Scripture: John 11:17-27
When Jesus arrived, he found that for four days Lazarus had already been in the tomb. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away. So, many of the Judeans had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she met him, however Mary remained at the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Rabbi, if you had been here, my brother would never have died. Yet even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even though they die, they will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Rabbi, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who comes into the world.”
Translation: The Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney, A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, Year A.
Sermon
This is a love story. No matter how you look at it. It’s about the love between friends, the love between siblings, and, ultimately, the love of God for God’s people.
Still, I admit, this is a curious selection from scripture. We’re used to hearing these eleven verses in the context of the full story. It’s a little like hearing the part about there being no room in the inn on Christmas eve, and nothing else. Why are we getting only one quarter of this story? What does it mean?
You may know this story well. It begins with Jesus receiving a message from Lazarus’s sisters, “The one whom you love is ill.” It continues with Jesus delaying leaving, because he wants this illness to be used for the glory of God. He and his disciples eventually go, though the disciples fully expect it to be a deadly journey—“Let us go, that we may die with him.” They don’t mean Lazarus; they mean Jesus. The last time he had been in Judea, a group of people had tried to stone him.
Then, we come to our passage—the one I’ve just read. Jesus arrives and has a conversation with Martha.
After this conversation, Jesus meets with Mary, who, kneeling before Jesus, repeats her sister’s statement, word for word: If you had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus’s emotions come to the surface, and he cries… for the pain of it all, for the sorrow of the sisters, for the loss of his friend, even if he is about to be found again. He goes to the tomb, and prays aloud to God, and has the tomb opened. He cries out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And he does—loosely clothed in linen wrappings. Jesus gives the gathered community the responsibility of unbinding Lazarus, and letting him go. There ends the lesson.
Our task today, though, is to reflect on Jesus’s conversation with Martha. There’s something here for us, something as profound as the powerful sign Jesus will be performing by raising Lazarus from the dead.
Before we begin to unpack that conversation, though, let’s remember: Martha and her sister Mary are grieving. They have lost their beloved brother, who is also loved by Jesus. The first days of grief can carry shock, disbelief, anger, a sense of fuzziness: an inability to think clearly. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross wrote that the most common of these in the first days is disbelief: some level of denial that the loss is real. Martha may be experiencing any or all of these.
At Jesus’s arrival in Bethany, Martha goes out from the house to meet him. By Martha’s calculations, Jesus is late. Her first words are, “Rabbi, if you had been here, my brother would never have died.” Do we hear reproach in Martha’s voice? Is she angry? We have only words on page. We don’t have access to the faces, the eyes, or the hands of Martha and Jesus, so often those revealers of our innermost selves.
But the next words out of Martha’s mouth take on a different tone. This is not a reproach; it’s a plea to a beloved friend. And not only a plea, but a statement of faith in that friend: “Yet even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Martha is not scolding Jesus. She’s telling him the facts and suggesting that he has a decision to make. She believes that Jesus can, somehow, undo what has been done. Turn back time. Heal Lazarus retroactively. Give him the breath of life. Again. Somehow.
Martha makes a powerful statement of trust in Jesus, and it’s made in a spirit of humility. She doesn’t instruct him. She doesn’t specify what he should do. But she somehow trusts that Lazarus’s story isn’t yet over, and that Jesus knows it. She trusts that Jesus’s intimate connection to God is at the heart of this crucial moment.
Jesus is uncharacteristically direct with Martha now. “Your brother will rise,” he says. In earlier verses that we did not read today, Jesus is entirely oblique with his disciples about his plans for Lazarus. He talks about light and dark, walking in the daylight versus walking at night, and they have no earthly idea what he’s talking about. Here, Jesus spells it right out.
But Martha makes a measured response. A careful one. Rather than accept what Jesus says at face value, she searches her tradition for some meaning for what Jesus has said, other than the obvious one, and she lays that out. “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” Martha is referring to a belief that was widely held among the rabbis of her day: a general resurrection of the dead, at the end of the world. This was held alongside the belief that the souls of the righteous dead would be in a heavenly realm with God, and the souls of the not-so-righteous would be in “Gehinnom,” a place of divine punishment. To give you a sense Gehinnom? It is named after a place outside Jerusalem where ancient kings sometimes offered their children as sacrifices. It was considered cursed.
Martha says this, carefully, I think. We can feel her hope, even as she tries to remain measured in her expectations.
Again, Jesus is breathtakingly direct in the next words he utters.
“I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even though they die, they will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Jesus has many names in the gospel according to John—names he claims as he goes about teaching and showing the power of God through miraculous signs such as turning water into wine, making a blind man see, and feeding a crowd of more than 5,000 with a few loaves and fish. He has said,
I AM the Bread of Life.
I AM the Light of the World.
I AM the Good Shepherd.
And now… I AM the Resurrection and the Life.
And he will claim more names as the gospel continues.
Jesus uses the phrase “I AM” repeatedly and deliberately. In the Old Testament, when Moses is confronted by God at the burning bush, and asks for God’s name, God responds, “I AM who I AM.” In modern times we have used the sound of the Hebrew letters to create the names “Yahweh” and “Jehovah,” but it is Jewish practice never to this name of God aloud, because it is so holy.
It seems to scholars of the New Testament that Jesus is claiming more than a kinship with God, here. Jesus is claiming a connection so close as to be almost indistinguishable. Jesus says, I AM, and we recognize that he is the revelation of God to us on this earth.
At the end of that remarkable statement—“I AM the Resurrection and the Life”—Jesus adds, “Do you believe this?”
And Martha’s answer is swift and strong. In fact, Martha’s response is the most complete and powerful affirmation of the identity of Jesus in the gospel according to John, perhaps in all four gospels. She says, “Yes, Rabbi, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who comes into the world.”
Just a few moments later, Jesus will begin to weep. And a few moments after that, he will pray aloud to God, and call, in a strong voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And Lazarus will come out. Alive. Restored to his family and his friend.
But Martha’s statement is unforgettable. Grieving a brother she loves, confronting a Jesus, a personal friend and rabbi whom she loves, she has put it all on the line. She has made a proclamation that rings out in this gospel, that stands as a statement of complete faith. Throughout all the gospels, Jesus is misunderstood. He is criticized. He is called a blasphemer. In fact, rather than drawing people to him in awe and admiration, Jesus’s raising of Lazarus does show the glory of God…not because Lazarus is alive again. Rather, because this incident hardens the hearts of those who are suspicious of Jesus and causes them to hurry forward with a plan to bring him to his death. In the gospel of John, the glory of God is the moment Jesus is elevated on the cross.
I know. This doesn’t make sense to our modern ears. How can painful, humiliating, bloody crucifixion show the glory of God? I believe it is because crucifixion reveals the love of God in Jesus. We witness our God, willing to come among us, not as an all-powerful warrior in a golden chariot, but as fully human, subject to everything that we are subject to—including death. The glory of God is the limitless love that results in Jesus on the cross.
Jesus was the Resurrection and the Life before he, himself rose from the dead. And resurrection wasn’t limited to him, as God’s revelation on earth. It was a gift he shared with multiple individuals throughout the gospels, just as it remains a promise to those of us whom he loves. In the letter to the Romans, Paul says, “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” (Romans 14:8)
This is a love story. Like Lazarus, like Mary, like Martha, we are all held in the love of God, in the love of Jesus, in the love of the Spirit. It is a love that pursues us all our days. It is a love that reveals itself in small moments of blessing and in great moments of unimaginable joy. It is a love that promises: whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
Thanks be to God. Amen.