Today we continue in our series on some of the most essential pieces of who Jesus is. Our Teacher, the Son of God, Living Water, the Light of the World —and today, we encounter Jesus just outside of Jerusalem, with his friends.
Now, it’s important to know that at the beginning of this story, Jesus is not in Jerusalem—he’s gone quite a distance, in fact, across the Jordan River to lay low after the religious leaders literally tried to stone him to death in Jerusalem.
Scripture: John 11:1-45
In the previous ten chapters of the gospel of John, Jesus has been doing plenty of healing. Last week, we saw him heal someone who had been born blind. He’s healed people who are paralyzed, who are sick, who were living at the edges of society.
So when his very dear friends send for him, saying that someone he loves is ill and near death, you would fully expect him to drop everything and go to him and fix it, right?
But Jesus does not do that. He knows that Lazarus is already dead, but he stays where he is for another two days—and then he doesn’t go to Bethany, where Lazarus is—he goes to Jerusalem.
He’s not exactly racking up the friendship points so far.
But after he stops in Jerusalem, Jesus makes the two-mile trek to Bethany—and he’s immediately met with Martha, Lazarus’ grieving sister.
“if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”
But Martha, even in the midst of all this, is clear-headed, and she quickly adds: “but I’m still convinced that God is at work in you.”
When Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life,” Martha doesn’t so much as blink, but everything revolves around her next words:
“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
Fun fact: Martha’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah marks the exact center of the entire gospel of John, like an anchor point for everything else to revolve around.
Martha then goes and retrieves Mary from the house. The mourners follow her, and Jesus is suddenly confronted with the full force of their grief.
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
But this time, there is no theological conversation. No grand confession of Jesus.
There is only weeping—open and unashamed.
This unsettles something in Jesus. For a moment, there are no pronouncements, no prayers, no healing. Jesus simply sits with the grief of his friends, and he weeps. He weeps even though he knows what he’s about to do. He weeps alongside Mary and Martha because they’ve lost so much.
They go to the tomb, and Jesus tells them to open it up—and Martha says what everyone has to be thinking. “The smell, Lord. The smell.” But Jesus persists and so they do what he says, and after a prayer of thanksgiving, Jesus yells at Lazarus.
And a man who was dead for four days is suddenly walking out of the tomb. There are people frantically pulling strips of cloth off of him so he can breathe and move.
The religious leaders are livid and begin plotting in earnest to kill Jesus, but that’s a story for next week.
Now, we could try to parse this story through the lens of God’s will – was it God’s will that Lazarus got sick? Was it God’s will that Lazarus died? Why would God do that to one of Jesus’ closest friends outside of the Twelve?
Or, we could take this story for its core teachings: that Jesus loved his friends. He had compassion for them in their hardest days, and he wept with them. And God in Christ has power over death itself. This story is not meant to be a theological treatise on God’s will for us when we’re sick – it’s a preview of Jesus’ impending death and resurrection.
This story is, more than anything else, a here-and-now foretaste of the promise of resurrection: not only for Jesus, but for all of God’s beloved people.
As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything under the sun: a time to be born, and a time to die. A time to rejoice, and a time to grieve. A time to sow and a time to harvest.
And this passage gives us the chance to hit both ends of the spectrum of grief: to weep openly and unashamed before Jesus for all we’ve lost, and for all in this world that is deadly and wrong. And it allows us to take a break from all of our grieving, our worrying, our despair, our illness and our pain – and rejoice in resurrection.
We can’t spend all of our time thinking about heaven, ignoring our lives and the love to which God calls us. But like Mary and Martha, sometimes we need to be reminded that all of this is not actually the endof our story. Even when God does not appear right this minute to fix it, even when we ourselves die, that is not the end. I can’t tell you precisely what the kingdom of heaven looks like, because throughout Scripture God uses metaphor and story and wild exaggeration to describe this life everlasting.
For example: gold is a very soft metal and would be a terrible material to make streets out of, but if God can afford to make the thing you walk all over out of gold, the most expensive metal in the known world, then you know God’s resources are so plentiful that you will want for nothing in God’s kingdom.
Because Jesus has shown us the heart of God, even in the midst of our mess, we can trust that what comes after death is good. It is rest. It is delight. It is true connection with God and one another. It is plenty. It is the absolute absence of pain, loneliness, need and endless striving.
We get to take a moment to look forward to that incredible gift, to rest in that promise.
Take a deep breath with me and imagine that kind of world.
Whatever hells in whatever handbaskets we encounter in this life, that is the end of our story.
AND – you know there’s always going to be an ‘and.’
Jesus came into the world not only to die and rise from the dead himself – he could’ve done that any time, without all the hullabaloo in between the first chapters and the last.
Jesus comes to disrupt death, and to bring life to every heart and soul – and if we know what to look for, we can catch glimpses of that eternal life in the here and now.
If we pay attention, we can also become those glimpses for others. Like Jesus, we can disrupt the ways of death.
To be clear, I am not telling you to go try to raise anybody from the dead.
What I’m talking about are ways we can bring little foretastes of the kingdom of heaven to the world here and now.
On your Lent at Home insert this week is one of my favorite poems: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry. Berry is a poet, novelist, teacher, and farmer – and he manages to hit this nail on the head. Before I read it, know that this is not a new poem – was originally published in 1971.
He writes:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.
Love the Lord. Love the world, work for nothing.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
In a world of quick fixes, ready-made, and ‘I’m good, how are you?’, Jesus invites us to be the kind of people who grieve, who wait, who tell the truth, who rest, who rejoice, who resist evil and embrace resurrection.
Thanks be to God. Amen.