DIRT, MORAL INJURY, AND RESURRECTION
Public Domain.
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
I have to admit that John 11:1-45 often leaves me feeling a little ambivalent. On the one hand, Lazarus is raised from the dead and Martha declares that Jesus is the Messiah—a critical recognition, and by a woman no less. On the other hand, Jesus’ behavior does not easily harmonize with that joy. Because, to be blunt, Jesus seems like a bit of a jerk. It seems cruel for him to delay helping the sick and suffering Lazarus. Saying he’s really just asleep doesn’t erase the fear and anguish of the deathbed. And then Jesus has the gall to say that he is glad he wasn’t there in time to stop Lazarus’ death, because waking him will bring glory to himself and help many believe. All of these comments leave behind the sour speculation that Jesus is using Lazarus’ suffering and the grief of Mary and Martha as means to an end. (1) iIs God that vicious, that indebted to death? Can’t God be properly glorified, and bring many to belief, by means other than these?
I want to suggest that if the Lazarus narrative prompts in us these kinds of reactions, we are not alone. In fact, Jesus himself validates such feelings. This text’s background will help us learn why Jesus waits before coming to Lazarus’ aid, how to understand Martha’s declaration, and the significance of Jesus’ tears. But to get there, we’ll first need to talk about Ezekiel 37:1-14, moral injury, and dirt.
Let’s start with dirt. In the John 9 account preceding Lazarus’ healing, Jesus heals by spitting on dirt to make a muddy poultice. Dirt is God’s stuff of life. In Genesis, God makes people out of dirt, even giving the first human the name ‘Adam,’ which means ‘mud-person.’ Being made of dirt puts us in fellowship with the entire universe: stars, elephants, and fungi alike. As theologian Norman Wirzba notes, “[c]reaturely life is grounded in the soil of this earth and stitched into a vast fabric of interlaced, multispecies life…generated out of and daily sustained by millions of years of complex evolutionary processes, and unfathomably dense networks of relationships.” (2) For Wirzba, our common origin in soil reminds human beings to “create…social, institutional, and material contexts” of mutual regard and nurture for the entire world. (3) Steven J. Battin’s work on the ancient Israelite covenant reveals that God calls the children of Abraham to inaugurate this way of life in order to share God’s blessing with all of creation. (4)
But by the time Ezekiel is written, the leaders of the people of God have betrayed these relationships of interdependence. They look out for themselves and their own prosperity alone. Their lack of integrity causes all people and the land itself to greatly suffer: Israel splits, Babylon besieges Jerusalem before trafficking away its rulers, and those remaining languish under occupation. A member of the priestly class in exile, Ezekiel begins having visions and decides to write them down. As he mourns the loss of the land and God’s tabernacling presence, Ezekiel is also grieving his own priestly culpability for the harms committed by Israel’s leadership. By chapter 37, he understands that the state of the promised land witnesses to Israel’s breaking of covenant: forsaking God’s call to embody faithful, interconnected relationships has left it like a valley full of dry bones—desiccated, fragmented bits of what should have been vibrant, symbiotic community. (5)
The conditions Ezekiel describes fit our modern understandings of moral injury. Long linked to military service or misidentified as burnout, moral injury is now also recognized in healthcare, clergy, education, carceral, and other settings. (6) Moral injury arises when “an event in a high-stakes situation violates a person’s moral code through their actions, inactions, or other peoples’ behavior.” (7) Moral injury describes the anguish of being trapped in situations where leaders betray those they should be tending by forcing them to compromise values to meet the leaders’ ends. The results include profound self-alienation and communal fragmentation. This inability to trust others or oneself severely restricts our capacities to build interconnected, mutually dependent relationships (8) As one journal article notes, “[t]he social consequences of moral injury appear to be especially pernicious.” (9) We dwindle into husks of ourselves, and community life devolves into isolation, competition, and indifference. Ezekiel’s account of Israel as a wasteland of bones helps us see how moral injury devastates all aspects of our world.
Yet Ezekiel 37:1-14 also shows that God opens even these graves. Notice that this resurrection does not consist solely of reversing physical death. In fact, in verses 7-8 Ezekiel describes such an outcome as the unsatisfactory result of the first effort he makes. He prophesies to the bones and they grotesquely rattle into some semblance of human form, but as the text says, “there was no breath in them.” Echoing Genesis 2, verses 9-10 clarify that only when the breath of the four winds of creation enters these bones can they truly live. Only by accepting their dependence upon each other and the rest of creation can the bones receive the Spirit of God raising them to the personhood of soil-grounded relationship (see verses 11-14). Resurrection is not primarily centered on individuals. Rather, it revivifies networks of mutually nourishing relationships across groups and species who share soil. Similarly, treatments for moral injury also involve “community effort to understand and reintegrate the morally injured, as well as to accept shared responsibility for that injury.” (10) We can understand the willingness of Ezekiel’s four winds alongside the bones themselves to return to each other as creation doing its part to heal the injuries committed by humans. Ezekiel sharing his vision with his fellow survivors in Babylon constitutes a penitent call for them to join that work. To receive the Spirit and be raised to new life, Israel’s ruling classes must learn to honor the people, creatures, and places they have previously considered less than themselves. They must accept their mutual interdependence with these others as the soil they all share.
