Scripture John 11:17-27; 32-44
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So 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?”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Sermon “Grief and Glory” Rev. Pat Raube
Those of you who joined us last week for Reformation Sunday (among other celebrations) probably noticed that we used questions and answers from the Westminster Shorter Catechism for our Statement of Faith. A first for us—at least, since I’ve been around. This morning, I’d like to read the first question and answer from the Heidelberg Catechism—an older one than the Westminster, written in Switzerland in an attempt to find common ground between Lutherans and the Reformed churches (such as Presbyterians). The year was 1563.
Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own,
but belong—
body and soul,
in life and in death—
to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way
that not a hair can fall from my head
without the will of my Father in heaven;
in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him,
Christ, by his Holy Spirit,
assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready
from now on to live for him.
Our much newer Brief Statement of Faith (written in 1983) steals the beautiful opening salvo of this creed, its first line being: In life and in death we belong to God.
This passage shows us Jesus in life and in death—not his death, not yet, though his death is coming soon in the gospel narrative—but in the death of a dear friend. When the sisters Martha and Mary send word to Jesus that Lazarus is sick, the note reads, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” There is no other person named in this gospel whom Jesus is said to love.
Jesus stumps his of followers, though, saying, cryptically, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Then he delays his departure so that Lazarus will die before he gets there.
Who does that? And why would he? The most obvious answer seems to be that Jesus allows Lazarus to die so that he can raise him from the dead—surely, that would give God glory. Right? Still, that explanation sits uncomfortably with us. It seems to indicate a strange quality present in Jesus’ love for his friend. A coldness. In movies, the people who just let other people die tend to be the bad guys. It’s hard to get away from the feeling that what Jesus is doing—by doing nothing—is cruel.
When our passage begins, Jesus arrives. Not only is Lazarus dead, he has been in the tomb for four days. In Jewish writings and tradition, this is significant. According to Midrash, the soul is in a confused state following death and before burial, lingers near the body for between three and seven days, or until the body is buried. Since Lazarus has been entombed for four days, the mourners would have assumed that his soul had departed, and any hope of him still being alive (perhaps in a coma, maybe having been mistaken for dead) are gone. Jesus has come to raise a hopeless case.
Jesus does not go into the house to greet Lazarus’ sisters—a place that would hold happy memories for him, I would think, given how close he was to the family. Instead, one at a time, the sisters leave the house, going out to greet him. Each of them greets him with words that sound like a reproach. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Martha goes first. She follows that reproachful statement with words of confidence… “But even now…” Even now, she believes Jesus can make a difference in this devastating situation. She and Jesus wind up having a theological conversation—the longest theological conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels. Jesus tells her that her brother will rise again. I know that, she says, in the resurrection on the last day. This is a period in Judaism when the afterlife is starting to be acknowledged more and more. There is this idea that, after a time in the underworld, lying down with their ancestors, all people would be raised for a final judgement.
That’s not what Jesus is talking about, though. He responds to Martha, “I am the resurrection, and the life.” Another cryptic thing for him to say. What can he mean by that? This is one of Jesus’ strange, mystical “I AM” statements, those sayings we find only in John’s gospel, in which Jesus comes close—dangerously close, in terms of what is acceptable among his people—to assuming the identity of God, Godself. In the book of Exodus, when Moses encounters God in the burning bush, and asks God to tell him the divine name, God replies. “I AM,” or “I Am Who I Am.” God defies naming. God’s name is beyond our ability to say or understand. And in John’s gospel, Jesus reiterates again and again the provocative possibility that he, and he alone among humans, gets to claim that identity, that name. I AM. Here he claims it as pertaining to resurrection. He is the one in whom trust, faith, means the difference between life and death. In life and in death we belong to God. Jesus says, here I stand, in the breach between life and death. I am the bridge. Do you believe this? And then Martha makes the first complete statement of understanding of who Jesus is that we find in John’s gospel. “Yes Lord,” she says, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed one, the Son of God. You are the One coming into the world.”
Jesus meets Mary soon after. Following her are the mourners. The sound of their wailing, their keening, hits Jesus hard—he is upset, he is disturbed. In the Greek it says, his feelings “thunder,” he is groaning in his spirit. He asks where they have laid the body—he can’t seem to bring himself to say Lazarus’ name—and when they reply, he begins to weep.
Jesus is not the bad guy in this movie. He weeps. Standing in the breach between life and death costs him something in this moment. Soon it will cost him his life, but here it costs him the pain he is witnessing in people he loves. He knows it could have been avoided. He has not done this lightly. He has done this knowing the cost—to Lazarus, to Martha, to Mary, and even to himself.
Jesus goes to the tomb and orders that the stone be rolled away. This is the same kind of tomb he will be interred in—a cave with a large boulder as a door. Then he turns to Martha and says, Didn’t I tell you there would be glory? He prays to God, he calls out in a loud voice, and Lazarus, still looking like what we would call a mummy, stumbles out, very much alive. “Unbind him,” Jesus says, “and let him go.”
Jesus has unbound Lazarus from death. He has unbound the sisters from their grief. All of this, of course, until life runs its course for the three of them, which it will. But it turns out the glory—if it is here, in this moment of jaw-dropping power and majesty—is not only here. The gospel according to John has a different understanding of glory than we do, or, I should say, an expanded idea of glory. My notion of “glory” has always been something like “majesty with visuals.” In other words, something about brightness, beauty, and awe—something beyond what we ourselves can create, something magnificent, important, and stunning. In John’s gospel Jesus adds to this something unexpected. For Jesus, and to Jesus, the glory of God is the moment when he is hanging on the cross. That is glory. And this action of raising Lazarus from the dead does indeed lead to that, though it’s not in the text of our passage. Just a few verses later, after a conversation about the raising of Lazarus among the religious elites, and all the alarms that raises, we read, “So from that day on they planned to put him to death” (John 11:53).
In life and in death we belong to God. In Jesus, we see the face of a God who weeps when we are weeping, who longs to heal what is broken in us. We see a God who has established a cycle of life and death and life again, but does not minimize the cost to us, God’s beloved children. In Jesus, we see and proclaim the one who stands in the breach between life and death and tells us that he is the bridge. For those of us who are grieving this year, we too stand in that breach, but unlike Jesus, there is not much we can do about it except to know that he stands there with us. He holds us close. He weeps alongside us. And he points us to a day when God will wipe every tear from our eyes, when death will be no more, and mourning and crying and pain will be no more. In life and in death, we belong to God.
Thanks be to God. Amen.