Pay Attention!
Why did Jesus stay away? Why did he stay away from Lazarus's house when he learned that Lazarus was sick? Was he careless? Was he cruel? Was he showing off? Why the cryptic language about what he was doing? “This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God.” “Lazarus is dead; and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.”
At first reading it sounds as though Jesus might've played a cruel trick on his good friends Lazarus, Mary and Martha. It sounds as though he used them-- “oh, here's a dead person I can raise back to life. Watch this; this is going to be great!” Does that sound like the Jesus we know? No, it doesn't. I don't think that's what he was doing.
When we look a little closer at this text, it seems to contain a lot of little details about the timing and geography of this event. It suggests to me that Jesus was well aware that he was going to go to Jerusalem and do it soon. And he knew darn well what was going to happen to him when he did. He's thinking quite a lot about his disciples: Are they ready to be on their own? Do they understand who Jesus is and what they're supposed to do? Jesus has to be wondering--Are the disciples going to freak out? Are they going to run away? Are they going to assume that the mission is all over and there's nothing left for them to do but go back to fishing?
Jesus is thinking about these things as well as other aspects of his showdown in Jerusalem when he discovers a way to give his disciples some timely experience with life and death; an opportunity to see for themselves that death is not the final word. Jesus wanted them to see a stone rolled away from a tomb door and the dead raised. Lazarus presented Jesus with that opportunity.
Jesus talks to Martha about her faith in him. He talks to his disciples about their faith in him. At first glance it sounds as if he's talking about their faith in his ability to raise Lazarus. Instead I believe he's talking about their faith – or not-- in Jesus' ability to rise from the dead himself.
Why does Jesus grieve just before he raises Lazarus? Doesn't that seem odd? He knows Lazarus isn't going to stay dead. But he's looking around and seeing Mary and Martha grieving, their friends from the city grieving (some of whom Jesus must've known), and he sees his own disciples grieving – because certainly they had met Lazarus and his family before. Jesus cries when he sees how these dear ones will grieve for him.
How could Jesus have made this lesson any clearer? In both cases, Lazarus and Jesus, there was mourning and crying. In both cases there was a body in a grave for days. In both cases there was a cave to serve as a tomb, with a stone rolled in front of the entrance.
It doesn't appear that anyone received the intended message, namely, that if Jesus raised Lazarus surely he could rise too. No one got it. But, honestly, I can't say that I blame them. I've heard about resurrection all my life, but for the people there – Jesus' disciples and all the folks in Bethany – they'd never heard of such a thing before Lazarus. And death is hard. You can't expect someone experiencing the death of a loved one to believe and trust and hope for something as strange and new as the defeat of death. I believe Jesus knew that. That – in part-- is why he cried, because he saw that despite all that he'd said and done, when it was his time to die, his friends and followers would assume that death had won, and they would cry.
We're no different. We tell each other the stories of Lazarus' and of Jesus' death and resurrection year after year, from generation to generation-- because we need to hear it, as often as we can-- because the idea of life after death still strikes us as...dubious.
What happens if we don't keep ourselves immersed in these stories? What happens if we don't teach them to our children? What happens if we don't pay attention? Then pretty soon we start to lose our familiarity with the idea of life after death. It's hard enough as it is, to keep ahold of that idea.
You know, this event, the raising of Lazarus, is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Up to this point, Jesus' popularity grows, his enemies get more upset, his miracles become more pronounced, he popularity grows, his enemies get more upset... but Jesus crosses a line here. When Jesus displays power over death his enemies stop just talking about Jesus and start putting a plot into play. This was just too much.
- Raising up the status of children was bad;
- raising up the status of foreigners was bad;
- raising up the status of women was worse;
- saying that he was the doorway to God and not the Temple and its priests – that was a frontal attack against them; that's bad!
But raising the dead? Really? Erasing the lines between life and death changes everything. It's too much. The priests have nothing like this. This makes the priests... irrelevant. Who is going to care about sacrifices in the temple when one with god-like power is walking around the suburbs? Who knows, maybe people will even turn on the priests! They never gave the people hope! They never raised the dead! Someone with the power of life over death could defeat the whole Roman Empire. Keep in mind that in the Gospel of John, Jesus is killed just before Passover. The Lamb of God is killed while the priests are killing the Passover lambs. It's all part of their plot to avoid a riot during Passover.
What they didn't know was that Jesus was bigger than Passover, bigger than the Temple culture, bigger than the Roman Empire. What they didn't know is that Jesus was the Christ, Israel's God-with-us, the long-awaited Messiah.
But we know. And knowing that we have hope in which to die. And just as amazing... hope in which to live.
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