John 11:17-27

12/27/09
John 11:17-27
Hudson UMC

We pick up today from where we got to before Advent when Jesus was on His way to Bethany because He was told that His friend Lazarus was sick. We find that, when they got there, Lazarus has been dead for four days. He has been dead long enough that there could be no mistake about it. Jesus had not only not gotten there in time to stop Lazarus from dying, He didn’t even get there in time for the funeral. Jesus arrives on a scene of grief. People have gathered from all over the place to comfort Mary and Martha in the loss of their brother.

We read that when Jesus was coming into town, Martha heard that He was coming and went out to meet Him on the edge of town. She said to Him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” I cannot decide if this is a profession of faith or a critique. On the one hand, it shows us that she believed that Jesus was powerful enough to heal her brother of his sickness. On the other hand, it sounds like she is blaming Jesus for his death. And yet, regardless of how she meant it, she follows it by saying, “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of Him.” This is a very interesting response. I have said periodically that nobody really understood Jesus until after the resurrection and even then, most didn’t have a solid understanding until the Holy Spirit was given to the church. Here is a woman who seems to go against that.

And yet, she still does not quite get it. We cannot look down at her because of this because we live in a time when the Holy Spirit has been given. We have the benefit of hindsight that she cannot have. When Martha thinks about what Jesus has done, when she thinks of the mighty healings He has performed and the miracles He has done, she thinks about Him as a guy who is so in tune with the will of God that God listens to Him more than most people. “I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” And yet, Christ is not simply some guy that God likes to listen to, Christ is indeed the fullness of God in our midst. Jesus does not have to ask God to do something, Jesus’ actions are indeed the actions of God. Jesus is so much more powerful, so much more significant, than Martha gives Him credit for.

Jesus promises Martha that her brother will rise again. She says, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” This is, again, a statement of faith, but one that falls short of what Jesus is trying to explain to her. Martha was aware of the promises of resurrection that were implied in the writings of the prophets. She had been taught all her life that the Lord was the God who raised the dead. She looked forward to the general resurrection of the dead just like she and the other Jews were looking forward to the coming of the Messiah, the chosen one of God.

There is something about hoping for something that is long in the future. Hope for the near future is always being impacted by our current situation. If times are tough, it is hard to find hope for tomorrow. But we cannot live without hope, so we hope for sometime in the distant future. Somehow, the further away the hope is placed, the easier it is to maintain it because it is not as affected by what happens today. If we expect something to happen long after we are gone, nothing bad that happens to us can shake that hope because we did not really expect to play a role in it, anyway.

Martha is certain about the general resurrection on the last day. She has probably believed it all her life and trusted in it without question. However, Jesus is asking her to believe that God does not just raise the dead someday, but today. God does not just impact lives in the future but right now.

Now, Jesus is going to physically raise Lazarus from the dead. It is not a figment of the people’s imagination because Lazarus remains alive, a living witness to the power of Christ. In fact, his life from the dead will annoy the religious leaders to the point that they will want to kill him, too. However, the main point of this passage, as well as the entire Gospel, is that Jesus is the one who brings eternal life, not just in the future, but now. Lazarus was physically raised from the dead, even though the people were not really expecting it, but the real point is that the eternal life that Jesus is promising the people is meant to take place now, not just someday.

Jesus points out to Martha, “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.” If we think about it, what Jesus has just said is that, though Martha thinks that the resurrection is a what, some thing, it is really a who, some one. We have a hard time thinking that something like the resurrection could be not simply a thing or an event, but actually a person. What is the resurrection? It is Jesus, the Son of God made flesh.

The first thing we need to come to terms with if Jesus is the resurrection and the life is that it means that there is not any real resurrection and life outside of Christ. We will not be raised in glory simply because it is in human nature for us to do so. When we are raised, and we will be raised, it is because we are implicated in Christ’s resurrection. It is not our power that will raise us from the dead any more than it was Lazarus’ power that raised him from the dead. God will speak the command to live over the earth and, as the scripture says, the sea will give up its dead and death and Hades will give up the dead that are in them. But the point is that none of us would be raised from the dead unless God had done what He has done by becoming a human being, taking our nature on Himself, healing it from the inside, dying for us and sending the Holy Spirit to take what is Christ’s and make it ours. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. There is no other source of life.

