March 22, 2026, Year A, Fifth Sunday in Lent, Passion Sunday

John 11:1-44, Psalm 130, Ezekiel 37🕑

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you, on this Fifth Sunday in Lent — Passion Sunday.

Five weeks ago, on Ash Wednesday, we entered Lent with the honesty that we are but dust — no pretending, no performance, just the plain truth of what we are without God. Last Sunday we stood before a man born blind — whose darkness was not punishment but preparation — and the whole Lenten season gathered itself into one question: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" (John 9:35, ESV). Today, that question finds its ultimate proving ground in front of a sealed tomb, four days in.

Today we also stand at the entrance to Passiontide. The crosses are veiled black — not gone, but covered. The glory is present but hidden, awaiting the moment of its full revelation. Holy Week begins next Sunday, and the Church, in her wisdom, asks us not to rush it.

Think back to Advent — the wreath and its candles, lit one by one in the dark of December. The first is called the Hope candle. It burns not because the promise has been fulfilled, but precisely because it hasn't — not yet. One small flame cannot eliminate the darkness. What it does is declare, quietly and stubbornly, that the darkness will not win. Passion Sunday carries that same energy.

We stand in a kind of December today. Covered crosses. Dry bones in a valley. A sealed tomb in Bethany. But the Church does not highlight these weeks merely to grieve. She highlights them as the Hope candle was lit — pointing to something greater, not yet arrived. As I’ve said all Lent, the wilderness is not the final destination. The valley of dry bones is not where Ezekiel's vision ends. The darkness outside Lazarus's tomb is not the last word in John's Gospel. Hope burning in the midst of darkness — that is Passion Sunday.

Our Gospel reading is from John chapter 11:1–44, found on page ______ of your pew Bibles. Our other readings, Ezekiel 37:1–14 and Psalm 130, speak from the same dark place — the same wilderness. All three refuse to stay there.

The story opens with urgency. Lazarus is gravely ill, and his sisters send word immediately. The message is telling — not a request, not a demand, just a statement of fact full of trust in verse 3: "Lord, he whom you love is ill" (John 11:3, ESV). They do not tell Jesus what to do. They simply tell him what is happening, trusting that love will respond.

Jesus hears the news. And then John gives us one of the most quietly disheartening lines in the New Testament in verse 6: "So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was" (John 11:6, ESV). He stayed. He didn't rush. He knew Lazarus was dying, and he didn't move.

Many of us know exactly what that delay feels like. We have sent the message, laid out the situation before God as plainly as we knew how, prayed, kept the faith, and waited. The answer didn't come — not on the timeline we hoped for, not in the form we expected. Mary and Martha had done everything right, and their brother died anyway, while Jesus was two days' journey away, apparently in no hurry.

But before we move on, we need to hear what John says immediately before that disheartening line, in verses 4–5. It is essentially what he told the disciples when they asked about the man born blind last week: "This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it. Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus" (John 11:4–5, ESV). Loved. The delay is not indifference. The delay is the operating theater of something the disciples and sisters cannot yet see. What looks like God's absence is often the very staging ground for his most vivid appearing.

Jesus tells his disciples in verse 15 that he is "glad" he was not there, so that they may believe. The greater miracle required the greater darkness. If Jesus had arrived and healed a sick man, faith would have been stirred. But because Lazarus is dead — four days in the tomb — what happens next will be unmistakable. Not a repair of what was failing. A calling back of what was already gone.

Stand here in the delay for a moment. It is where most of us spend much of our lives, and it is not a comfortable place. There is a particular ache to unanswered prayer when we have prayed, trusted, and reached out in faith — and the silence continues. What do we do with a God who hears and, apparently, waits? The psalm we read this morning knows this territory well.

The psalmist opens with a cry that has no preamble: "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD!" (Psalm 130:1, ESV). The Hebrew word for depths carries the image of dangerous waters, the kind that overwhelm and drown. Why was he overwhelmed? The weight pressing him down is his own iniquity: "If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?" (Psalm 130:3, ESV). He has looked at his own ledger before God, and he knows the verdict. None of us would fare better. And yet he doesn't stop there. He reaches — from the depths — for something he doesn't deserve and cannot earn, but has been told is real: "But with you there is forgiveness" (Psalm 130:4, ESV).

