Has there been a highpoint in your life these past twelve months? Can you recall any unexpected blessings that came your way? Or was this year marked by personal sorrow and sadness? Whatever has happened in your life this past year, God has continued to bless you with life, grace and mercy, and wants you to experience that “the mercies of the Lord are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22).” It’s also helpful to remember that our “bad days” have no more hours in them than our “good days”.

Today we thank God for every Christian near and dear to us who has died in the Christian Faith. We’re grateful for the blessings brought to us through their prayers while they were still alive, and also for the love we received from them. God has given us two gifts to help us cope with the loss of our loved ones. He has given us our memories of them, and He has given us our sure and certain hope of life with them in heaven forever. God’s Word says “The memory of the righteous is a blessing (Proverbs 10:7).” We honour our deceased family members and friends by thanking God for them. God’s Word comforts us with these words from Scripture, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His faithful ones (Psalm 111:15).”

As sad as it may be that they’re no longer with us, it would be sadder still if we had never known them and they had not enriched our lives with their presence and love. Good memories can prolong the blessings we feel. With our memory we can bring to mind things we didn’t notice at the time, and yet realise that the best is still to come, a time for which our faith is preparing us, even today.

Death isn’t God’s final word to you about your deceased loved ones. The last Book of the Bible tells us, “Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord (Revelation 14:13).”  “To bless” those who have died may sound strange to modern ears. Our modern world prefers to think of blessedness in terms of this life only. It cannot see how death can be a blessing to someone. But for everyone who “believes in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead into life everlasting”, it’s so very different.

For all of us who do, death marks the start of the greatest chapter of our lives. Death doesn’t end our relationships with those who have died in the Faith; rather it raises our relationship with them to a higher level. The Christian Faith we share together transforms the parting of Christians into “the communion of saints”, for in the communion of saints, we have in Christ a link with them that transcends death. Our fellowship with the saints in glory gives us a deeper meaning to our worship in the name of Jesus. We worship God together with all those who worship Him around the throne of God in heaven.

Our Christian community is much larger than all those Christians who are alive on this earth now. In today’s second reading, St. Paul gives us a vision of the Church on this earth and the Church triumphant in heaven, inseparably bound together. Just as a bridegroom is complete with his bride, so Christ feels complete with the members of His Body, His dearly loved Church. Here, as St Paul often does in his letters to churches, Paul addresses the Christians in Ephesus with the title of “saints”.

It is significant that in the Apostles’ Creed, immediately after we confess our faith in the communion of saints, we confess our faith in the forgiveness of sins. Saints are all those Christians who treasure and embrace the forgiveness Jesus Christ has won for them at Easter. Every Christian who clings to Christ as his or her only source of hope, despite the pain and suffering they’ve experienced, is a saint in God’s eyes. We could also refer to this particular Sunday in the Church Year as a Festival of Forgiven Sinners. While many of the saints mentioned in our Bibles performed heroic acts of faith, others could easily identify with the prayer of the tax collector in the temple when he prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

“Saints” are not those who achieve holiness by doing good works, but all those who receive Christ’s own holiness through faith. Wherever there is faith active in love, there is a saint at work. God has chosen some rather odd characters to carry out His mission in our world, because all kinds of Christians matter to Him. His Son Jesus loved the Church, the community of believers, so much that He gave His life for it. St. Paul presents the continued existence of Christ’s Church on earth as proof of the power of our Lord’s resurrection.

Our risen Redeemer is alive and active both within and outside of His Church in unexpected places. Each Sunday Service is a celebration of Easter. Easter is both the promise and the guarantee of your own resurrection. St. Paul uses amazing words to tell you of the far-reaching effects of Easter when he says, “God has made us alive together with Christ … and raised us up with Christ and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6).” Already now, in Holy Communion, we experience “a foretaste of the feast to come”. When we confess that Jesus is risen from the dead, our faith isn’t in a far away event, but rather in an event that transcends time and space, that reaches out to include us. In a mysterious way, our life as our Lord’s saints is already a life beyond death, hidden under this life. St. Paul says to us, “For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3).”

