John 11:1 - 45
This last week I have found myself
getting pretty upset with God. If this virus ends up injuring
someone I love, or disrupting society so much that people will be
roaming around in gangs stealing toilet paper from senior citizens,
or our life savings will be wiped out and we will have to move in
with our kids, whose life savings will probably also be wiped out --
well, you get the idea. And I’m kind of mad at God for a situation
in which we can’t go to church, can’t celebrate weddings or
funerals or even the Easter services that bring our worshiping
communities together. And between you and I, I’m upset with God
that I can’t receive Holy Communion. So I say, along with lots of
other people, “Why, God? Why are you doing this to us?”
Today we just heard the story of the
Raising of Lazarus. I think the story might help us if you, like me,
are wondering why God doesn’t seem to be answering our prayers.
Jesus is informed of a tragedy
waiting to happen. He does not seem alarmed, even when he tells his
disciples that Lazarus has died. I’m pretty sure the apostles
wondered why Jesus hadn’t dropped everything and rushed to the home
of his dear friends, Lazarus and his sisters. After all, that’s
what people do, especially if they can help. And they will especially
do it for the ones they love.
That’s what Martha says, as she
meets him at the edge of the village. “If you had been here, our
brother would not have died!” If God was really in charge, he would
have kept Lazarus from dying. After all, dying is about the worst
thing that could happen to someone. And Jesus tells her in a calm
voice, “your brother will rise”. Martha, being of the Pharisee
persuasion, agrees. I know he will rise on the last day, but that
doesn’t help now, does it?
Mary then spots Jesus, runs out and
falls at his feet, and says the exact same thing, “If you had been
here, our brother would not have died!” Now maybe I’m taking
liberties here, because I see Martha being very human, shaking her
fist in Jesus’ face. I don’t blame her for being angry. Mary,
on the other hand, is on her knees. And Jesus reacts very
differently, He becomes perturbed, deeply troubled, and he wept.
That’s the part that’s so hard to understand about this story.
Why did he become troubled and disturbed and weep? Is it all a sham,
is it something to make the forthcoming miracle even more dramatic?
Does it tell us something about God and human tragedy?
When Jesus weeps, he shows us that our
sorrow is also God’s sorrow. We do not have a God who sits in
heaven watching everything happen without a care; his grief is as
great as, or greater than our own. As the Good Thief found out, God
is right up on that cross next to our own. In our current crisis,
God is with us. Emmanuel.
When Jesus weeps, he reminds us that
there are times when words cannot help, It’s a lesson we need to
learn over and over again, because we all keep forgetting it.
Sometimes the only response to someone else’s tragedy is to simply
weep with them. When you turn on the news or go to your favorite
news sources, someone is always talking,speculating, blaming,
criticizing, or second-guessing; and someone else answers back. And
neither really knows what they are talking about.
When Jesus weeps, he grieves for what
is lost. Lazarus will be restored, of course, but not to the way
things were. He will suddenly be a cause for disruption in his
peaceful village. There will be those who will rush back to church,
so impressed by this obvious miracle. There will be those who will
want to kill him, as we learn later in John’s gospel, because his
very existence is a threat to their way of life, their power, their
legitimacy. And there will be those who will decide it was all a
trick to make Jesus into some kind of God, and they will blame
Lazarus for going along with this ruse. Lazarus has definitely lost
something, even though he is raised from the dead. Jesus loses
something as well when he is resurrected; he bears the marks of the
nails on his hands and of the sword on his side, for all eternity.
And when we get through this terrible trial, we all will have lost
something.
The climax of the story is that it
shows us how God works. God does not make decisions about who he
will heal and who he will not. We are invited to pray for healing
and for other good things. God may choose to answer our prayers.
But in the story of Lazarus, we see God working in his usual way,
where he always redeems our suffering afterward. In the miracles
described in John’s gospel, you can see that thread running through
them. The healings that take place are healings of people who have
been suffering, sometimes for a very long time, like the crippled man
waiting by the pool of Bethesda, or the healing of the man born
blind. Lazarus tells us that God even redeems the suffering after
death. And the mystery of the Cross simply universalizes this theme.
Does that console me? Do I cease being angry with God? It may be
that I am still angry, because I’m human, and his ways are not my
ways. But in the end, it comes down to faith. He has shown us how
he works. The cross could not be clearer. It is now up to you and
I to believe that God is with us, suffering with us, precisely so
that our suffering can be redeemed.
