The Beginning of Resurrection

It has been a little while since I last wrote here. Life has been full in the way that stretches time—travel, ministry, important conversations about upcoming transitions. But as we begin to turn the corner into spring, I find myself returning here, at the threshold of something. We are nearing the end of Lent.

Just one week remains before we step into Holy Week, where we will walk with Christ through his passion, his death, and—eventually—his resurrection. But we are not there yet. We are still in that in-between space. The place where the questions linger. The place where hope has not yet fully taken shape.

And yet… something has already begun.

The scriptures appointed for this final Sunday of Lent, especially in the Book of Ezekiel and the Gospel of John, invite us to consider a deeper kind of resurrection. Not only the life that awaits beyond death, but the life God is already breathing into places that feel dry, distant, or beyond repair.

It is here, in this space, that a question is asked: “Mortal, can these bones live?”

And the only faithful answer, it seems, is this: “Lord… you know.”

This week, before we rush ahead to Easter, we are invited to pause with that question, to stand honestly in the places that feel like exile. Will we resist the urge to fix or force life back into being? We are invited instead, to trust, however quietly, that the God who raises the dead is already at work.

Resurrection is coming. But more than that—resurrection has already begun.

Sermon: Lord, You Know

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Sermon: Lord, You Know

14:33

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As we come to the final week of Lent, the Church does something wise. It slows us down. Just as we are ready to move toward Easter, the scriptures ask us to pause—to stand in the valley a little longer, to face what feels unfinished, unhealed, not yet alive. Because resurrection is coming. But it is not yet.

Though both the texts in the Book of Ezekiel and the Gospel of John today hint at resurrection, they are not primarily concerned with life after death—at least not yet. We will wait for Easter to speak fully about that.

Instead, these readings draw our attention to something more immediate and, in many ways, more difficult: the life of God’s people right here and now, and what it means when God restores life to those who feel as though hope itself has dried up.

The prophet Ezekiel gives us one of the most arresting images in all of Scripture. He is carried by the Spirit of God into a valley filled with bones—not a few scattered remains, but an entire valley—and the text lingers on one chilling detail: they were very dry. This is Scripture’s way of telling us that whatever life once was here has been gone for a very long time. This is not recent loss or fresh grief; this is something settled, something final, something beyond any reasonable expectation of repair. Hope has long since left this place.

And it is there, in that valley, that God asks Ezekiel a question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” The way God addresses him matters here. “Mortal,” God says—ben-adam in Hebrew, son of a human. It is a reminder of who Ezekiel is and who he is not. He is finite, bounded, a creature standing before the Creator. From a human perspective, the answer to God’s question would have to be no. These bones are not simply dead; they are very dry, long beyond hope. And yet Ezekiel refuses to let that be the final word.

Ezekiel’s response is as simple as it is profound: “O Lord God, you know.” It would be easy to hear this as hesitation or uncertainty, but it is neither. It is, instead, a kind of holy clarity.

Ezekiel recognizes that the question itself reaches beyond the limits of human knowing. Life does not belong to him. It does not belong to human effort or imagination. Life belongs to God. And so Ezekiel does not speculate, does not try to solve the problem before him. He places it back into the only hands where an answer could possibly be found.

His response, “Lord, you know,” becomes a posture of trust without control, a refusal to limit what God might yet do. In that moment, the text quietly invites us to stand beside him, because we too are mortals who find ourselves looking out over landscapes in our own lives that seem just as beyond repair.

But to understand the full weight of this vision, we have to step behind it and into the story it is telling. The valley of dry bones is not an abstract symbol; it is Israel in exile, living in the aftermath of the Babylonian Exile. Jerusalem has been destroyed, the temple—the very place where God’s presence was known—has been reduced to rubble, and the people have been scattered far from the land that once defined them. Everything that had grounded their identity as God’s people is gone. And so they say, with painful honesty, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.” For Israel, exile did not simply feel like defeat; it felt like the end of the story itself.

The prophets, however, insist that something deeper is at work. Exile is not only a political catastrophe; it is a spiritual reality. Scripture consistently holds together the ideas of exile and sin, but not in the way we often imagine. It’s hard for us to talk about sin and so a lot of times we don’t. Because many of us have inherited an understanding of sin that is far too small: sin as rule-breaking, sin as moral failure, sin as simply being bad.

I know this was the image of sin I was given in my youth in the evangelical church and that has seeped its way into our culture’s ideas of good and bad, heaven and hell. I know I am still untangling many of those ideas I’ve inherited about what Jesus came to do in relation to sin in our lives.

So this Lent, I’ve been reading Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s The Day the Revolution Began. In this book, Wright argues that the cross is not primarily about God punishing Jesus so individuals can go to heaven, but about God defeating the powers of sin and idolatry, ending exile, and launching new creation. Very simply: The cross is God’s act of restoring humanity to its true vocation, freeing us to be fully human and to participate in the renewal of the world. This biblical vision is much more expansive. Sin is not merely about breaking rules; it is about forgetting who we are.

