It took me a while to realize the full importance given to the hallowed Day of Halloween in this country. See, where I grew up it wasn’t observed or celebrated at all, not in my day. I spent my entire childhood without ever going trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, missing out on pounds and pounds of sugar candy. I never got to know who the “sweetest” neighbor in our village was. In fact, where I was raised, October 31 was boring. Children didn’t dress up. No spider webs covered front yard shrubs, no fake gravestones stood on the lawn, no witches, no headless monsters, no skeletons, no blood stains showed up anywhere. You couldn’t even find a single grinning pumpkin face. Eerie music played after dusk? Not even a hint! I missed out on all of it. It’s a wonder I made it through childhood unscathed, right?
But now, as I have observed the spectacle for a good number of years, having donated my share of money to the candy industry for the good cause of feeding children pure sugar and giving them permission to raid houses after dark, I have come to understand the deeper purpose of Halloween. See, at any other time when children are confronted with the reality of death, it’s very serious and often disturbingly emotional. It’s difficult to deal with, especially for children, especially if it was someone close to their hearts. So, it’s not something anybody wants to confront voluntarily. But thanks to the National Candy Day, we allow everybody to encounter the darker side of life, the looming possibility of death, the grimacing face of mortality, without the seriousness and the emotional burden that is usually associated with it. You could also say: we make fun of the old Scythe man, and by doing so, we celebrate life.
Last year when we went for a family reunion to France, we stopped in Paris on our way back home. We had two days there, so I asked my son Peter what he wanted to see. Naturally, he didn’t say he wanted to see the world renowned Louvre Museum or even the Eiffel Tower, which surprised me. No, he wanted to go to an entirely different place, I mean ENTIRELY different. See, in 1786 Parisians, worried about public health and hygiene, converted old Roman limestone quarries into a huge subterranean cemetery. In nearly 200 miles of dark and dank tunnels they meticulously stacked the skeletal remains of five million people from floor to ceiling in various symmetrical patterns. Graffiti line the narrow passages and low ceilings, commenting on the certainty of death and the uncertainty of life. One reads, “Crazy that you are, why do you promise yourself to live a long time, you who cannot count on a single day?” Well, that’s the place Peter wanted to visit, and I have pictures to prove it.
Of course, what can be fun to experience under the guise of Halloween or in a throng of tourist visitors, in the safety of a public venue, gazing at the dead bones of unknown people from the past, is much, much tougher to face when it affects you personally in real life. The story of Lazarus is a case in point. It’s a very emotional story. Suffering and weeping and expressing their anguish are two sisters, Mary and Martha. They are on the brink of losing their only brother; they’re on the brink of a financial disaster; they’re on the brink of losing their faith.
Mary and Martha were two of Jesus’ most interesting disciples. They were extravagantly generous. Certainly Mary was when she poured out ointment worth a year’s wages onto Jesus’ feet. Everybody hearing this story knows about that gesture and what it meant, as you can tell from how in the beginning of this chapter John identifies Mary as “the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair”, even though that event doesn’t even happen in John’s gospel until the next chapter. Mary and Martha were all in – INvolved, INspired, INcluded, INtune with the Jesus movement. Everybody, it seems, knew the family. So dedicated were the sisters that they remained “unattached” in a world which didn’t really have a positive social category for single people.
And now the risk involved in that path becomes frighteningly clear to the sisters, as their brother is fighting for his life. Lazarus was not only a beloved brother, but was also the closest thing to Social Security that Mary and Martha had, and he was slipping away. So they called Jesus; they sent word to him of the dire situation they were in, urging him to speed up. Lazarus was on his death bed. Given their relationship, given their friendship, the sisters expected him to drop everything and come at once; perhaps he would even be able to heal his gravely ill friend.
But, to their great disappointment, Jesus doesn’t come. He doesn’t come to be with his beloved friend as he lies dying, and he doesn’t come to honor his friend at the funeral. When the sisters get word that Jesus is finally on his way, Martha impetuously and angrily runs out to meet him — conduct that would have been seen as scandalous, or even dangerous for a woman alone. She confronts Jesus from the depths of her grief and anger. As we all know, funerals are emotional affairs. Human emotions – anger, sadness, resentment, and whatever else is under the hood – it all comes out one way or another. It tends to be messy, as messy as death itself is. And we still don’t know why Jesus didn’t come earlier. It’s like in real life: our expectations are not always met and God sometimes seems mysteriously absent and slow.
Now, I always found this story difficult to muster, mainly because of its happy ending. To me, it carries the stigma of a cheap Hollywood B movie. As the drama reaches its culmination point with Lazarus dying and the hero hopelessly late, the bad forces seemingly triumphant, the sisters facing sure disaster, the screen writer pulls out one last stop. Jesus, the Son of God remembers his divine connections and shows up just in time to bring the corpse back to life. He yells, “Untie him and let him go!” And everybody lives happily ever after. The end. It’s like the sugar high at 10:00 p.m. on Halloween night. But the next day the kids have to go to school, right?
To me, the story teaches us less about dealing with death, because what happens here does not mesh with the teary hours when we deal with the real loss of a loved one. This story is like a mega-metaphor, telling us that, when all is said and done, when life is lived and someone is gone, the power of God, the power of life is stronger than death, and reminding us that with God, there never is a time that we could label “too late.” Even the tombs are not beyond God’s reach. That’s the gospel of Halloween on All Saints Day, delivered by the one who said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” Now that’s no sugar high. It is the hallowed foundation of the Christian faith, the reason for a hope that certainly begins in this life but doesn’t stop at the cemetery. May God bless all those who are grieving, all those who find themselves at a loss, all those who are in Mary and Martha’s situation, and may God grant us all faith that is far bigger than what we can see or imagine, that reaches up into eternity.
Amen.