We can consider the resurrection of Lazarus—another instance in which a grave is opened—against this backdrop. With Lazarus as for us today, illness is often a question of where you live; how much money your family accesses for nutrition, education, and healthcare; how high run the levels of socio-economic stress to which you are exposed. The responsibility for sickness and death or healing and restoration therefore rests not with the individual, but the broader community. (11) Moreover, since Lazarus lives with his two sisters, his death leaves Mary and Martha vulnerable to economic and social hardship. For these two reasons alone, Lazarus’ death becomes a matter of moral injury, of the larger community’s failure to keep faith with one another.
Intriguingly, Mary and Martha implicate Jesus in this moral injury. They each confront him with the charge that if he had been present, Lazarus would still be alive. Are they right? Consider that John describes Lazarus and his sisters as ‘beloved’ of Jesus multiple times. Clearly Jesus longs to be with him. Yet verse 7 complicates matters. John chapter 10 describes how, while in Jerusalem for the feast of the dedication, Jesus preaches against the hypocrisy and exploitation rampant in the leaders. They do not enact their covenantal obligations but mimic their oppressors. Jesus contrasts himself as the good shepherd who protects and sustains his sheep, gathering in those who are not currently welcome. He prophesies that he will fulfill the covenant to do this even at the cost of his own life. And for this they try to stone him. So Jesus flees Jerusalem, ending up teaching and healing on the far eastern side of the Jordan River, which is where we find him at the opening of John 11. As his disciples remind him in verse 7, going to Lazarus’ aid in Bethany means returning to proximity with Jerusalem and the risk of assassination. As is natural for human beings, Jesus is not keen on dying. Not only will he face terror and agonizing torment, but death will end his mission. Under the conditions set by the rulers of his age, if he fulfills his call, his mission will be forcibly ended; but if he does not minister, he will be faithless. So, out of love for those who keep coming to him for help, he continues his ministry under duress. He dodges the authorities: flees, hides, and waits.
Jesus is thus no stranger to moral injuries. They press upon him and constrict his choices just as they do to us. Like us, Jesus suffers from the strain of living and working under leaders who are threatened by integrity. And like us at times, Jesus experiences moral injury from those who use the name of God to justify their wrongdoing.
Typical less-than-effective responses to moral injury involve efforts to avoid, control, escape, or fix the situation. But when Jesus finally reaches Bethany, he neither suppresses nor denies his emotions. Instead, in front of the community, he articulates how he and those he loves have been damaged. Verses 33-38 describe him as ‘deeply moved’ and ‘troubled within himself’ at the grief of Mary and the Judeans, terms that would be better translated as ‘indignantly angry to the point of roaring with rage’ and ‘so profoundly emotionally agitated that one physically shakes.’ And then he weeps. Standing before Lazarus’ tomb that signifies the full range of how human faithlessness destroys creation and reduces people to alienated particles of dust, Jesus’ anger and grief acknowledge all the little and big injuries that led to and will stem from this situation. In contrast to those who hunt him for telling the truth, his anger and grief embody the repentance God’s people should be making in the face of their failure to stop moral injury.
As in Ezekiel, these responses are what reverse death. As in Ezekiel, creation eagerly responds. Lazarus’ grave gives him up. The question is whether full resurrection will take place, whether the human community around Lazarus will return to its covenant duties in dependence upon one another and creation. In the Greek of verses 25-26, Jesus names himself as the resurrection and life so that all (not just people, but everything) that entrusts itself to him, even though it may physically die, will live. Two textual nuances here require further explanation. First, “belief” in Jesus does not mean: “I signed on a dotted line” or “I assented to a propositional statement.” Rather, it means full entrustment to Jesus, which then entails mutual interrelationship with all else under his care. Second, many translations omit verse 26’s clause “eis ton aiōna” following the promise that those who believe “will never die.” The phrase literally says “to the age”— so it can be interpreted as meaning that the death of those who believe will not last, will not let this age hold power over them.
Martha’s affirmations in verses 21 and 27 thus powerfully enable Jesus’ response to the moral injury of Lazarus’ death. While grieving, she entrusts herself to Jesus and affirms him as the resurrection re-ordering the universe. In Martha, Ezekiel’s vision of a return to the covenant to secure mutual flourishing begins again. She is the first to commit to this revelation of Jesus’ mission, even before his own death and resurrection, even before the rest of the disciples. Who will join her?