The Church is an extension of Christ’s body. We experience even now the countless blessings of His life, death and resurrection. This means we will seek to love each member of His Church just as He loves each one of us. St. Paul bursts into jubilant thanksgiving when he hears of the faith of the Ephesian Church and their love for one another. One of the joys of being a member of Christ’s Church is an awareness that we belong together with all Christians, of every time and place, and can enjoy a feeling of being “at home” when travelling, sharing the same hymns and songs, praying the same prayers and listening to the same Bible readings we have here.

In our celebration of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus joins us with the whole communion of saints, here and beyond time and space. “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven (Hebrews 12:22-23a).” The words of our Holy Communion liturgy, “therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we adore and magnify your glorious name”, reinforce this message.

You may, therefore, more properly remember your deceased loved ones at the Lord’s Table than at the cemetery. That’s why receiving Holy Communion is such a wonderful experience. In Holy Communion you not only have communion with Christ Jesus and with those who receive Holy Communion with you, but also with those who have died in the Faith. They surround you and support you invisibly, just as all the other Christians do who worship God together with you. They witness your worship and rejoice over it, even as the angels rejoice over one sinner who repents. “Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner who repents (Luke 15:10).”

All of the changes of this life prepare us for the greatest change of all, from this life to the life of the world to come. “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope (Jeremiah 29:11).”

Remember, the best is still to come. Amen.

All Saints
John 17:20-26 ‘’

In another life I studied quantum theory at the University of Regensburg in Germany. It is a much more interesting field of study than many might imagine. But I have to admit, when I turned my attention to theology, I didn’t think I would be finding much use for quantum theory again. Then I read today’s text.

But before we get to that, I need to explain a couple of basic points about quantum mechanics for those of you who may not have been paying close attention in Year 10 science.

Firstly, quantum mechanics looks at the interactions of particles at the sub-atomic level, much as classical physics looks at the laws that govern the interaction of matter on the large-scale level.

As we know, everything material that exists, like air, water, stars, trees and us, are made up of distinctive combinations of atoms. Water, for instance, is simply a collection of molecules made by combining two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom. H2O. That seems pretty straight forward.

But what takes place within these various atoms is something quite remarkable. Electrons orbit around a nucleus that composed of protons and neutrons. And these subatomic particles are again formed by even smaller fundamental particles such as leptons, quarks and bosons. But the really interesting thing is that matter seems to relate and act differently at the subatomic level than at the large-scale level.

Just a few points that you may recall from those long-gone days in science class. Sub-atomic particles appear to act as both a particle and a wave. This means we need to look at them as being both at the same time to understand how they work.

And here is another interesting point. These particles/waves are connected in ways that are hard for us to fathom. For instance, Albert Einstein (who you have all heard of) together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (who you have probably never heard of) put together the famous EPR thought experiment in 1935 seeking to show that quantum theory really didn’t make sense. But they appear to accidently have gotten it right. Some decades later laboratory experiments not possible in the 1930s showed that what they proposed was actually the case. Basically, it was shown that particles that are split remain somehow connected and in communication even at great distances. So if a particle has a total spin of 0 and it is split, and one half of the particle is measured or made to have a ½ right spin, the other half of the particle, even if it is kms away or even on the other side of the galaxy, will instantly have a ½ left spin to balance it out. And this information between particles is transferred faster than the speed of light. Which according to classical physics is not possible. And yet it happens. Einstein was not happy about this and called it ‘spooky action at a distance’ which is not a technical scientific term, but it is easy to remember.

Another famous scientist of the time, Erwin Schrödinger (famous for his Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment) looked at the whole phenomenon of how subatomic particles are both wave and particle at the same time, and are somehow connected even after being split, even if they are half a universe away. He called the whole scenario quantum entanglement. And that became the technical term.

So this is the point. At the most fundamental level of reality, everything is completely entangled. That’s the way God made our universe. There are connections and actions that defy our understanding of time and distance, and of wave and particle. Everything is so inter-connected to everything else at the foundational sub-atomic level that traditional categories of space and time cannot explain the depth of these connections. And this, in a nutshell, is what is called quantum entanglement.

Now, back to today’s Gospel reading.

This is the only substantial prayer of Jesus that we have apart from the Lord’s prayer, which is more of a template. In this prayer we have a glimpse into the heart and deepest concerns of Jesus as he was preparing for the cross.

