Folding the Laundry
- Mar 24
- 9 min read
Fifth Sunday in Lent - March 22, 2026
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Ezekiel 37:1-14 + Psalm 130 + Romans 8:6-11 + John 11:1-45
Grace to you, and peace, from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. + I speak to you today in the Name of the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
Knock, knock!
Who’s there?
Orange!
Orange Who?
Orange you glad I’m not giving another 45-minute sermon on the liturgy?
While throughout that series I had hoped at least to scratch the surface of the liturgy, demonstrating its capacity to lift us out of the ordinary, from chronos to kairos, from the mundane to the sacred. Perhaps in light of the gospel today, we might consider whether we can or should speak of the ‘ordinary’ at all. Perhaps liturgy does not lift us from the ordinary, but reminds us that everything is extraordinary.
Indeed, it might make for a powerful Lenten observance if we all gave up talk of “the ordinary” as a collective spiritual practice. Perhaps to think of anything as ‘ordinary’ is really just to live from a place of unawareness…of spiritual slumber.
Does the great Dismissal really send us back out into an ordinary world or does it send us out with new vision, new insight, new awareness that the world, life itself is all miraculous.
Even as I write these words, I can overhear Fernando talking and laughing with his parents on the phone in the next room. They are not discussing anything particularly deep or life-changing. Just an ordinary conversation, the likes of which they have on a regular (almost daily) basis. A conversation for which I would give anything, to have with either of my own parents, now deceased. A conversation whose particularities will easily be forgotten amidst the repetition of the next and the next and the next daily phone call, but whose words would no doubt be remembered with poignancy and tenderness and longing should it turn out (God forbid!) to be their last.
If there’s one thing that disabuses us of illusion of the ‘ordinary,’ it’s death itself. No matter how prepared we think we are, the death of a loved one breaks into what we habitually call the “ordinariness” of life, waking us up to the reality that every moment really is extraordinary, indeed miraculous.
This, no doubt, was the stark reality faced by Mary and Martha of Bethany, the sisters of Lazarus, who lay dying when the sent a message to Jesus to come quickly to heal him. Yet their efforts would be in vain as the chronology of the narrative suggests Lazarus died even as the messenger was en route to Perea, Jesus’ last known location according to John 10:40. His intentional delay of two days, plus a day’s journey from Perea to Bethany has Lazarus already in the tomb for four days when Jesus finally arrives. Just enough time for the finality of his passing and the ravages of grief to set in.
There can be little doubt in the context of John’s gospel that this narrative serves as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ own resurrection with the notable caveat that Jesus is not merely resuscitated (as will be the case with Lazarus) but resurrected. That is to say, forever beyond the bounds of death whereas poor Lazarus will indeed one day have to die again. And there is a beautiful, even if subtle, way in which John speaks both to the cohesion between these two stories of dying and rising, while at the same time observing the profound differences between Lazarus’ resuscitation and Jesus’ resurrection. And it all revolves around the ordinary.
Some of you may be familiar with Jack Cornfield’s book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry published in 2000, which explores the ways in which we live out our spiritual awakening, our enlightenment—in our so-called ordinary day-to-day lives. An invitation to see nothing as ordinary. So too, in the midst of all the extraordinary events that unfold in John’s gospel today, his narrative hints at a deeper more subtle truth, not unlike Cornfield’s own insight, that the raising of Lazarus is fundamentally about the mundane, the ordinary, and the routine. Indeed, it is quite literally about folding the laundry in the Kingdom of God.
Read side-by-side, the raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection of Jesus betray a striking contrast. Here is how John describes the raising of Lazarus from the tomb:
After rolling away the stone Jesus “cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth [keiria], and his face wrapped in a cloth [soudarion]. Upon seeing him, Jesus said to the others, “Unbind him, and let him go free.”
Notice the description of what Lazarus is wearing as he emerges from the tomb: His body is bound in tight strips of cloth (keiria) and covering his face is something akin to a handkerchief (soudarion). So, we should imagine him looking somewhat like a mummy.
What we see reflected in this narrative is ancient Jewish and Christian burial customs. Upon death, a body would have been wrapped in a sheet or bands of cloth, the face covered with a separate cloth out of respect and the body anointed with oils. The corpse would then be placed on a kind of shelf or niche carved out of stone in a shallow tomb, where it would be left to decay over the course of a year. At the end of that time only the bones would remain and the family would return to the tomb and carefully stack the bones in something called an Ossuary or “bone box.” The ossuary was relatively small and would be engraved with the name of the deceased on the lid and usually placed somewhere on the ground of the tomb, leaving the niche now available for use by another family member when the died. So, when Jesus arrives in Bethany and tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again!” (11:22), Her response is understandable:
“I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day” (Jn 11:23).
