John 11:1-57
On his arrival, Jesus found
that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Bethany was
less than two miles from Jerusalem,
and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their
brother. When Martha heard that Jesus
was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. "Lord," Martha said to Jesus,
"if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you
whatever you ask."
Jesus said to her,
"Your brother will rise again."
Martha answered, "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at
the last day."
Jesus said to her, "I
am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though
he dies; and whoever lives and believes
in me will never die. Do you believe this?"
"Yes, Lord," she
told him, "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to
come into the world." And after she
had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. "The
Teacher is here," she said, "and is asking for you." When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and
went to him. Now Jesus had not yet
entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the
house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed
her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there. When Mary reached the place where Jesus was
and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, "Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died."
When Jesus saw her weeping,
and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in
spirit and troubled. "Where have
you laid him?" he asked. "Come and see, Lord," they
replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, "See how he loved
him!" But some of them said,
"Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from
dying?" Jesus, once more deeply
moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the
entrance. "Take away the
stone," he said. "But, Lord," said Martha, the sister of the
dead man, "by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four
days."
Then Jesus said, "Did
I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. Then Jesus
looked up and said, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said
this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that
you sent me." When he had said
this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" The dead man came out.
When
my father died a few years ago, I found a box at his house with a label. It said, “Things I want my son to keep.”
Inside
there were no bearer bonds or gold coins.
No age old stocks. Nothing you
would list on Ebay.com and try to auction off on the Internet.
It
was a strange collection. A hodge podge.
I found a broken
pencil. Strange pencil. It was shaped like a rifle. Pull the tiny trigger and lead comes out. Not bullets of lead, but you know, a long
thin line of lead you write with. Open
the shoulder rest and there is an eraser.
It is absolutely worthless. It is
terrible condition, but there was a small note attached to it that was written
in Dad’s handwriting. It read, “My
mother’s pencil.”
I also found a
pearl. Not a very pretty one, and in
fact, was quite small. But Mom had found
it while eating oysters at a dinner. How
could you throw something like that away.
There was an
envelope filled with teeth. Human
teeth. Not adult size teeth – children’s
teeth. I don’t even know whose teeth
they had been. My teeth? My sisters’?
Some bully Dad had beaten up in the 2nd grade. Who knows?
There
was another envelope. It was labeled
“Missy’s hair.”
Missy was my
sister, and so I opened the envelope expecting find a small lock of her
hair.
But
instead, inside was all of her hair.
Enough for a small wig.
You
see, 41 years earlier, Missy had become sick and had to have brain
surgery. She was only six years
old. And of course, they had to shave
her head. Looking at this envelope of
hair, I imagined Mom or Dad gathering up the hair as the orderly or nurse
shaved her head, and then keeping it as if someday it might be all that was
left of the child.
Now,
I was quite young as well, so there are a lot of things I do not remember about
Missy’s illness, but one thing I do remember very clearly is that our other
sister, Shannon, had such deep faith.
We lived in a small town at the time and
everyone became aware of this 6 year old child who was sick, and everyone was
praying for her. Now, even as a child, I
was aware that even though people were praying for my sister, I could sense
that people didn’t really believe God would do anything to heal her.
Have
you ever sensed that in someone? Or
maybe you have sensed it in yourself.
Praying for something, but not really believing.
But
Shannon – our other sister – she not only prayed.
She believed.
She knew.
She was
convinced.
She was
persuaded.
Without any doubt
at all, Shannon knew God was going to heal our
sister Missy.
It
is an amazing thing to see someone with that much faith.
Jesus
promised in Matthew 17 (verse 20), “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as
small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to
there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."
That
was the kind of faith Shannon had. Everyone else seemed to have their
doubts. But Shannon
never did. She knew God would heal
Missy.
A
few months after the surgery, Missy died.
And
the day Missy died was the same day that my other sister, Shannon, stopped
believing in God.
We
serve a God who is sometimes very hard to understand.
We serve a God who
sometimes disappoints us – because we can’t manipulate him even with our
prayers.
We serve a God who
is sometimes hard to believe in.
Maybe you have been
there.
You watch your husband
or wife suffer a long illness. Day by
day the body weakens, the mind fades, one organ after another shuts down. It’s hard to believe in a God who lets
someone die so slowly and painfully.
You are at home
alone when the doorbell rings. You
answer it and find the police at the door.
There has been an accident. Your
child was in a car. It’s hard to believe
in a God who lets a child suffer a sudden death.
Or perhaps you’ve
heard the news from your own doctor. The
tests have all come back and they have confirmed the worst. “There’s nothing we can do,” the doctor tells
you. It’s hard to believe in a God who
allows death to intrude upon your life.
And don’t think
this is something new.
It’s the same story
in this morning’s Gospel reading.
Jesus has a friend
named Lazarus. He gets sick, and then he
dies.
