Today's Gospel is difficult to preach on All Saints' Sunday. The story of the raising of Lazarus is familiar and uplifting, but this section is a little awkward. We enter just in time to witness Jesus' tears and anguish, some graphic words about how the body would smell, an odd little prayer, and -- almost as an afterthought -- the calling forth of four-day-dead Lazarus, still bound in his shroud, shuffling awkwardly from his tomb before the astonished mourners. No ringing words about Jesus as the resurrection and the life; just a, shall we say, former corpse blinking newly-restored eyes against the light of an ordinary earthly day. 

Because that was what the still-present shroud signifies: Lazarus has been raised but not resurrected. He's been given a new lease on his old life; he hasn'…