John 11:1-16

11/22/09
John 11:1-16
Hudson UMC

One of the advantages of going through a single book of the Bible over an extended period of time is that the preacher doesn’t get to only choose their favorite passages and forget the rest of them. On the other hand, it requires the preacher to come to terms with passages that he or she might find difficult to preach on. This morning’s text is just such a passage.

Basically, the problem is that the story about Lazarus is far too long to fit into a single sermon. In fact, in the end, we are going to spend three or four weeks looking at this one story. What complicates things a little more is that we have Advent starting next week and we will be taking a break from John. We won’t get to the end of the narrative until most of the way through January. Our passage today tells us that Lazarus is dying but we won’t know finally what happens to him for a long time. And yet, the fact that this text falls on this particular Sunday can serve as a kind of symbol that helps us to get our minds ready for Advent.

Before the Son of God became incarnate and lived among us as the man Jesus, the world was in a sad state. Pagan cultures invented any kind of God they felt like; the philosophers looked down their noses at the common people and defined God according to their own understanding of logic and necessity. Even the people of God, the Israelites, were finding themselves trying to please God by working really hard, which is not how God told them to respond to Him. The Roman government had control over most of the known world, ruling with an iron fist, and guerilla warfare was fairly common. It is as if the world as a whole was dying and needed God to come and lead it into resurrection.

The story of Lazarus has fascinated the Western world, both religious and secular. When I think back on popular culture during my life, I feel that Lazarus coming back from the dead was more of a theme than Jesus doing so. Maybe it is because we feel more like we can relate to an ordinary person resuscitated back into the same life he lived before than we can with someone who was both God and man who was resurrected in glory. Maybe it is because Jesus has so much other significance that we can focus on just one element with Lazarus. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that lots of people know the story of Lazarus, even if they haven’t spent much time with the actual story.

The passage begins innocently enough. “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha…So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’” So far, so good. People who know how much Jesus loves their brother send a message to let Him know. After all, He has healed many other people, why could He not heal Lazarus, too? Their action is totally understandable and we see nothing wrong with it. What is interesting, and perhaps even troubling, is what Jesus says and does in response. “But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘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.’ Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

This might bother us. We are told that Jesus loves these people, yet He does not drop everything and go to them. We might feel more comforted because the text portrays this delay as unfortunate. “Though Jesus loved them…he stayed two more days.” But, you know what? There is a problem with the way the New Revised Standard Version reads at this point, because it is not quite what the Greek says. Now, the Greek reads this way. “But Jesus loved them…therefore he stayed two more days.” This seems to put the shoe on the other foot, does it not? What seemed at first to be a regrettable delay has turned into something that Jesus has done deliberately, not in spite of the love He has toward them, but because of it. What in the world can we make of this?

There are a few translations that soften the reading like the NRSV does, but there are a few that are more faithful to the original. I think what has happened is that the translators didn’t want Jesus to come off in a harsh way. Perhaps they wanted to soften the language here, to make Jesus seem more compassionate. Whether that was what they were thinking or not, I think that most people would rather have it like it is in the pew Bibles. However, that kind of reading causes a different problem. According to the original, Jesus did what He did because of His great love for Martha, Mary and Lazarus. Even if we do not understand it, or wish He would have done it differently, the root cause is still love. If we insist on changing the text so it says, “Though Jesus loved them,” we end up portraying Jesus as nothing more than another person who is bound by the fortunes of the moment, swept along without a say in what happens, an unfortunate person who can be hindered from doing the good he wants to do because of other pressing concerns. Once we begin to see Jesus in this light, forget the power of prayer, because a God that can be held up in spite of the love He has for us may not be able to respond to our prayer. Though it seems more harsh to stay away from the dying man and his family because of love, it is what John is saying. It now remains for us to come to terms with it.

I think that we need to allow Jesus to redefine how we think about the love of God, because if we allow the culture to tell us that love is nothing more than a passionate feeling that is fickle and fleeting that can come and go, often without warning, we will completely miss how Jesus and the New Testament talk about love. If we look at love from a secular point of view, we can make no sense of Jesus delaying His trip to Bethany because of love; it would simply make no sense whatsoever. And yet, this is precisely what He does. How can this delay be a display of love?

Another thing that might give us a hard time is something that Jesus says at the beginning of the passage. As soon as He is told that Lazarus was sick, what does He say? He says, “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.” This is a problem because, just a few verses later, we read the following. Jesus “told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’” This is some good advice. If you are sick, one of the best things you can do is get some rest. Even in our modern age of antibiotics and incredible medicine, one of the most important things that we need to do when we are sick is rest. And yet, the problem was not really that Lazarus was sick. It was so much more serious. “Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead.’”