The first thing we notice in today’s text, which is the final part of his prayer, is that Jesus is praying for us.  ‘I ask not only on behalf of these here, but also on behalf of those who are yet to believe in me through their word.’ Think about that. Jesus prays for all those who are yet to believe. That’s us.

That alone, if nothing else sticks in your mind from this text, should bring comfort and peace. Jesus prayed for us – for you and me today.

But what exactly does he pray for? He prays that we might all be one. And in his prayer he reveals something of what this means. He does this by revealing who he is in relation to the Father and who he is in relation to us.

Jesus does this through the repetition of key words and ideas. It is something we find often in John’s Gospel. The key themes repeated in the next few verses are unity, love and glory. Like elsewhere in John’s Gospel, we find that these words and concepts are not simply repeated, but recur in every changing configurations that continue to fill out these key concepts.

For instance, in the case of the theme of unity or oneness we begin with Jesus’ wish that we might all be one. The foundation of this idea we then find is that Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in Jesus and that all of us who believe in Jesus are in this unity of Father and Son. Likewise, Jesus says, that he is also in us, and the Father is in him. And in this way Jesus says we are becoming ‘completely one’ so the world will see and know that the Father loves each of us just as he loves Jesus.

So the love that flows from Father to Son and Son to Father is the same love that flows to us, and between us. And we learn that this has been the case since before the physical world was founded.

And this famous prayer of Jesus finished not with an ‘amen,’ but with these words: ‘I made known your name to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.’

And that is the end of the prayer. Jesus concludes with the desire that the love of the Father which flows into the Son, with whom the Father is one, will also flow into us, and that Jesus will also be in us just as we are in him.

So now, and in the future, and from before time began, love and unity flow between Father and Son, and between the Son and us, and between us and the Father, and between all of us. And the glory of the Father is also the glory of the Son. And in following Jesus we reflect this glory back to the Father and we experience and see this glory ourselves.

Now, if that all sounds impossibly complex and interconnected, that is exactly the point.

This text sounds a lot like the situation of quantum entanglement that underlies all physical reality.

Perhaps we might call this divine entanglement. It is description of the complex interconnectedness which underlies all spiritual reality.

It makes sense that a God who creates a physical world so completely and mysteriously inter-connected or entangled would also produce a spiritual reality no less complex and interconnected.

But you might say, ‘This is all too complicated. How can we ever understand what Jesus is describing in this prayer? ‘

I would like to suggest that that is not the point.

Let’s think again about the world of quantum physics. Some time ago at a conference on the relationship between science and faith, I was asked how to tell if someone actually understood quantum theory, as there were (and still are) so many competing and contradictory explanations and understandings about what actually takes place at the quantum level.

My answer was that I could not tell them how to tell if someone understood quantum theory, but I could tell them how to tell if someone did not. This got their attention.

The simple test, I said, was that anyone who says they understand how the quantum world works, has no idea what they are talking about.

In the field of quantum mechanics, it is well known that basic principles, like uncertainty, action at a distance, wave particle duality, and entanglement work in practical application. But it is also well-known that no one really understands how or why these principles work.

Similarly, on the spiritual level, we do not know just how it is that Jesus and the Father and the Spirit are one. Nor do we fully understand just how we are one with Jesus and with each other. Or how he is in us and we are in him. Or how love and unity flow in every possible direction between Father, Son, and believers, or how all this is both still being ‘made known’ and has at the same time been true since before the foundation of the world.

But we know that it works. We know that if we think of the relationship of Father and Son in this way, and of our relationship with both Jesus and Father in this way, and the relationship that we have in unity and love also toward one another, that it works.

Understanding how it works is not a prerequisite for it working.

But if such things are too complex for us to understand, or at least fully understand, then why does Jeus bring it up? Why does Jesus pray in this way? And why does John record this complex prayer?

The reason is because John’s Gospel is about knowing who Jesus is as God, and about who we are in Jesus. It is about knowing what it means to be one with Jesus, who is also one with the Father. John’s Gospel is about the mutual circle of love between Father and Son, and between us and Jesus, and among one another.

So Jesus, in this prayer, is describing the reality that we are completely entangled in divine love and unity and glory. We may not understand the complexities of how it works any more than we are able to understand the complexities of the quantum world.

