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New Testament Reading—John 11: 1-45
If you had a choice, how many of you would want to be like Lazarus and experience dying twice? Remember first that it is a bit ambiguous whether Jesus actually helped Lazarus to live longer. Jesus could have saved him earlier before he died, but, according to John, decided against it because by raising Lazarus from the dead he would glorify God and the Son of God—that is himself.
Also remember that we later learn that Lazarus might well have died soon after he was brought back to life because the chief priests planned to have him killed. With this in mind, how many of you would like to experience what Lazarus experienced? Any thrill seekers out there?! Doesn’t sound appealing does it? And, it is not an appealing portrait of Jesus either at first blush. If someone else were to willingly let a friend of theirs die just so they could glorify themselves, we might say they are a bit narcissistic and sadistic.
But this is if we take the story as a literal, historical event. If we instead remember that the Gospel of John was the last of the gospels written and that none of the earlier gospels include this story, and if we instead treat this as an oral story of legend and myth used to convey a deep and powerful meaning among the followers of Jesus many years after his death, then I think that gives us some wiggle room and allows us to appreciate the story all the more. Maybe God doesn’t really make us suffer solely to make a point or to teach a lesson. Maybe this story instead serves to foreshadow the death and resurrection of Jesus. Maybe this story instead serves to metaphorically convey that Jesus was and is the bringer of life into this world, not just for Lazarus but for all of us. Jesus after all tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Maybe the story also reflects the true and very real experience of the community in which it was originally told. Maybe it reflects their experience of death itself as a persecuted and battered community. And, yet, maybe it also reflects their experience of the resurrected spirit of Jesus all those many years later.
There is a wonderful story told by Martha Conant that is indeed a true story, and it is a story about an experience none of us would actually want to have, but it’s a story from which all of us could learn a lesson about life and about God.[i] This is a story that some of you might remember, especially Natalie Cantrell and John Fite, who both at one time worked for United Airlines. The story begins on July 19, 1989. On that day, United Airlines Flight 232 left Denver for Chicago. During the flight, an undetected crack caused by fatigue led to the failure of the plane’s tail engine along with its flight controls.[ii] As the CBS news show, 48 Hours would later explain, “At this point, piloting the plane was like driving a car without steering or brakes.” The pilots “were forced to use the two wing engines as navigation devices. By throttling the left engine up, they could slowly turn the plane to the right, and vice versa…they flew like this for half an hour” before getting to Sioux City, Iowa for an emergency landing.[iii]
Martha Conant was one of the passengers on board. Over the PA the pilot, explained that this would be “the roughest landing” they would ever experience. He instructed the passengers on the “brace position” which means “feet on the floor…hands on the back of the seat in front…and…head down between…[the] knees.” As they endeavored to land, the pilot yelled, “Brace! Brace! Brace!” Conant remembers then being struck by a wave of air, gravel, dirt, and debris. Her arms flailed around, her body bounced “out of control.” Twice she blacked out. Each time she came to, she said to herself, “Oh, I’m still alive.” The plane was still in motion and chaos was all around her, but all she could hear were her own thoughts. Of the 296 people on board, Conant was one of 185 who survived. A hundred and eleven perished.
As one might imagine, the experience had a profound impact on Conant’s life. She later described her life as being like the “proverbial ocean liner turning around.” Some of the changes in her life were immediate and some have unfolded over every year of her life since then. One immediate change was that she decided that she “wanted to live with as few regrets as possible.” She set out to repair relationships. She became determined to never leave home in the morning upset. She never missed a chance to tell her husband or one of her sons how much she loved them. She took every opportunity to tell her friends how much she appreciated them.
Initially, these life changes were difficult. She had to be very intentional about them because they required changing deeply ingrained habits. “Oh, this is hard,” she would think, but then she would say to herself, “Yeah, well, I might not be coming home tonight. It’s not that hard.” With a lot of effort, the changes eventually became part of her way of being. What took a longer time to change, however, was the “reprioritization” of her everyday life. When the crash landing happened, she was flying on a business trip. She was a person very much absorbed by her professional life. It took up a lot of her time and attention. She recalls paying “lip service to the notion that [her] family was [her] first priority, but when push came to shove, it didn’t always work out that way.” It took a while for her professed values to become her practiced values.
Her beliefs about God were also profoundly impacted by her experience. A central part of this was coming to terms with what is often called survivor’s guilt. Why did I get to live while others died? Right after the accident, there were a number of pastors and social workers who surrounded the survivors as they were fed and cared for. One of the social workers said to her, “God must have had a reason for saving you. You haven’t finished your life’s work yet.” That notion didn’t sit well with Conant. First of all, it made her feel like an immense responsibility had just been placed on her shoulders. What exactly was she saved for? How was she to figure that out? Second of all, what did this belief in being saved for a reason mean for the people who died? The flip side of the social worker’s statement was that “God didn’t have any more work for all those other people.”
Conant simply couldn’t believe that. She couldn’t believe in a God who intervenes in our lives to give us such arbitrary destinies. In facing the tragic and absurd conditions of life, Conant instead decided to believe that some things in life are just the product of random chance. Chance “impacts all of us in big ways and small ways.” On the day of the flight, chance impacted Conant and everyone on that plane when it decided who was going to sit where. This realization, however, didn’t mean that Conant no longer believed in God. No, her faith was actually strengthened by her experience. Conant recalls, “One of the things that has accompanied me, followed me, surrounded me, wrapped me is that feeling of gratitude for whatever happens. That event was like being picked up by the scruff of the neck and shaken. And God says, “This is your only life! Just be grateful for it. Just be grateful that you’ve got these days and these hours and these wonderful people in your life. Just be grateful for that.”
None of us probably want to experience what Conant experienced to come to such revelations. We don’t want the Lazarus experience, but we want the Lazarus effect. We want the kind of faith that follows from experiences like Conant’s. We want a belief in God that is capable of withstanding the storms of life. We want a belief in God that re-orients our life and sets our priorities. We want a belief in God that brings us to a deep feeling of gratitude. We want a belief in God that brings us life, that resurrects our spirits. Let the coming weeks be a time when we allow the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection to have its own impact on our lives, its own Lazarus effect. Let the story grab you by the scruff of the neck and shake you until you realize the full beauty and wonder of the life that has been gifted to you by God. Amen.
[i] Unless otherwise specified, everything that follows comes from Dave Isay’s Listening Is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the Storycorps Project, (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 105-109.
[ii] Aircraft Accident Report, “United Airlines Flight 232, McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10, Sioux Gateway Airport, Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989,” <http://www3.ntsb.gov/publictn/1990/AAR9006.htm>.
[iii] “30 Minutes That Changed Everything: A Joke before Landing,” 48 Hours, (August 20, 1998), http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/08/20/48hours/main16349.shtml