He waits. He watches. He compares himself to the watchmen on Jerusalem's walls, straining toward the first faint line of dawn: "My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning" (Psalm 130:6, ESV). The repetition is not a mistake — he wants morning so badly he says it twice. This is Lenten waiting at its rawest: not resigned endurance, but active, straining, wide-awake waiting that knows morning is coming even while the darkness is still total. The psalm ends in confidence, as most do: "For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption" (Psalm 130:7, ESV). From the depths to plentiful redemption. The God who hears the cry from the bottom of the well is the God whose love does not run dry.

Ezekiel takes us somewhere even more stark. The hand of the Lord carries the prophet — in the Spirit — to a valley full of bones. Not fresh graves. Not recent death. Bones bleached by the sun, long since stripped of any memory of the life they once held. And God asks the most remarkable question: "Son of man, can these bones live?" (Ezekiel 37:3, ESV).

Ezekiel's answer is the only honest one available: "O Lord GOD, you know" (Ezekiel 37:3, ESV). He will not say yes — from any human standpoint the question is absurd; dry bones do not live again. But neither will he say no — because this is God asking, and to say no to God is to have forgotten who God is.

What Ezekiel is looking at is Israel — scattered, exiled, the Temple razed, the nation finished by every geopolitical measure. Not sleeping. Dead, and picked clean by time. They had the covenant, the Torah, the prophets — and were still here, in this valley, with nothing to show for any of it by every outward measure. It is worth sitting with how total that desolation was, because when God acts in this passage he does not act into a situation with a few remaining sparks to fan into flame. He acts into nothing. Ezekiel is not helping a dying patient recover. He is speaking to a graveyard.

God says: prophesy to these bones. Ezekiel does. The valley rattles. Bone finds bone. Tendons appear. Flesh follows. Skin covers. But still no breath — ruach, the Hebrew word meaning, breath, spirit, and wind. God says: prophesy to the wind. Ezekiel does. Breath enters. And they stand — "an exceedingly great army" (Ezekiel 37:10, ESV). God speaks the meaning plainly: "I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live" (Ezekiel 37:14, ESV).

This is what Nicodemus was being offered in the cover of night. What the woman at the well received at noon. What the blind man now sees with the eyes of his transformed heart. What Lazarus is about to receive in the cold silence of his tomb. The same Spirit who moves where he wills. The same breath that animated Adam from the clay of the earth. The same divine life that cannot be manufactured, cannot be earned, cannot be improved into — only received.

The dry bones of Israel are not a peculiarly ancient problem. They are also a mirror. There are valley seasons in human lives — when hope seems to have decomposed entirely. Marriages gone dry and silent. Faith that was once living and is now mechanical, going through the forms with no sense that anyone hears. Grief that has outlasted the patience of those around us. Regret grown old and brittle and permanent. God walks into every one of those valleys and asks the question: "Can these bones live?" The only right answer is still Ezekiel's: "O Lord God, you know."

We cannot leave John 11 without going the full distance. Jesus arrives at the tomb, but before he gets there he meets Martha on the road. Martha — grieving, bewildered, four days into the worst week of her life — becomes the unexpected place where the Lenten question gets its fullest answer. Jesus says in verse 25: "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25–26, ESV). And Martha answers: "Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world" (John 11:27, ESV). The man born blind fell down and worshipped. Martha, standing on a road with her brother four days dead, makes her confession. Different circumstances, the same answer to the same question: "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" "Yes, Lord. I believe."

That confession does not prevent her from protesting at the tomb in verse 39 — "Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days" (John 11:39, ESV). Faith and doubt sitting right next to each other, which is exactly where most of us live. And thankfully for us, Jesus does not rebuke her. He simply says in verse 40: "Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?" (John 11:40, ESV). The confession holds even when the nerves fray. That is what belief looks like in the real world — not a feeling that never wavers, but a declaration made at the roadside that we carry with us all the way to the tomb.

And then — before he speaks the word of resurrection — he weeps in verse 35. The shortest verse in the Bible, and one of the most important. God incarnate, standing at the grave of someone he loved, wept. The wilderness is real. The grief is real. The dark is real. There is nothing in Christianity that asks us to perform cheerfulness in the face of genuine suffering. Lament is not the opposite of faith — it is one of faith's most honest expressions. Jesus does not arrive composed and clinical. He arrives grieving. And he still acts. Those two things are not in tension in the Gospel of John. They belong together.