There
seems to be no escaping death and tragedy.
The death of
Lazarus comes in chapter 11 of John’s Gospel and it is in sharp contrast with
what has been happening in chapter 10.
Chapter
10 is a beautiful chapter. It’s filled
with promises. It’s full of life.
Jesus
says, “I am the Good Shepherd.”
Jesus
promises that he has come to give us life, so that we may have it abundantly.
In
chapter 10, Jesus promises life.
Then
in chapter 11, Lazarus is dead.
Lazarus
was a friend of Jesus. A very close
friend (verse 3).
Lazarus
had two sisters, Mary and Martha. They
were the ones who sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was sick. Jesus doesn’t waste any time. He starts back to Judea
to heal Lazarus. Now this is a risky
thing to do. By this time, the
popularity of Jesus has begun to decline.
In fact, his disciples reminded him that they left that region because
earlier people tried to stone and kill Jesus.
But Jesus is determined. So when
he goes, the rest of his disciples agree to go and die with Jesus.
But
it is not Jesus who dies in this chapter – it’s Lazarus.
Martha
goes and meets Jesus as he arrives, and she is bitter. She tries not to be. But she is. (John 11:21) "Lord," Martha said to Jesus,
"if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Martha served a God
who is sometimes very hard to understand.
Martha served a God
who sometimes disappointed her.
Martha served a God
who is sometimes hard to believe in.
Martha looked at
Jesus and said, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Jesus tells her,
"Your brother will rise again."
And Martha tries to
maintain her faith, "I know -- he will rise again in the resurrection at
the last day."
But then Jesus says
a strange thing.
Jesus said to her,
"I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even
though he dies; and whoever lives and
believes in me will never die.”
Martha professes faith
that what Jesus is saying is true. She
looks at Jesus and says, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
who was to come into the world.”[1]
It’s hard to keep
your faith sometimes. It’s sometimes
hard to continue to believe in God. But
Martha believes.
Now Mary had stayed
at home, but now Martha goes and gets her and says that Jesus wants to see her,
so Mary goes to where Jesus is.
Mary and Martha are
so different. You see their differences
in other passages of Scripture, but sometimes they are very much alike.
When
Mary sees Jesus, she ends up saying the very same thing that sister Martha had
said to him earlier. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not
have died."
It is at that point that everyone breaks down
in tears. Grief overwhelms Mary. Then the other mourners.
It is interesting
to see the effect this grief has on Jesus.
When he sees the tears of Mary, and of the other mourners as well, he
was, in the words of the Gospel, “deeply moved in spirit, and troubled.” To be more accurate, scholars say these words
do not reflect compassion, but anger.[2]
You don’t pick up on this in most of your English Bibles, but it shows up in
most other languages.[3]
Why would Jesus be
angry at a funeral?
Anger and grief are
closely related cousins.
In the classic
pattern of grief, there are five stages – from denial to acceptance and
hope. In the middle we find anger as one
of the five stages of grief.[4]
Think back to your
own experiences with someone’s death.
Wasn’t there some moment of anger?
Anger at the drunk
driver who killed your best friend?
Anger at the doctor
who wasn’t able to pull off a miracle?
When
my sister died, my other sister became so angry that she stopped believing in
God.
When death happens,
anger is one of the visitors at the funeral service.
It was as natural
as what Jesus does next.
Verse 35 is the
shortest verse in the Bible. “Jesus
wept.”
Which has always
struck me as a strange thing for Jesus to do in light of what he does next.
Jesus goes to the
tomb and asks that the grave be opened.
He addresses Lazarus and orders him to come out of the grave.
And he does.
Lazarus, who has
been food for the worms for four days, comes back to life.
Jesus commands him
back to life. It is one of the great
miracles – or signs that Jesus performs.[5]
The raising of
Lazarus from the dead is a foreshadowing of Christ’s own resurrection, and of
our own resurrection into eternal life.
Death intrudes into
our lives all the time. Like it or not,
ready or not, willing or not – death comes to our friends and loved ones, to
the young and the old. And eventually,
it comes for us.
But, through Christ, we have the hope
for eternal life, and after Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, there should
have been no doubt in anyone’s mind that this was true.
In fact, the
Scriptures say that as a result of this, many put their faith in Christ (verse
45).
Christ makes it
possible for us to have eternal life.
Yet of all the
miracles Jesus performs, I think this one may be the one that is the hardest
for us to believe.
Oh I know, I
know. We SAY we believe it, but do we?
Jesus said to
Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will
live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?"
Martha says she
does believe it.
But do we believe it?
You stand at the
grave of your best friend, and you hope there is everlasting life. But do you really believe?
You
watch the casket of your husband lowered into the ground. Do you really believe what Jesus said when he told Martha, "I am the
resurrection and the life.” Or do you
just hope?
You hear the doctor
give you the results of last week’s medical tests. You listen as he tells you that there will be
no cure. Do you really believe that
there will be anything at all for you after your death?