The other thing we need to grasp is that, since Jesus is the resurrection and the life, our resurrection and life are not our own, but Christ’s resurrection and life in us. This is truly good news. After all, it does not take much to look around at the world and realize that, if it were up to us, we would not see much resurrection and life. We see nations going to war with one another over bigotry and commodities like oil. For decades, we lived in the tensions of a cold war that threatened to erupt into the world’s first truly nuclear war that may very well have wiped out all life on this planet. Even at the local and personal level, we see a world that does not have life in itself. We see people who slave away at jobs they hate so they can have fun on the weekend. We see people who would love to get better jobs but can’t either because the economy being what it is or because the necessary education and training is just not available to them. We see people sitting at home hoping to find joy in their television sets and video game systems. We could go on and on, but we live in a sad world, a world where we need the resurrection and life of Christ given to us because we have no life on our own.

And yet, though we have nothing to give in return, this is precisely what God gives to us. We are indeed invited to participate in the very life of God through the Spirit and in Christ. It is an astonishing fact that we, though we are broken by sin and seemingly insignificant in the cosmic view of things, are so beloved by God that God would give His life for us, not just by dying for us but by actually giving divine life to us that we can actually participate in because of what Jesus has done.

One of the major points that Jesus is making by raising Lazarus from the dead is to help us understand that, though the general physical resurrection will not happen until later, there is a sense that a more significant resurrection, a resurrection of our souls from death to life, is available to us right now and we can live the resurrected life today. In fact, we might say that this now resurrection is more difficult because everyone will be bodily raised, but not everyone participates in this realized resurrection. When we are baptized, we are symbolically showing that we have died with Christ and have been raised with Christ. Even when we baptize a baby, it is not simply a cute, baby dedicating service, but a serious service of death and resurrection. When we confirm a young person, as we will in a few weeks, and we remember our baptism, we are remembering that we have already died because Christ has died on our behalf and in our place, but we have not only died. We have also been raised up with Christ and that, because of what God has done and is continuing to do, we will live as resurrected people.

Paul, in his letter to the Colossians, takes this theme and helps us understand it quite well. He writes, “Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory. Therefore consider the members of your earthly body as dead to immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.” We could continue on, but Paul’s point is clear. We have died and our lives are hidden with Christ in God. Christ is our life, so, when Christ is revealed, we also are revealed in glory. Our life is bound up with Christ’s life; our glory is bound up with Christ’s glory; our resurrection is, once again, bound up with Christ’s resurrection.

Though we are most likely to think about this passage and the entire Lazarus narrative as emphasizing the resurrection, Jesus does not just say He is the resurrection but also that He is the life. He says, “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” I don’t know about you, but I used to have some serious issues with this statement. After all, we all know Christians who have been strong in the faith who have died. It is a heartbreaking experience, not because we think that they are utterly lost, but because they have been such a bright light in our lives. I used to wrestle with this passage because I could not reconcile Jesus’ promise that they faithful would never die with my clear experience that the faithful do die.

Over and over again, you have heard me talk about how we cannot think abstractly about God but need to allow what God has actually done shape how we think about everything. When we do this, so many of our interpretational problems disappear. After all, Jesus is the resurrection and the life and He died. He was put to death for our sins. And yet, we do not see Jesus or the apostles finding any kind of contradiction here. The life of God transcends physical death. We can trust and rejoice in the fact that, if the death of Christ could not stop Him from being, in His very person, the resurrection and the life, our deaths cannot stop us from being forever bound up with Christ’s life and resurrection.

So, if we are the people of the resurrection, not just because we follow the one who was raised from the dead, but because we ourselves are bound up with that resurrection, even now, how then shall we live? Paul, in that reading from Colossians, tells us, “Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” In Romans, Paul had been talking about the absolutely radical nature of grace, pointing out that where sin increased, grace increased all the more. He continues by saying, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be! How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed from sin.”

If we are the resurrection people, people who live in Christ who is the resurrection and the life, we can no longer live like people who are dead. We have been made new, God Himself has come to live inside of us through the power of the Holy Spirit, and we have been united to Christ in a powerful and profound way. People who have the life of Christ in them cannot live like those who do not know God. We have been called to a better way of life and we have been empowered to actually live it. All of us together are the body of Christ, so all of us together must join together to encourage one another to press on to fulfill our calling.

So, let us go into the world with joy, knowing that our God has conquered death, has made us into new people, has taken up residence in our hearts to be with us every moment of every day, praying for us, strengthening us, and giving us the life of Christ. The Scriptures ask, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Brothers and sisters, we are the church of God. If God is for us, who can stand against us? Let us be filled with confidence that God will bring His work to completion, for that is precisely what He has promised us. Jesus is the resurrection and the life and so we will never die. This is indeed good news. Let us go from this place and let the world know so they can know the love that we have known. Let us pray.

AMEN