After Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he says to the people there a line full of meaning: “unbind him and let him go.”
He was physical bound to their rituals of death, so in a very real sense, he needed to be removed from all of that to return to the land of the living. But it is also a deeply metaphorical command. Let go of the things that would keep him bound in your hearts. The things that hold us to the before times and to a life of skeptical frustration.
What happens when we accept this invitation for ourselves and expand the scope a bit?
Dare we see the way Jesus is changing the world and our own precious expectations for him?
Do we hold him, our loved ones, and ourselves bound to expectations that don’t fit any longer? That haven’t changed with the moment? With the needs of the world? With our own lived experience?
Has Jesus brought things to life that we keep wanting to treat as dead and gone? Dare we live, too?