John 11:32–44
New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has been making headlines recently. Inmate deaths; unguarded cell blocks; and detainees being denied food and medicine. Lawmakers who toured the complex described overflowing toilets and floors covered in dead cockroaches, feces, and rotting food. There is a stench, indeed.
The stench of Rikers Island is not just the literal stench of feces, food, and death, but the metaphorical stench of a death-dealing culture that meets violence with violence. The systems of policing and the prison industrial complex are systems of disposal. They remove people from society, whether it’s through dramatic actions of police violence or through everyday police activity; whether it’s through flashpoint moments like we’ve seen at Rikers or the everyday removal of incarcerated people from being worthy of care. Even before bodily death, the empire binds and entombs people.
As Barry Friesen and John K. Stoner write in If Not Empire, What? A Survey of the Bible, “We all are stricken, as good as dead within a culture that has surrendered to violence and the threat of violence as if they are forces of nature, like gravity or Earth’s rotation. The stench surrounds us, but we are disabled by fear.” Fear drives liberals and Christians to collude with the empire and its systems of disposal, making the stench feel like a forgone conclusion.
In this passage, Jesus arrives to join the family of Lazarus in mourning after Lazarus has already died. He joins the family and community in their grief and sorrow, even though he knows that journeying to their town moves him closer to Jerusalem, and to those opposed to his movement. The readers of John’s gospel, enduring their own persecution by the empire, would rely on “trusting in the Lord’s ability to bring life out of death.”
Jesus approaches the cave where Lazarus is buried. According to John Petty, “…caves are places of spiritual mystery and are symbolic of the womb. … It is also a way of saying that new life can emerge only out of the death of the old.” Jesus calls, “Lazarus come out.” In calling Lazarus to new life, Jesus invites all of us to emerge from the fearful, stench-filled, death-dealing ways of empire.
Kelly Hayes wrote of the inmates of Rikers Island, “[w]e’re allowed to forget about them, because they exist within the realm of our fears. These are people who we are told are being contained for our safety, so most people wind up accepting that containment on the state’s terms, without asking too many questions. And so the monster that is the prison-industrial complex becomes more deadly and it grows.” Like Martha who warned Jesus of the stench of Lazarus’s body, many people balk at the thought of reimagining policing and prisons. The stench is as much a product of our collective fears and the ways those fears collude with the empire’s system of violence.
The story of the raising of Lazarus is recorded as a word for those living against the violence of empire. If it is intended to give the original audience confidence in the ability of the Spirit to bring life out of death, what word might it be offering to us today? May it call us to awaken to the death around us and find ways the Spirit is working to bring forth new life. Let us not turn away from the stench of death and empire’s death-dealing ways but join with Jesus and those who are willing to roll the stone away and call forth new life.
Abolition is not an easy road. It is not a road that avoids moving through grief, fear, or oppression. But it is a road that looks for resurrection in the midst of these things. It looks for a new world that can be birthed from the cave of the old.
Rev. Dana Neuhauser is the Racial Justice Organizer for the Minnesota Annual Conference of the UMC and Minister of Public Witness at New City Church in Minneapolis.
Jonathan Stegall is a faith-rooted organizer with Reclaim the Block, and a user experience designer, in Minneapolis.