Lent 5, Year A

His commencement speech at the college begins, “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys.  How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”  The speaker adds, “This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of little parable-ish stories.”  After a bit of self-deprecation he remarks, “The immediate point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.  Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude—but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.” He comments on the cliché of commencement speeches that the value of a liberal arts education is not about filling you up with knowledge; it is about “teaching you how to think” and says that this is not as insulting as it may seem to students who figure they already knew how to think when they were accepted to college.  

The year is 2005 and the commencement speaker is David Foster Wallace, a writer who is in some ways a genius, and is also suffering from some miserable and damaging mental illnesses.  He has a love-hate relationship with religion, and he seems to have a love-hate relationship with many aspects of life, and, in the end, a love-hate relationship with life itself.  His advice to these young graduates is in some ways wise, and in other ways poignant because he seems to glimpse something that he finds so difficult to incorporate into his own life.  

He tells a second parable-ish story. I’m quoting it verbatim even though I wouldn’t use the words he uses.   “There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness.  One of the guys is religious, the other’s an atheist, and they’re arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.  And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God.  It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer thing.  Just last month, I got caught off away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn’t see a thing, and I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, “God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me!”  And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled: “Well then, you must believe now,” he says.  “After all, here you are, alive.”  The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp: “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to camp.” 

He says, “It’s easy to run this story through a kind of standard liberal arts analysis: The exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience…which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from, meaning where they come from inside the two guys…as if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice, of conscious decision.  Plus, there’s the matter of arrogance.  The nonreligious guy is so totally, obnoxiously confident in his dismissal of the possibility that the Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help.  True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations, too.  They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us here, but the fact is that religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s atheist’s—arrogance, blind certainty, a closed-mindedness that’s like an imprisonment so complete that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.  The point here is that I think this is one part of what the liberal arts mantra of “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties, because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”

Hold that thought about arrogance and certainties as we look at today’s gospel reading. There’s a reason that the raising of Lazarus is placed in the lectionary today, the Sunday right before Palm Sunday.  The raising of Lazarus, which appears only in the gospel of John, occurs in the narrative shortly before the triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the palms. In fact, it is the raising of Lazarus that sets in motion the events leading to the crucifixion.  This is because there are two responses to Jesus’ raising Lazarus.  The first response, as we’ve heard today, is “Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.”  However, the second response, in the verses that follow today’s passage, is that other people go to the Pharisees to complain, so the Pharisees call a meeting of the council, at which they say, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” Caiaphas responds, with an irony he himself is not aware of, “It is expedient to have one man die for the people” so from that day on they planned to put him to death.  

The people we encounter in the gospel of John, like all of us, have certainties about how the world operates.  Mary and Martha are weeping in their grief.  They both say the exact same thing to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But now, of course, it is too late.  It’s not that they don’t believe in resurrection.  When Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again,” Martha replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”  The Pharisees believe in this too: you will remember that the difference between the Pharisees and the Sadducees is that the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection but the Pharisees do.  But Jesus isn’t talking about rising again on a day far in the future.  Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”  Martha had her certainty, that resurrection was something that would happen eventually, far off in the future on the last day.  But she does not show the arrogance we were talking about that sees only the old certainties and dismisses anything else.  Because of her lack of arrogance, Martha is able to let go of her old certainties and she answers, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”  Jesus does the miracle that raises Lazarus from the dead.   Other friends who are with Mary and Martha also drop their certainties and their arrogance and believe.

We see the opposite response from the Pharisees, who are certain they know how the world operates and how God operates.  When Jesus does something that does not fit in their expectations of how the world works and how God works, they do not adjust their expectations, they see the disruption of the status quo as something that must be stopped.  They plot to kill Jesus.  In addition, John 12 tells us, “The chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and believing in Jesus.” They do not consider that something they were certain of might turn out to be wrong.  And that certainty and arrogance take them down the worst possible path.

Jesus raising someone from the dead is, in itself, a good and wonderful thing.  A miraculous thing.  Still, the significance John wants us to see is not just the miracle itself; it is what the miracle shows us about who Jesus is: “I am the resurrection and the life.”  It is as if John is telling us that resurrection isn’t just something that happens off in the future, after we are dead.  Resurrection and life are right here right now.  They are who Jesus is.  They are who God is.  

With our certainties, we are like fish swimming along, missing the most obvious thing of all: what’s water?  I’m a fish like you, so I’m not really able to put into words what water is.  What I can say, is that when I read the gospels, I get a sense that we have been swimming through our lives preoccupied with our anxieties and our frustrations, our complaints and losses and annoyances, while all the time there is something that constantly surrounds us and supports us and flows through our gills, and that that something is life-giving, and loving and part of an infinite ocean.  It is not far away in time or space; it is right here, right now.  It is the commencement of a lifelong process to be a fish who believes: this is water.