Believing that we
have eternal life and that there is a resurrection is more than just a nice
pie-in-the-sky hope that we have that gives us an empty comfort in times of
crisis.
This belief is
central to the Christian faith.
St.
Paul said in his letter to the Corinthians that if you
don’t believe in this, you might as well not believe in anything (1 Cor
15:12-14). He says, “If it is preached that Christ has been
raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of
the dead? If there is no resurrection of
the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is
your faith.”[6]
The most familiar
passage of the Bible is John 3:16.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
It’s a wild
doctrine to believe! It’s beyond the natural – it’s supernatural! An afterlife?
A bodily resurrection? It’s like
believing someone could walk on water. It’s
as wild as believing someone could turn water into wine.
But that’s St. Paul’s point. If you believe in the resurrection of Christ,
then you must also believe that there will be a resurrection for you and other
Christians as well someday.
Paul’s words in
First Corinthians 15 are very clear! “If
it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you
say that there is no resurrection of the dead?
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been
raised. And if Christ has not been
raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
We have eternal
life.
We have a hope for
the resurrection from the dead.
Believe it!
Believe it when you grieve over the death of your
parents.
Believe it when you feel the anger over the injustice
of the untimely death of a child.
Believe it when you weep as Christ wept at the death
of a friend.
Believe it, and be comforted – not in the pie in the
sky hope, but in the reality of faith.
When my father died
a few years ago, I found a box that was labeled, “Things I want my son to
keep.”
Inside was a tiny
rifle shaped pencil, a small pearl, baby teeth, and an envelope containing my
sister Missy’s hair.
And -- there was a letter.
It had been written
by my sister, Shannon.
She’d had such
faith. She prayed and truly believed
that God would answer her prayers and heal our sister Missy.
And when Missy
died, Shannon’s faith died.
But her faith did
not remain dead for long. She often said
over the years that when she held her first child in her arms for the first
time, she found her way back to God.
She wrote the
letter on her 50th birthday.
By that time, she was facing her own serious, life-threatening illness.
She was waiting for a transplant and had high hopes that it would save her
life. It wouldn’t. Five years after writing this letter, she
would die.
In the letter, she
wrote about her illness. She shared her
hopes. She shared her fears.
And she also shared
her faith.
“Dear Daddy, I pray
every day that God will heal me. But I
don’t know if God will heal me and let me live.
It’s important to me that God heal me.
I want to live. But what’s more
important than whether or not I live in this world is that I know our family
has been given eternal life.”
And then she quoted
a verse of Scripture – a verse from our Gospel lesson for today. ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ says
the Lord. ‘He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever
lives and believes in me will never die.’”
Copyright Maynard
Pittendreigh, 2014
All Rights Reserved
[1]
This is a confession of faith. Martha
starts it in the same way that we begin the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe…” It is a confession that is as equal to
Peter’s in Matt 16:16: "You are the
Christ, the Son of the living God."
[2] Enebrimesato
is translated as
“deeply moved” in the NIV, and “greatly disturbed” in the NRSV. The verb connotes anger and indignation, not
compassion. In its use in the Greek
version of the Old Testament (the Septuagent) and other New Testament usages, this
Greek word has this meaning consistently.
(Daniel 11:30, Matthew 9:30, Mark 1:43, 14:5). The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume 9, page
690. Barclay adds an interesting insight
in his Daily Study Bible Series, the Gospel of John, Volume II p.
97. “In ordinary classical Greek the
usual usage of the word is of a horse snorting.”
[3]
The German translation by Martin Luther translated it simply as anger.
[4]
This description was first presented by Dr. Kubler-Ross in her book On Death
and Dying. The five stages she
identified are: Denial, Rage and Anger, Bargaining, Depression,
Acceptance.
[5]This is the last of the
seven signs in John’s Gospel. In recent
weeks, Jason and I have been preaching on the Gospel of John, and you may
remember that we have pointed out that there are seven signs that Jesus
performs. Other Gospels record scores of
miracles performed by Jesus, but John selects only 7 miracles to write
about. Each one of these miracles is a
sign that reveals God’s glory. These
signs are: Turning water into wine, the
healing of a nobleman’s son, healing the paralytic, feeding the multitude,
walking on water, giving sight to the man born blind, and raising Lazarus from
the dead.
[6]
There was a debate about whether or not there would be a bodily resurrection of
the dead during the time of Christ and the ministry of Paul. Sadducees did not believe in the
resurrection, while the Pharisees did.
Not all who were Christians in the First Century proclaimed a future
resurrection. Some preached a spiritual
awakening, or resurrection, that was already past. Such a view, adopted by Hymenaeus and
Philetus and adopted by later Gnostic heretics, was sternly condemned by Paul
(II Timothy 2:17-19)
(from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary)