The prevailing belief was that the very bones in the ossuary would be reconstituted as a glorified and resurrected body, much as we heard today in Ezekiel’s prophecy of Valley of Dry Bones:
Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you…and you shall know that I am the LORD.” 13And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people.
Thus, when Lazarus emerges from the tomb it would not be unexpected to see him ‘bound’ in burial strips of cloth, which is why upon seeing him Jesus commands, “Unbind him, let him go free.”
Now if we read this story side-by-side with John’s account of the resurrection of Jesus notice how he describes the burial cloths of Jesus in Chapter 20:
Peter and the disciple whom Jesus loved set out and went toward the tomb. 4The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. 6Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, 7and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.
Now, you realize of course what this means, don’t you? It means that the very first act of Jesus upon inaugurating the eschatological Kingdom of God…The very first act of Jesus in the world after his passion and death, the harrowing of hell, the resurrection from the dead…His very first act after all that was to fold his laundry! No doubt many will find this profoundly anti-climactic, which is why it was probably not include in the Nicene creed:
He was crucified under Pontius Pilate
Suffered, died and was buried.
On the third day he rose again from the dead
And folded the laundry!
But clearly a comparison between how Lazarus emerges from the tomb, and how Jesus does so later in John’s gospel, should not so easily be dismissed. Why would John provide so much attention to detail about the placement of the burial cloths?
“…the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.”
One prominent theory suggests: that such orderliness serves as evidence against the accusation that Jesus’ tomb was ram-shackled and his body stolen. Another theory (by no means contradictory to the first), but perhaps more spiritually satisfying, suggests that the orderliness of Jesus’ tomb is meant to stand in diametrical opposition to the way in which Lazarus emerges from the tomb: still wrapped (indeed bound by) his burial cloths. Namely, Lazarus emerges from the tomb still bound by his burial linens because unlike Jesus, he will die again. He is still literally and figuratively bound by death.
Here stands in stark contrast the difference between resuscitation and resurrection. For, by contrast, Jesus’ own resurrection, he is forever free from the bounds of death, from the ties that bind all mortal flesh to the grave. Unlike Lazarus, he will have no need of his burial cloths or the soudarion that reverently covered his face. And thus, he leaves them behind as surely as he leaves behind death and mortality itself. The longing for immortality that Mary and Martha hoped for is both anticipated and foreshadowed in the raising of their brother Lazarus to life. But the bands of death that will bind him can only be abolished by the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus.
There is nothing in the gospel today that attempts to unveil for us the great mystery of what lies behind the veil of death. No insights into the heavenly realms that await us beyond the grave. What matters to the story is not what Lazarus experienced in his time of dying but rather the joy of his return to the mundane and ordinary life of a middle-aged man in a small village in ancient Palestine. It is the unbound joy of his return to this rather ordinary life that is the cause of celebration.
New life in Christ begins now not merely in some glorified ‘after.’ It can be found, indeed celebrated, in what can otherwise easily be dismissed as the mundane until that moment when death thrusts itself upon us, throwing everything we take for granted into sharp relief. Exposing the simple, routine ordinariness of life as something to be cherished all along. Indeed, the raising of Lazarus assures us, as surely as it did Mary and Martha, that resurrected life has already begun in Christ here and now in what we inadequately call the mundane.
And even as Jesus will show in his own resurrection, even amidst the very act of saving the world, there is still laundry to be folded. Perhaps, it turns out that God, not the devil, is in the details. And perhaps there is something in this for us:
Perhaps we might stop seeking the extraordinary and instead wake up to the fact that we can’t escape it. To simply remind yourself whenever you’re folding the bed linens, a handkerchief, or a bath towel, that this too was the very first act of the resurrected Jesus’ as he arose from the tomb to inaugurate the eschatological age. About this, John is very clear: he folded the laundry!
And in doing so, Jesus took the chaos and terror, the destruction and doom that is death itself, and transformed it into an encounter with God. His orderly tomb looks nothing like the aftermath of a violent battle between the cosmic powers of good and evil, life and death. It appears more like a tidy sleeping chamber. Christ! The great domesticator of death itself, replacing its terrifying threat with the gentleness of the ordinary.
The mundane, the ordinary, the daily grind becomes in Christ the school of faith where we must learn to know Christ in every detail lest we are unable to recognize him when he calls us to Lazarus’ side. Indeed, I sometimes wonder what it was like for Lazarus. Not ‘being dead’ or ‘seeing the Great Beyond…’ But what it was like after all that to be ordinary again…when the neighbors had gone home and the fanfare was over and Lazarus found himself alone in his room, preparing for a night’s rest, I wonder if perhaps we might imagine him ruminating for a time on his burial cloths which he had been freed from just hours before. Gazing at them for a moment, before taking them in hand and folding them gently, to be put aside for yet another day.
The laundry does not just come after the resurrection, but precisely in the midst of it. Find it there.
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.