The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means “missing the mark,” like an arrow that falls short of its target. Wright says human beings were created to bear the image of God, to reflect the praise of creation back to the Creator and to reflect God’s wise and loving care into the world. Israel was called to embody that vocation as a royal priesthood, a people through whom God’s life would flow outward to the nations. But sin is the failure of that vocation. It is the turning away from the Creator toward lesser things, the distortion of what it means to be fully human.

And when that happens, Scripture tells us, the result is not simply guilt but death—not as an arbitrary punishment, but as the natural consequence of being cut off from the source of life itself. This is why exile is described in such stark terms. Israel is not merely displaced; they are, in a very real sense, a people as good as dead, a valley of dry bones.

And yet, it is precisely there that God begins to act. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, and as he does, the bones begin to move, to come together, and to take on form. Bodies are reassembled where there had only been fragments. But even then, something is missing. There is structure, but no life, form, but no breath. And so, God commands Ezekiel again: “Prophesy to the breath.” The word used here is ruach, which can mean breath, wind, or spirit, the same breath that animates humanity in the Book of Genesis.

When that breath enters them, they rise, not as scattered individuals but as a vast living multitude. And then God makes the meaning clear: “I will open your graves, O my people.” What Israel cannot do for itself, God will do. Exile will be undone, sin forgiven, and life restored. What Ezekiel sees is nothing less than resurrection, not as an escape from the world, but as the renewal of life within it.

Next…we turn to the Gospel, and we find ourselves standing in another place of death. In the Gospel of John, Jesus arrives at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, who has been dead for four days. In Jewish thought, the soul was believed to linger near the body for three days. The text tells us it has been four days to make the point unmistakable: Lazarus is truly dead.

Martha meets Jesus with a mixture of faith and grief, telling him plainly, “Lord, already there is a stench.” There is no ambiguity here; whatever hope might have remained has long since passed. This, too, is a kind of valley of dry bones. And yet Jesus stands before the tomb and calls, “Lazarus, come out.” And somehow, impossibly, Lazarus does.

In John’s Gospel, these moments are never just miracles; they are signs, revelations of who Jesus is and what God is doing through him. The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and greatest of these signs, and it echoes Ezekiel’s vision in unmistakable ways. In a place where death seems final, a grave is opened and life is restored. What God had promised through the prophet, God is now enacting in the person of Jesus. The exile is ending. The life of God is breaking back into a world that had long been marked by death.

But this sign comes at a cost. Almost immediately, the story turns. We are told that from that day on, the leaders begin to plot Jesus’ death. The act of giving life to Lazarus becomes the moment that seals Jesus’ own fate. The irony is almost too much to hold: Jesus calls a man out of the grave, and in doing so, steps more fully onto the path that will lead him into one. Lazarus emerges still wrapped in grave cloths, and Jesus tells those around him to unbind him and let him go. Not long after, Jesus himself will be wrapped in burial cloths and laid in a tomb.

The story suggests something quiet but profound: the life given to Lazarus is bound up with the death that Jesus is about to embrace. This is why the Fifth Sunday in Lent often includes the Lazarus story. It stands at the edge of Holy Week. The message is: The God who promises life in Ezekiel is the God who acts in Jesus. The way God brings life to the valley is not by avoiding death, but by entering it.

And this is where the story meets us. Exile is not only Israel’s story; it is ours as well. Whenever we find ourselves distant from God, from one another, from the people we were created to be, we are experiencing something of that same exile. It shows up as distance, as brokenness, as a quiet or not-so-quiet sense that life has drained out of certain parts of our lives.

Where, in your life, does something feel dried up?

Where has hope quietly slipped away?

And maybe even more honestly: where are you trying to fix what only God can restore?

Lent is the season in which we are invited to name those questions honestly. We pray, we fast, we repent, and these practices matter deeply. But if we are not careful, they can become subtle attempts at self-resurrection—ways of trying to fix ourselves, to bring life back by our own effort.

Ezekiel reminds us that this is not how life returns. Only God can breathe life into dry bones. Which means that the most faithful posture we can take is not one of control, but of surrender.

When we pray the collect—asking God to bring into order our unruly wills and affections, to help us love what God commands and desire what God promises—we are, in essence, saying what Ezekiel says: “Lord, you know.” We are acknowledging that we cannot manufacture life, but we can turn toward the One who gives it.

And so, as we stand on the threshold of Holy Week, we hear again the question: “Mortal, can these bones live?” May we answer, perhaps more honestly now, “Lord God, you know.”

And in Jesus Christ, God gives the answer. Graves are opened. The dead are called forth. Exile is undone. And the valley of dry bones becomes, at last, the beginning of resurrection.