Consider how John describes the mourners who have arrived from Jerusalem to be with Mary and Martha. The text presents their motives as mixed. They scoff at Jesus. Who heals with mud yet fails Lazarus? But these, too, are people Jesus loves. They are also ones to whom he is called to extend new life. Other gospels report that Jesus longs to gather up the people of Jerusalem like a mother hen encircles her chicks with her wings (Matthew 23:37-39 and Luke 13:34). Though they tried to stone him in just the previous chapter, Jesus’ delay until Lazarus has been entombed for four days gave this group time to gather and be invited back into the community covenant that is still available to them. Jesus risks his own safety so that these, too, might join in resurrection. This means the glory he seeks by raising Lazarus is not his own self-aggrandizement but, as in the original promise to Abraham, the ever-widening circle of mutual relationship he is calling the crowd to join. Raising Lazarus is an invitation to the community to join that resurrection life; an enticement drawing the people back to their covenant. Verse 45 reports that some in the crowd indeed repent. Yet in verse 46, John states that others leave to inform on Jesus. A council gathers at which the intent to commit the ultimate moral injury is clearly stated. Afraid of their occupiers’ response to Jesus’ power—a fear that results from their own unhealed moral injuries rooted in the continued denial of mutual interdependence—the high priest decides “it is better for one to die for all the people” (John 11:50). They decide to find a way to turn him over to the Romans.
We leave Jesus here, fleeing once again into the wilderness before he returns to Jerusalem at Passover for his final showdowns with the rulers of this age who govern according to their own wishes and not for the good of all. But Jesus does not leave us. When we experience the horror and alienation of moral injury in our own and others’ choices, he calls us to find healing by returning to the soil, to practice dependance upon one another as we articulate the truth of our circumstances. Like Jesus, under conditions of moral injury, we may need to deploy different responses at different times or in different contexts. Sometimes we may be called to confront those who harm, at other points we may be called to reach out to them. We may need to repent ourselves, hide and wait, or mourn openly as a witness to truth. But as we discern which of these is the way for us in any given situation, we will find our companion Jesus already there, sharing in our anger, our grief, our feeling stuck, our struggling to find a path. His acceptance of our pain in companionship with us will help us forge it with one another and this good creation. And that is when Jesus’ Spirit will bring us all new life.
Even if the two days’ delay followed by the journey to Bethany and the immediate raising of Lazarus foreshadows how “on the third day” Jesus will rise again, it still seems like an awful way to get the point across.
Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 43. Becky Copeland’s previous research pairing evolutionary biology and physics with Christology also demonstrates humanity’s interdependence with other creatures. See Rebecca L. Copeland, Created Being: Expanding Creedal Christology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2020), 25-8, 68-75, 80-1, 84-90.
Wirzba, This Sacred Life, 197, referencing Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020), 13-14. See also This Sacred Life, 200-54.
See Steven J. Battin, Intercommunal Ecclesiology: The Church, Salvation, and Intergroup Conflict (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2022), ch. 3-4.
For an account of Ezekiel’s stress upon the land as a “delicately organized structure of holiness,” see Stephen L. Cook, “Ezekiel,” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: With the Apocrypha, 5th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1175-1177, quote at 1177.
See Harold G. Koenig and Faten Al Zaben, “Moral Injury: An Increasingly Recognized and Widespread Syndrome,” Journal of Religion and Health 60 (2021): 2989-3011, at 2996-7 (accessible via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-021-01328-0), as well as Brandon J. Griffin, Natalie Purcell, Kristine Burkman, Brett T. Litz, Craig J. Bryan, Martha Schmitz, Claudia Villierme, Jessica Walsh, and Shira Maguen, “Moral Injury: An Integrative Review,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 32 (2019): 350-62, at 356.
Lauren M. Borges, Sean M. Barnes, Jacob K. Farnsworth, Wyatt R. Evans, Zachary Moon, Kent D. Drescher, and Robyn D. Walser, “Cultivating Psychological Flexibility to Address Religious and Spiritual Suffering in Moral Injury,” Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy 28:Sup 1 (2022): S32-41, at S33 (accessible via https://doi.org/10.1080/08854726.2022.2031467).
See Wesley H. Fleming, “Moral Injury and the Absurd: The Suffering of Moral Paradox,” Journal of Religion and Health 60 (2021): 3012-3022, at 3013-4, 3020 (accessible via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-021-01227-4), as well as Timothy J. Hodgson and Lindsay B. Carey, “Moral Injury and Definitional Clarity: Betrayal, Spirituality, and the Role of Chaplains,” Journal of Religion and Health 56 (2017): 1212-1229, at 1214, and Griffin, et. al., “Moral Injury,” 356.
Griffin, et. al., “Moral Injury,” 356.
Griffin, et. al., “Moral Injury,” 357. Engaging spiritual values and practices, thinking flexibly, and holding together multiple perspectives “even in the presence of moral pain,” can help (see Borges, et. al., “Cultivating Psychological Flexibility,” S34), as can making meaning through “independent inner process” (see Susannah Robb Kondrath, “Moral Injury and Spiritual Distress, Clinical Applications in Interdisciplinary, Spiritually Integrated Interventions,” Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry 9 [2022]: 126-139, at 130). However, note that these interventions also require re-integration at a communal level. Restorative justice approaches also aim at community transformation. Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice: Revised and Updated (New York: Good Books, 2015) offers an introduction.
The fact that the text doesn’t specify Lazarus’ illness should help us grasp that the emphasis is less on a specific diagnosis Jesus can spectacularly overcome and more on the communal duty to nourish one another’s flourishing.