I can imagine the shock felt by the disciples. “What’s the big deal, Jesus? You said that this illness would not lead to death, and now you tell us that he has died? Why in the world did we wait for two more days? If we left right away, maybe we could have stopped him from dying.” We read this and our first thoughts might be that Jesus is either a liar or perhaps not as powerful as He seems. After all, if He can be wrong about something as serious as this, how can we listen to Him with faith?

The first thing I want to point out is that, even if we want to blame Jesus for staying, we really can’t. Remember, Jesus stayed for two days before He left to go to Bethany. If we peek ahead to the very next verse after our passage, we find that, when Jesus and the disciples got there, Lazarus had already been dead and in the tomb for four days. Even if Jesus left right away, Lazarus would have still died two days before they got there. I wonder if John included this bit of information to help us realize that we are not always the best judge of what is going on. We get upset when God does something that seems out of line, but we do not always realize what God knows, that there is more to the situation that meets the eye. Jesus knew what the disciples, Mary and Martha did not, that Lazarus would be dead before they got there, regardless of when they left. Nobody but Jesus knew just how dire the situation was.

The next thing I want to point out is how this text has been traditionally interpreted. The great tradition of the church understands this text as a key moment in Jesus’ earthly ministry. It is very important that Jesus waited until Lazarus had died before showing up; not only is it important in general and to the people at the time, it is important for us that Lazarus died. If Lazarus had not yet died, Jesus would have healed him and he would have gone about his life like so many other people that Jesus healed. If that had happened, we would know that Jesus was a great healer, but we would never know that His lordship extended not only over disease, but even over death.

This is important for us as Christians, because we, though we have a hope that others cannot have in the face of death, death is still our enemy. The Bible never portrays death as some noble quest that is simply part of life and, therefore, is not really all that bad. No, the Christian Scriptures consistently portray death as fundamentally unnatural. Death was not part of God’s original intention for creation. Only when, through the fall, all of creation was implicated in the sin of humanity did death enter into our midst. In the history of the world, only two human beings ever escaped death, Enoch and Elijah, and there have been many that believe that even these will endure death before Jesus returns and recreates the heavens and the earth.

Death frightens us. We do not want to think about our own mortality. We see it, correctly, as our enemy, the force that takes our loved ones away from us and causes untold grief. Indeed, even our Lord Himself is not untouched by the sorrow of human loss. We will read, before this story of Lazarus is over, that Jesus stood by his grave and wept.

It is in light of this story and others like it that we see the love of God and the power of God shown to us more clearly than other places. We begin to see that, though we are afraid of death, God is not. While we shrink back in fear before the power of death to destroy, God approaches it boldly. When Jesus goes to bring Lazarus back from the dead, He was putting His own life on the line, willingly going back among the people who wanted to kill Him. Jesus was going to go head-to-head with death to fight for the life of His friend, and He was going to win. This is what Jesus meant when He said that the illness does not lead to death. He did not mean that Lazarus would not die, but that death would not have the final word for him.

Jesus shows us that, when death ravages us and the ones we love, it does not mean that God does not love us. God loves us more than we know, though He might seem far from us at any given moment. Indeed, we see that God is not afraid of death even more clearly when we see Jesus willingly go to His own death on the cross. Because of what Jesus has done, we realize that God is not unafraid of death because He doesn’t have to go through it, but precisely because He did. When we lose loved ones and even when we face our own deaths ourselves, we can cry out to God, knowing that God does not simply have compassion on us, but really knows what it is like, both to lose friends and family, and even to go through the trial of death Himself.

So, what do we learn from this passage? We learn, that is, we are reminded, since we have already heard this earlier in John, that Jesus is Lord, even over death. He is the one who lays His life down and takes it back up again. He is the one who promises that we will share in His resurrection. He is the one who, despite the fact that Lazarus has died, will return him to his family. Our God is Lord, even over our deaths and will one day deliver us from them, first, by giving us hope and strength in the time of trial, but also by resurrecting us in glory so that we might live and reign with Him forever and ever.

So, seeing that our lives are not finally in our own hands, but in the hands of God, who is far wiser and stronger than we are, let us let this impact the way we live our lives. Jesus told His disciples, who were worried that they might die, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world.” It will do us no good to look forward and fear our death and worry about it. After all, Jesus, in His sermon on the mount, asked, “Who of you by being worried can add a single hour to your life?” Our job as Christians is not to dwell on the things that we cannot control and that God has promised to transform into glory. Our job is to use the time that God has given us so that we might help others see the greatness of God. Our Lord has shown that He can be trusted, even in our moments of deepest despair. So, as we enter into the season of Advent, let us rejoice that the infinite God of the universe has been willing even to come to us. Let us pray.

AMEN