Bulletin: Mar 9
Scripture: Romans 8:5-11, John 11:1-45
Somewhere in my last year in seminary I read an observation that there are no funeral rites in the New Testament. I can’t remember the source, but the writer said the absence of funerals in the gospels was because every time Jesus came across a dead person, he brought him or her back to life.
The gospels of Mark and Luke tell us about how Jesus healed Jairus’s 12-year-old daughter, whom everyone had given up for dead. Luke tells us about how Jesus stopped a funeral procession and brought back to life a widow’s only son.
People came to expect this kind of miracle from Jesus. Surely Mary and Martha had expected Jesus to heal Lazarus so that he would NOT die – at least not then.
But that’s the difficulty of understanding the significance of these healing miracles. The people that Jesus healed physically, they’re not alive now. The physical healing, the emotional healing, didn’t last beyond their ordinary lifetimes.
The raising of Lazarus is an important example. If we just take it on the surface, that Jesus could bring people back from the dead, we fall into the trap of seeing Jesus as a magician, a sorcerer with impressive powers. If these powers were that simple, why didn’t Jesus just heal everybody? Why would any widow have to bury her only son? Why would anyone’s 12-year-old daughter have to die an early death? Why wouldn’t Jesus bring back to life every disciple or close friend who died?
These are the kinds of questions that the faith community of the writer of John was asking. If we believe in the risen Lord, why are we dying? Didn’t Jesus promise us everlasting life?
You remember we saw in discussions of scripture earlier this year that a lot of followers of John the Baptist thought the end of the world was near. A lot of Jesus’s followers thought that too. Everything was going to end and they’d all be taken into the kingdom bodily.
But it didn’t happen that way. By the time the gospel writer of John wrote, Christians were dealing with a whole new set of expectations and questions – ones we still hear and ask today.
This story of Lazarus is for us Christians who did not see the living, human Jesus. It’s for us who feel the presence of Jesus as a spirit, rather than a man. And who live with the realization that all of us who live physical lives will eventually experience physical death.
But we who know Jesus and who are studying God’s Word, we are invited to see death – ours and those of our loved ones – in a different way.
Lets examine the way Jesus viewed death in this story. When Mary and Martha sent word that Lazarus was very sick and needed Jesus’s healing power, Jesus delayed. He waited until he knew that Lazarus was dead and buried.
After four days Lazarus would have been, in the words of the Munchkin coroner in the Wizard of Oz that keep cropping up in my mind, “not just merely dead but most sincerely dead.” No doubt about Lazarus just being in a coma. Jesus waits until he’s stinking dead.
Why? Perhaps because he did not view Lazarus’s death as something so terrible it should be prevented.
He says, I am glad for your sakes that I wasn’t there. You’re about to be given new grounds for believing. “
Jesus is going to show his disciples – and us – new grounds for believing. And he demonstrates that he’s not afraid to die. The Judeans are just waiting for an opportunity to kill him – they’ve tried to stone him once already, his disciples point out. But Jesus pays no attention to these death threats.
I think Thomas shows a certain amount of bravado when he says, almost with a shrug, well we might as well go and die with him. He’s talking about Jesus dying at the hands of the Judeans. Thomas misunderstands Jesus’s reasons for not fearing death. But at least Thomas is willing to follow, even in the face of death threats.
Both Martha and Mary say, “if you had been here, he wouldn’t have died.” They showed a certain amount of belief in Jesus – they believe he could have healed Lazarus. But they expected healing on their terms. They expected Jesus to come when they first asked, so that he could have prevented Lazarus’s death.
Martha goes further, saying she believes Lazarus will be among those who are resurrected in the end times. But she wanted Jesus to keep Lazarus alive right then. She didn’t want to wait until the resurrection of all the faithful.
What does Jesus say to her?
You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this? Do you trust me?
This is the key question in this passage: Jesus asks, Do you believe this? Or as some commentators translate it, Do you trust what I’m saying? Do you trust me?
The believers in the gospel writer’s community were discouraged, they were confused. Things weren’t happening the way they expected. Just like Martha and Mary.
And like us. We get discouraged and confused. Things aren’t happening the way we expect. Our friends and our family members die, sometimes even when we pray that they be healed. No matter how faithfully we live our lives, we’ll all die someday. We’ve all had occasion to challenge Jesus – if you had been here …
To our doubts and our questions, Jesus says, do you trust me?
Martha responds with a stock answer, similar to words and phrases we say in the apostle’s creed or certain written prayers or in hymns. She clings to her liturgy, to words that she doesn’t fully understand, but takes on faith:
Yes, Master. All along I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God who comes into the world.”
Then Mary comes, and she says the same thing Martha did. If you had been here,
Maybe that’s why the Message translation says Jesus gets angry. He gets frustrated at the misunderstanding of those who just want another miracle.
But if Jesus is irritated, he’s also sad. Jesus wept. Yes, it is human to grieve the death of a friend. It’s OK to cry, even if you’re the Son of God and you know death does not have ultimate power.
Jesus wept. Jesus wept with the other mourners,
Martha has one more chance to show she doesn’t get it, when she objects to the stone being removed because the body will stink.
Jesus snaps back, Didn’t I tell you to trust me and you would see the glory of God?
And he prays aloud to God, he says, “on account of this crowd standing here I’ve spoken so that they might believe that you sent me.”
So he performs the miracle. Lazarus, who was most sincerely dead, walks out of the tomb, trailing wrappings, his face still covered with a burial cloth.
“Unwrap him,” Jesus says. And we don’t get any more explanation from Jesus or from the gospel writer about why Jesus waited until Lazarus was dead or why he brought him back to life, if only for a little while.
On account of this crowd standing here, he said.
Jesus showed these people, some of whom wanted to kill him, that he had power over death, that he was not afraid of them or of the suffering of death or of death itself.
And Jesus is trying to tell his friends and disciples and the crowd – and us – that we don’t have to be afraid of death either.
It’s a liberating thought, if you let it sink in.
If we trust Jesus when he tells us that we will have eternal life after the death of the body, then we are freed in our bodily life as well. Not that physical death is no longer a reality, but it’s inevitability cannot control us. We don’t have to wait until we die to participate in the resurrection. Just knowing that death is not the end frees us to LIVE, to live without fearing death.
One of the Bible commentors I read regularly, Bruce Martin, a minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church here in St. Louis, really helped me see how to express this liberation. He says, “The avoidance of death is no longer our chief concern. Because we no longer “stumble” against the rock of self-preservation, we no longer need Jesus to be physically among us (he is immediately present in our faith).”
We may begin to realize the misunderstanding expressed in our lament to Jesus, “If you had been here…’’ Because, of course, Jesus is here. He is here, weeping with us in our grief and suffering, as well as assuring us that he is the resurrection and the life. He has prepared a table for us to share.
Do you trust me? Jesus asks.
You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all. Do you believe this? Do you trust me?
If we live our lives trusting Jesus, that we don’t have to wait for the end to get our reward, we can live more fully here and now. We can know that Jesus is with us and we don’t have to accuse him, “If you had been here…”
He is here.
Praise God.
Amen
Tags: Communion, gospel of John