But we know that it works.

We know that we are safely entangled in the love of Jesus. We are bound up in unity with him and with the Father and with the Spirit. We are entangled and inextricably connected to all those who are also entangled in Christ’s love.

This divine entanglement that begins and concludes in the person of Jesus and in our relationship to him is not a mystery to be solved. It is a truth to take comfort in.

In Jesus, God has entangled us in his love, and in is very being. And we do not need to fully understand how this works to know that there is no better place to be than fully embrace and entangled in God’s love.

Amen.

Pastor Mark Worthing.

Dear saints in Christ, I want you to have a quick look around, and tell me if anyone here is wearing a golden halo. Is there anyone here who is looking particularly saintly today? Your husband or wife or your Child perhaps? The fact is, we know that we’re all pretty human, and being human means “warts and all”. Most of us have probably said, “I’m no saint”. However, in just a little while we are all going to say the words, ‘I believe in the communion of saints’. And with these words we will confess our belief that there is more to the church than meets the eye.

 There is more to this Lutheran congregation, than meets the eye. The church is far more than a gathering of individuals loitering with religious intent. The church is, in fact, a communion of all people who have been made holy by Jesus – all believers in Christ, in all places, of all times. The communion of saints includes all Christians living now, all the faithful who have died, and even those believers who are yet to be! All of these are “saints” because they are baptized into Jesus, and all of these saints are a “communion”, because being united to Jesus makes us united to each other.

The thing I’d like to focus on today is that all Christians as saints. All baptised believers are holy, and that’s what the word ‘saint’ means: a holy person. And to look at the role that the saints (both living and departed) play in our lives, I’d like to focus on a passage from the Lutheran Confessions, one that I think all Christians could say ‘Amen’ to. Let me read the relevant passage to you.

Our Confession approves giving honour to the saints. This honour is threefold. The first is thanksgiving: we should thank God for showing examples of his mercy, revealing his will to save people, and giving teachers and other gifts to the church….The second honour is strengthening of our faith: when we see Peter forgiven after his denial, we are encouraged to believe that grace does indeed abound more than sin. The third honour is imitation, first of their faith and then of their other virtues, which each should imitate in accordance with his calling. (Apology, XXI)

Let’s look at these three ways of honouring the saints

1. We give thanks to God for all his people. Because apart from the gospel and the sacraments, the saints are the greatest blessing the church has. Every saved man, woman and child is a wonderful cause for rejoicing. Every believer sitting in the pew today is evidence that God is still at work in the 21^st century just as much as he was in the first. Every believer sitting here today demonstrates that miracles still occur. We should never stop giving thanks for the fact that despite all the faults we can find with others, and all the warts others can find with us, God has begun his work of salvation, and is daily working to bring it to completion.

Moreover, we can thank the Lord for those who taught us the faith and brought us to Jesus: our parents, our pastors, our teachers. Thank the Lord for every mature Christian who showed us what following Christ means. We thank the Lord also for ordinary Christians who have simply and steadfastly kept the faith, and for unknown Christians who were never remembered in this life, but will receive ample reward in the next. And, we can even thank the Lord for those living saints with whom we disagree, with whom we experience conflict, because they too are our brothers and sisters, and our unity in Christ transcends our disagreements and tensions. Every saint, in fact, is a demonstration of how much God wants to save us, how much he wants to forgive us.

1. And that brings me to the second reason for honouring the saints: for strengthening our faith. Again and again we discover that the saints are forgiven sinners. They may have been heroes of the faith, but they were highly forgiven heroes! The greatest hymn-writer of the Bible, King David, was an adulterer and a murderer. Jacob, who was named Israel, was dishonest and tricked his brother Esau. Peter denied his Lord three times. Paul confessed to a lifetime struggle with sin. And yet, God’s grace triumphed over all their faults and his forgiveness covered their most disastrous sins. When they were weak, God showed his strength in them. Whenever they thought they had failed, God’s word returned to them having achieved all it set out to do. And how does this strengthen our faith? Well, if God has shown such mercy to them, think of what mercy he will show to us. If God has used other sinners, he will also use us. There is hope for us all!
2. Imitate the saints who stand out are worth copying. They are good role models for the rest of us. St Paul quite unashamedly said: ‘Join with others in following my example, brothers, and take note of those who live according to the pattern we gave you’ (Philippians 3:17). We need heroes to inspire us. We have sporting heroes – why not faith heroes? A young Catholic I spoke to some time ago said that at their confirmation they chose a saint to whom they could look as a model and inspiration. What a good idea!

