “resuscitation” (Lazarus). The distinction without a difference seems to hinge upon a linear understanding of time: no resurrection can happen before Jesus’ own, so what happened to Lazarus must be something else.
This linear understanding of time, however, might be expanded for preachers to think about how the resurrection of the Lord reaches forward (to all subsequent events after the third day), but also how it reaches backward to heal the things that occurred before the third day (like, for instance, the raising of Lazarus). This understanding of time presupposes that the resurrection of Jesus has the power to touch everything (it does), and that in reaching backward it is healing the past as well as the future. Adept preachers will be able to play with “time” as a concept from the pulpit not in speculative ways, but in ways that declare the raising of everything.
Many are not used to thinking about Easter in this way, and – even amongst Lutheran preachers – the total infusion of all things with the cross and resurrection of Jesus is more an intellectual assent than a deep spirituality. All Saints is a day charged with emotion, bittersweet in its texts, its hymns, and its ceremony. All of these are designed to proclaim the Easter message for us and for those we hold dear to us: Jesus is risen, and death – seemingly powerful – is revealed to be a fraud. What is really real is Easter.
John’s Gospel presents a host of interesting details, but wise preachers will not get bogged down in them at the expense of the Good News. The story of Lazarus is one of only two instances where Jesus weeps; he waits to come when summoned; Lazarus is proclaimed dead for four days, meaning he’s really really dead in Jewish understanding, on and on. These are all interesting details that fill out the story, but they are not the thrust of the Good News.
For every preacher on All Saints, there are people in the assembly who are grieving. They may be mourning a person that they have lost, but it might also be the loss of a dream, or – more to the point – the loss of how our lives once were when the object of grief (person, dream, event, etc.) marks time. We grieve for the thing, yes; but we also grieve for ourselves and the way we used to be when that thing marked a season of our living. Aged members of the assembly will understand this better than young ones, and the truth of resurrection reaching forward and backward means that the bittersweet grief of “how we used to be” is also being healed by Jesus, the Lord of all time.
"...the truth of resurrection reaching forward and backward means that the bittersweet grief of 'how we used to be' is also being healed by Jesus, the Lord of all time."
In the story of Lazarus, Jesus commands the onlookers to “...unbind him and let him go.” Lazarus is bound, obviously, but so are others in the story: his sisters are bound by grief and misunderstanding, the onlookers are bound by conventional understandings of life and death, and the Pharisees and chief priests are bound by their inability to rejoice in the miracle that has just occurred. The raising of Lazarus is, after all, the tipping point that pushes them over the edge to say “Enough!” This story, it bears repeating, is the immediate catalyst that sets the wheels of the passion into motion.
So, who in this story is “unbound?” Is it just Lazarus? Please, dear preacher, do not preach the obvious sermon. How is the raising of Lazarus Good News not just for him, but also for those who are present, “bound” by something else other than death? Are these very same people sitting in your pews? How is Jesus' command to “come out!” not just an order for Lazarus, but also encouragement for those for whom grief and loss have become a new normal?
Orthodox priest and Liturgical Scholar Alexander Schmemann wrote in his 1973 classic For the Life of the World that for God, death is an “intolerable state.” Chew on this thought for a moment. Death is an unacceptable situation for God. And, if death is not “real” for God, is it real at all? If the Ultimate Reality (God) does not recognize death, then it must not be. For, how can something that is ultimately real engage with something that is not? This is a huge thought, and clever preachers will be able to distill this down to a digestible size: death is not real to God. And still, we experience death, as did Mary and Martha and everyone at Lazarus’ tomb. The ultimate experience of death is Jesus himself (preach the cross, please, Lutherans!), but by entering it to defang it, he defeats it in the final form that Schmemann suggests: it no longer has real power because God – who reaches forward and backward – won’t let it have any real power. To quote the Roman funerary Preface, "...for your faithful, Lord, life is changed, not ended."
As in every Lutheran sermon, you must preach the Gospel: what is Jesus doing in this text? Do not preach how we should just believe all of this more through our tears (there are many on All Saints), but how Jesus acts to raise up the world despite his tears and ours. The great communion is real. It is as real as the communion that we can see, and we confess it every week in the creed. Point to this communion, because it, too, reaches beyond time and space into resurrections we are only starting to understand.
Last: Lutherans have wasted a great deal of time debating if you can pray for the dead, basing much of their dithering on medieval intercession connected to the sale of indulgences and the removal of purgatorial punishment. Please expand your theological viewpoint for the purposes of pastoral care. We pray for the “communion of saints” every week in the Intercessory Prayers: saints who are real, really present in the world. By praying for saints who have died, are we doing anything different? Note that I did not say pray to them, but prayer for the saints is completely within bounds if we take seriously the communion that we confess. “Yes, but they’re already saved, they don’t need our prayers.” So are you, and you – and all the saints – still need prayers. No one is advocating for 16th-century abuse of intercessory prayer to the saints. Instead, for one in deep grief in your community, prayers for those they love who have died might be the last connection that gives them comfort. Do not deprive them of this pastoral act. For in it, too, the resurrection is reaching forward…and backward.
THE REV. DR. PATRICK H. SHEBECK is the Senior Pastor at St. Paul-Reformation Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from St. Olaf College with degrees in Liturgics and History, and received his MDiv. at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC), doing additional work at Trinity Seminary, Columbus Ohio, and Cambridge University in England. Pastor Shebeck holds the Doctor of Ministry in Liturgical Theology from the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago where he studied under Ed Foley. Pr. Shebeck is a Fellow of the Collegeville Institute at St. John's University, and also a fellow of the John Templeton Foundation's project on Science and Homiletics; he also serves on the Board of Directors of the ELCA Deaconess Community and the Board of Trustees of the Seminar on Lutheran Liturgy.
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