It is Friday night and you are one the edge of your seat, possibly biting your nails, desperately waiting for a dangerous situation to resolve itself in the film you are watching. Are Doctor Grant and John Hammond’s grandchildren going to get out of the Jurassic jungle before being eaten by the raptors or a T-rex? They only have one chance before the electric fence is re-activated to restore safety! Is Danny Ocean, with his 11 mates, going to succeed in robbing the evil Terry Benedict’s casinos? There is only one chance and if something goes wrong – they have blown it! Is the Terminator going to find and rescue Sarah Connor’s son John to save the human race before it is too late? Are countless lovers going to make it in time to the airport or the train station to run past security and tell their beloved of their feelings before they are forever separated? As you sit on the edge of your chair, you know it will probably be fine, but you can very much imagine things going one way or another if this one and only chance is or is not taken.
‘There is only one chance and there won’t be another one’ is one of the most common tropes in cinema. I am sure you can continue the list of examples over lunch. Whether it is a response to or the cause of a certain culture of worrying about missing or wasting chances, I don’t know, but I think it is true that all of these endless plots speak into a human fear of having to hang on to the very last thread of opportunity because, if missed, there won’t be another one. I have for a long time lived with this fear. You mess up your school exams and not get into uni and your life is forever ruined; you make a mistake on a visa application and instantly get deported and so on. This sort of thinking can be very powerful; powerful enough to undermine any sense of hope and even faith. And, in the face of such fears or even without them, it is a good idea to turn to our faith and examine it, because what it teaches us is precisely the opposite.
The readings today are among the most profound and well-known portions of Scripture that exist: Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones and the raising of Lazarus. There are around 600 years between these events and the texts describing them are written under very different circumstances, but they have one common theme: with the Lord, there is always a second chance.
Ezekiel is writing in exile; he has just found out that the Babylonians have destroyed Jerusalem. If there was one chance to save it, it clearly wasn’t taken and the worst did happen. The first part of the book is rather grim, full of grief, but then a shift happens and the vision of dry bones is one of the first signs of hope. The people of Israel may be the dry bones, but God will breathe new life into them. It is a metaphor for the New Creation, which echoes the image of Creation in Genesis 2: man is moulded from dust and the breath of life animates his dry body. The vision of Ezekiel progressively gets more miraculous and overwhelming, building up to an image of a universal restoration encompassing the whole of creation, not just the people of Israel. What he says is that everyone and everything will have a second chance. And possibly not even just the second but the fifth and the seventeenth, if we remember the story of the people of Israel in the Old Testament, who wandered away from God again and again, but the Lord, staying true to the covenant He made with them, brought them back to Himself, each time giving them a new chance.
It dawned on me the other day that we don’t speak of our relationship with God in covenantal terms, as Jews do, but our relationship with Him is also a covenant, made through Christ and sealed with his blood. It has acquired new symbols through new commandments, new miracles and through us being sustained not with the manna and water from the rock, which the Israelites ate and drank in the wilderness, but with the body and blood of Christ, which we eat and drink today. One of the miracles we look to as a confirmation of this covenant is the raising of Lazarus. You may have heard a thousand times that the important part of this narrative is that Lazarus is not raised to eternal life but instead to this earthly life again. In effect, he is literally given a second chance to live it, except this time he can do it in all fullness and in the knowledge of Christ’s power to save. And while you and I have certainly not had the same experience as Lazarus, we all have been given exactly the same chance through our Baptism. It is, in essence, a second chance to live a full life. We don’t see it like this now, but many early Christian baptisteries were below ground level, to symbolise being raised from a grave, because this is what happens in baptism. And staying true to our baptismal vows is our part of the covenant with God.
This new covenant, created in Christ, is a stage in the evolving relationship between God and His people. It starts with Adam and Eve making a promise to God and breaking it, but the covenant is restored in Noah, to be broken again and again restored through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be broken again and restored through Moses, to be broken again and restored through David, to be broken again and restored through Christ. God never turns away; there is never only one chance. A Christian cinematic universe is that of sequels, in which Doctor Grant will certainly get another shot at getting away from the dinosaurs, Danny Ocean will plan another robbery to punish Terry Benedict, and Arnie will certainly come back from the future again.
My message to you today is that of hope: the Bible tells us clearly that God offers second chances to those who have faith in him. After destruction and desolation, there is always restoration; after every exile there is homecoming; after every war, there is always peace; after any turmoil there is always calm; after every death, there is new life.
Even nature functions according to the same principle. After the devastation caused by the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster and the seemingly complete wipe-out of all life, nature is flourishing, the diversity of flora and fauna is growing, animal species are thriving and multiplying. New beginnings and second chances are built into the very fabric of creation and there is no reason to think they are not built into us. This is not to say that there is no punishment and no justice and anything goes. Again, we have seen the disappointment and the wrath of God in the Bible. This is not an invitation not to examine our thoughts and behaviour because it will all become irrelevant once we get our next chance. If anything, we are still in Lent, the time to look inwardly and to correct our ways.
I think we must act like we only have one chance in everything we do, but we must rejoice in the knowledge that if we stumble, however badly, God will be there to help us up and to cheer us on. Amen.