So, our honour of the saints is three-fold, say the confessions. We give thanks for them, our faith is strengthened by them, and we imitate them. To finish off, let me return to a point I made at the beginning:

• The communion of saints is a spiritual reality, and therefore it’s something we can hardly begin to understand in this life. But because we are all joined sacramentally to Christ – through baptism and holy communion – we are also joined to each other. We share all things in common. The spiritual strength of some saints help and sustain those who are weak. On the other hand, the sins and weakness of others are shared by the rest as well. As Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘If one part (of the body of Christ) suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it’. So, on this festival of All Saints, let us give thanks for what we all share in common, and let us confess: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints”. Amen.

And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Isiah 25:6-9  Revelation 21: 1-6a  St John 11:32-44

The lection for today is related to ‘All Saints Day’. This festival reminds us of those countless witnesses, according to the book of the Revelation, ‘who no one can number’ and who surround the throne of God with their heavenly praise of the Lamb: Who hear, know, and experience Christ’s promise, “Behold I make all things new.” (Rev. 21:5)

The 11^th chapter of the holy gospel of St John concerns the events, associated with the raising of the dead Lazarus, which foretells the newness of which the Revelation of John speaks, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This 11^th. Chapter is pivotal in the plan of St John’s presentation of the evangel. For it is the event of Lazarus’ raising and its disruptive consequences for the Jewish peoples’ relationship with the occupying Roman authorities that precipitates the discussion of how Jesus may be removed from the scene through his death. The counsel offered by the High Priest is that it is better that one man should perish than that the whole people should suffer (v.48) This was in the context of the consequences of the unwelcome attention of the Romans to the Jews, caused by controversies associated with Jesus’ action in raising of Lazarus from his death.

The raising of Lazarus is not simply, as an incident in the gospel narrative, a literary device, which St John uses to introduce the question of Jesus impending passion and death due to the Jewish authority’s planned execution of Jesus. This chapter is also filled with potent meaning as to St John’s view of the relationship between Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection and Christians understanding of their life. It concerns the way God has taken with us in Christ, encompassing as He does our human life in its vulnerability to the ravages of death and decay, encompassing our life with the grace of His life-giving presence.

To put these issues into more a manageable context it is necessary to concentrate our attention on particular aspects of St John’s account. To this end I take the shortest text in the New Testament. “Jesus wept.” (v.35 Chp. 11)

In the presence of the death of Lazarus, He who had previously said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” (v 26) The One who says this of Himself weeps? Why is this so?

The onlookers of this drama suggest some answers. The Jews who see Jesus’ weeping say “See how he loved him.” They understand Jesus weeping in terms of his grief at the loss of a dear friend. This would be a perfectly reasonable observation except, except, St John has already told us that Jesus deliberately put off coming to Lazarus’ aid when he heard that he was sick. “So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’” Again, when Lazarus’ death is reported Jesus says, “For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.” (v.15)

These are hardly the actions of one consumed with empathy and/or grief at the plight of his friend. St John indicates an intentional delay by Jesus in his coming to the situation of need and distress. According to Jesus we must seek the reason for this delay in his statement made in (v.4) that Lazarus’ illness and death is, “for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it.”

How then is Jesus weeping to be understood as glorifying the Son of God and thus in turn glorifying the Father? It cannot be simply in the obvious sense as an expression of human grief in the face of death.

The other comment offered by the Jews standing by is, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” (v.37) The inference in the rhetorical question is that Jesus weeping was an expression of his weakness in the face of the human ‘Destroyer’, death. It was a sign of his inability to help the helpless in this most human situation of family grief, weeping at the loss of their brother. Acknowledging their complete helplessness in the presence of death, the destroyer of all human hope.

It is possible that this second comment by those standing by, even though it is intended as an ironic jibe at the seeming inability of Jesus to act in the situation of distress which now confronts him, this comment draws attention to Jesus’ weakness. And it is, I suggest, precisely this, that Jesus’ weeping is about!