The wilderness is not the final destination. They take away the stone. Jesus prays — not for the miracle itself, but for those who will witness it, that they may believe. And then he speaks into the sealed dark in verse 41: "Lazarus, come out" (John 11:43, ESV). And the dead man comes out, still bound in his burial cloths, alive. And Jesus says in verse 44: "Unbind him, and let him go" (John 11:44, ESV).

This is the seventh and final sign in John's Gospel — placed precisely here, in the shadow of the cross, as the announcement of everything the cross and resurrection will accomplish on the largest possible scale. Lazarus will die again; this is a preview, not the final chapter. But the preview is given so that when we arrive at Easter morning — when the women find the tomb empty, the cloths folded, the stone rolled away — we will recognize the signature. We have seen it before. The God who called Lazarus out of the tomb is the same God who walked out of his own.

So what does all of this mean for us this Lent and beyond? Four movements flow from everything we have heard.

The first: name our valleys honestly. Ezekiel stood in the middle of the death and saw it clearly. The psalmist cried out of the depths without cleaning it up first. There is a particular temptation for people of faith to perform hopefulness before we have actually received hope — to say "I'm fine" or "I know God has a plan" as a way of shutting the door on the real conversation. But that is not really faith; it is coping. It is different than the same words spoken in hope. 

The first movement toward resurrection is always naming the death — to God and I hope also to at least one trusted person — saying plainly: "this is where I actually am." It is like the first step in a recovery program — first admitting that we have a problem and that we are broken by it. God meets us in the valley, not in our attempts to shortcut around grief and disappointment.

The second: stay in the conversation. Martha goes to Jesus even with her brother four days dead and says: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." That could only come from someone simultaneously grieving and still talking. She could have just packed it all in and returned to Judaism. But like the woman at the well, she stays active in the conversation. Practically, that looks like continuing to pray when prayer feels like speaking into nothing, remaining in the worshipping community in the dry seasons, and telling a pastor or trusted friend: "I am in a valley and I cannot see the way out." That honesty is itself an act of faith.

Third: prophesy to what seems dead. God told Ezekiel to speak the word of life to bones without waiting for signs of improvement first. For us, that looks like a parent who keeps speaking blessing over a child who has walked away from the faith — a defiant refusal to agree that the story is finished. It looks like speaking life and vision into a marriage that has gone silent. And it looks like countering the inner voice that says "this will never change" not with forced optimism but with the word of God: "I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live." The bones looked dead too, right up until they weren't.

And fourth: unbind each other. Jesus raised Lazarus, but the unbinding he gave to those standing there. There are people among us who have experienced genuine resurrection — brought through something they could not have survived alone — and they are still standing in the tomb doorway, wrapped in grave clothes of shame, old reputation, or the way others still treat them as the person they used to be. They are alive, but not yet free. The church's calling is to be a community of “un-binders”. Who in your life is standing in that doorway? What would it look like this week to go and help unbind them?

We are one week from Palm Sunday. In a few days our churches will fill with the shouts of Hosanna, and then the second half of the service will turn — as it always does — toward betrayal, trial, crucifixion, and the silence of Holy Saturday. The covers on the crosses will stay through Good Friday, when more of them are stripped away and the full weight of what they mean is set before us undisguised.

Do not look away from the cross as we enter this final stretch of Lent. Walk toward it as Thomas walked — not understanding everything, but following the one he had come to trust.

The question sharpening all season — "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" — finds its answer not in a moment when everything finally makes sense, but here: beside a tomb, saying with Martha, "Yes, Lord. I believe."

Come to this Table. Come with whatever weight you carry, whatever depth you have been crying from. Come from the valley, the waiting, the long night that has not yet lifted.

The one who wept at the tomb is here. The one who delayed — not out of neglect, but love — is here. The one who breathes life into dry bones is here. He meets us in bread and wine, body and blood, and says again: "I am already here. I have not forgotten you. And the stone will not stay in place."

Let us remember this as we leave today: The wilderness is not the end. The valley is not the end. The tomb is not the end. And the silence is not the end. Because the God who meets us here is the God who brings life out of death.

Let's pray…