Mending: Grief, Lazarus and Love that Stitches Us Back to Life

 John 11:1–44       

    

Grace and peace, beloved. Welcome to the first Sunday of Lent—forty days of slowing down, looking honestly at our lives, and turning toward God.

 

Scriptural Greek names that special kind of turning with a beautiful word: metanoia— most often rendered in English in our scriptures as repentance. Repentance then is intended as a change of heart and mind, a re‑orientation of our lives. In this season we aren’t polishing ourselves into perfection; we are turning back toward God, turning back toward love.

 

This year our guiding image for these weeks of Lent is mending—the kind of repair that makes things useful again, yes, but the kind of repair that also leaves evidence that something has happened here.

 

Can you picture in your mind’s eye a piece of clothing that has been mended?

 

The threads of the repair show. The stitches tell the truth.

 

Repentance, like mending, restores us to life – life with God, but we are not the same after the repair. We are changed.

 

Today John’s Gospel takes us to Bethany, where siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are caught in the rawness of loss.

 

Jesus receives word that Lazarus is gravely ill…and Jesus does not hurry to his side. By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been dead four days. Now the air is thick with sorrow… and questions.

 

Martha meets Jesus on the road with a sentence many of us have prayed: “Lord, if you had been here…” She knows and trusts Jesus and she still tells the truth about her pain and disappointment.

 

Jesus answers with the bold claim central to John’s gospel: “I am the resurrection and the life.” 

 

Listen carefully to what Jesus says: I am the promise for the future—and I am life right now. Resurrection someday, yes.

Abundant and full life with God in the present tense, also yes.

The love of God holds both together. 

 

Then Jesus asks for Mary. When she comes, it is as if a dam breaks. She weeps; the community weeps; and Jesus weeps. The translation from the original language here suggests that this is not merely a polite tear, but it is the heavy crying of one who loves deeply.

 

For all that Jesus will soon do, he does not sidestep the grief of losing a loved one. He steps into it. Jesus experiences with us the pain of grief and loss. He does not discount our human loss. He dignifies it with his own tears…because he feels it too.

 

But then, standing before a sealed tomb, he calls Lazarus by name: “Come out.” Lazarus stumbles into daylight still wrapped in grave clothes, and Jesus turns to the gathered community with this command: “Unbind him, and let him go.” 

 

If Lent is a season for turning, this story shows us turning: from death toward life, from resignation toward hope, from isolation toward community. 

 

And let us notice that the miracle ends with shared work. Jesus restores life; the community removes the bindings that contain Lazarus in death. That is mending work—holy repair that takes many hands so that life returns.

 

And because I hope that we can be clear-eyed and name truths, we also have to admit what this story does not do: simply put Lazarus will one day die again one day.

 

Bodily death remains a real sorrow in a world God loves. The promise is not that we avoid loss; the promise is that we do not face it alone. Jesus is the resurrection and the life—our future with God and our present with God. Both matter. 

 

So what might mending look like for us as we begin Lent?

• Mending names what is torn and tattered or broken without shame. It refuses to pretend that things will ever be as they once were. It asks, Where have the seams of my life split? Where has our congregation frayed? Where has our community been ripped by fear or injustice or indifference? And then—patiently, tenderly, persistently—it starts stitching.
• Some repairs we will carry on our bodies and in our stories. The seam will show. That’s not failure; that’s testimony. Following Jesus, we will find that repaired places become strong places. The patch becomes the most honest part of the garment—proof that love has been at work here.

 

Martha shows us the first stitch of mending grief: speak the truth to God. If your prayer today sounds like, “Lord, if you had been here…,” bring that whole sentence. God hears and receives our lament, our anger, our pain.

Mary shows us the second stitch: bring your tears. God receives them. And not only does God receive them, God joins them. In fact, Jesus wept with his own grief – not just Mary’s or the community’s. As I have said to some of you in seasons, I believe Jesus weeps over the state of our world even today.

The gathered community shows us the third stitch: help one another out of the bindings that keep us from living—habits that numb us, words that wound us, systems that trap us.

 

Lent is not a solo project.

Faith is not a solo project.

Nothing about following Jesus is a solo project.

 

This season we’re going to practice mending together in a tangible way. As you leave today, you’ll find baskets in the entryway and in the Fellowship Hall with simple strips of fabric. Each week, write a word or short prayer on a strip—something in you, in a relationship, or in the world that needs repair. Leave the strips on the tables. Over these forty days of Lent we will stitch these pieces into our altar covering—visible, honest, beautiful in its patchwork—to carry into Holy Week and Easter as our witness that God is making all things new.

 

Beloved, Jesus stands at the tombs we carry within us and around us and calls us by name. He weeps with us. He speaks life to us. He hands us to one another with the charge: unbind them. This is the work of Lent. This is the way of mending—repair that makes us whole again, while keeping us honest and transparent about how we’ve been changed.

 

May we walk these forty days listening for the Shepherd’s voice, tending and mending the fence lines of our hearts, and taking up our needles, our patches, our prayers, our courage. And when Easter dawns, may our altar reflect our truth: once we were broken, and now—with stitches showing, beloved and useful—we live anew. 

May it be so.

Amen.