Not in the sense in which the Jews intended. Jesus’ weakness, and therefore his weeping, is not because of His own inability in the face of death. He has already in this chapter said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life……” (v. 25) In Himself as the Son of God the frontier of death and the negation of human existence, its hopes and dreams, has no place in Him. His weakness, his weeping is not for his own sake. Instead, we must understand his weeping as a sign of his awful humility, his accommodation of himself to our weakness and our being subject to the ravages of death in all its forms of sickness, anxiety and paralysing fear. In this way in our place his weeping is for us, for our sake he confronts the sovereignty of death in our flesh.

Here God’s glory, the glory of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is revealed as Jesus promised in (v.4 of chp. 11.) “This illness….is for the glory of God; so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it.” But God’s glory is revealed in that which according to the standard of our human judgment hides God’s glory, conceals his divinity. It is revealed in weakness, in weeping. Finally, in the apparent absence of God in the darkness of Gethsemane and Golgotha; shame, abandonment, nakedness and death. There the glory of the Son in His obedience to the Father, his unity with the Father is to be seen. There God’s glory is revealed in the hiddenness of the cross; since His glory consists in his inestimable humility, his divine freedom to be one with us in the depths of our estrangement from God. God’s almightiness here is the almightiness of a love so powerful that it is capable of accepting powerlessness, hiddenness, in terms of what is normally perceived to be the manifestation of God’s presence in the world. We measure God against our conceptions of power and almightiness. God who is present in the world in Jesus has refuted just this conception of power. God is so free as to be powerless and weak in this world without ceasing to be God. This is how God accompanies us and the world in its history. God’s apparent powerlessness and weakness are revealed in Jesus to be God’s limitless power.

The raising of Lazarus is a sign of this limitless power of God and its effect in the alienation of the human situation subject as it is to death. Lazarus is a sign of this coming glory of God. Lazarus himself is not the resurrection and the life, he dies again. But the overcoming of his death by the presence of the humiliated Jesus, His weeping at Lazarus’ grave as a sign of the solidarity of the Son of God with us, becomes for us the sign of His victory over sin and death achieved once and for all in the cross and resurrection.

This indiscriminate generosity of God which lays claim to the world turns upside down our natural understanding of how God is present and acts in the world. We hold it as an unchallengeable fact that we live in a world in which what negates human life is sovereign. The situation in the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany reflects the situation of the church in the world; anxiety, grief and unbelief.

The action of Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb puts an end to this anxious view of Christian discipleship – the anxious view of the situation of the church in the world. It seeks to address a church that is always taking a tragic view of itself and its future. The inveterate pessimism of the disciples and the church that dare not to understand themselves as people who belong to the Victor of Gethsemane and Golgotha. This is the word we hear from St John in this 11^th. Chapter to be read for ‘All Saints Day.’ The fact that, “Jesus wept.”

In this holy sacrament we find again the sign of the presence of Christ’s glory, His weakness for our sake. As Luther put it in his inimitable forthright manner, in the Eucharist Christ comes to us:

“Allowing Himself to be profaned and taken by hands, mouth, and belly, as if He were a fried sausage? Would this be consistent with the majesty of God and the glory of heaven? Ah, this is more than certain.” (Luther Works Vol 37 p 47.)

So, Jesus goes on His strange journey of obedience from Martha and Mary’s house at Bethany to Jerusalem in order that by sharing in what we are, we may share in what He is. He makes us one with the Father by giving us to participate in his righteousness as at one and the same time he takes upon himself our sin and death. This is Christ’s glory; this is how the Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father and how both are glorified in the Spirits mediation of this reality in the life of the church. It is this ‘glory’ that Jesus intends when he says at the tomb of Lazarus, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you would see the glory of God?”

Whether we think of our circumstances and that of the church good or bad, the decisive thing we must learn from this text which tells us “Jesus wept;” is that in Jesus Christ before darkness and death could threaten and torment us, He triumphed over them for our sake. That this One who wept in his weakness, his identification of Himself with us, this One lives as the Lord for us and all people.

Therefore, let there be, “glory to the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Amen

Dr. Gordon Watson.