The Big Picture: John 11:38-42
Ordinary Time
Sermon series: Jesus Moves
Jesus was deeply disturbed again when he came to the
tomb. It was a cave, and a stone covered the entrance. 39 Jesus
said, “Remove the stone.”
Martha, the sister of the dead man, said, “Lord, the
smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.”
40 Jesus
replied, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believe, you will see God’s
glory?” 41 So they removed the stone. Jesus looked
up and said, “Father, thank you for hearing me. 42 I
know you always hear me. I say this for the benefit of the crowd standing here
so that they will believe that you sent me.” 43 Having
said this, Jesus shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The
dead man came out, his feet bound and his hands tied, and his face covered with
a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”
45 Therefore, many of
the Jews who came with Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him. 46 But
some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. (CEB)
I
have moved, wholesale-all-my-belongings, more than 15 times in my life, so
you’d think I’d be really good at it.
False. For whatever reason, every single time I move
I have this absolute brain shutdown that says surely this time we will have
invented teleportation and I absolutely must make sure I want to keep all my
things into one space before poof, they arrive in the new place. I get completely bogged down in the details
of moving and forget the actuality of, y’know, putting things in boxes in a
timely manner.
My
best friend knows me well and loves me dearly and also has a lot of big
sister energy that takes my detail fixation and pats it gently on the head. When I was getting ready to move here, she
declared she was helping me and, at one point, said to me that she was going to
pack up my kitchen. It would feel like
she was packing all the things I’d actually need in the transition period, she
told me, and “You’re going to feel like it’s too much. You’ll be wrong, but I’m going to listen to
why you feel that way.”
She
did, and I did, and she was right.
(Don’t worry, she knows I’m talking about her today and can listen to
the recording of that on loop.) This is
one small instance of how the gift of her friendship is that she sees what I
can’t, sometimes. I was so overwhelmed
by all that needed to happen in moving that I couldn’t see how I really could
survive without my tofu press for a while; she wasn’t in the thick of it, and
could see that.
We
return to the series of “Jesus Moves” and settle today in the gospel of
John. Today’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus is one
of the more famous miracles in this gospel, or as John calls them,
“signs.” This is the seventh sign in the
gospel of John pointing toward Jesus’ divinity; after changing water into wine,
healing people, feeding 5,000 folks, and walking on water, pushing back death
itself is a pretty intense boss fight.
There’s
a lot of speculation about Jesus’ relationship with Lazarus, but suffice it to
say that they were at least really good friends. In fact, just before today’s pericope—which
just means “chunk of verses,” essentially—is the verse famous for being the
shortest in the Bible but also one of the most impactful: Jesus wept. Jesus cries for the death of his friend,
mourns this loss, and grieves with the surviving sisters that death is a thing
we have to know. Today’s verses start
with Jesus being “deeply disturbed again”—in the Greek, something closer to
“shudders with sadness—because knowing your friend is dead is one thing and
seeing his tomb is entirely another.
Those of us who have lost friends know that a headstone or an urn or a plaque
is a whole different level of real than a phone call. Jesus is probably crying again, standing
outside the tomb where His dear friend is laid.
Lutheran pastor Edward F. Markquart writes that, “Within the Greek
phrase for ‘shudders with sadness,’ there is a connotation of anger, that Jesus
was angry about something, and the scholars in the commentaries ponder what
Jesus was angry about. I know what Jesus
was angry about: he was angry that
Lazarus died too soon, too young, that it hurt deeply.”[1] Jesus was all wrapped up in the whirlwind of
emotion that loss brings.
And
then He says, “Remove the stone.”
One
of the great things about the gospels is that yes, they’re a collection of
stories about holy people and the movements of God embodied but they’re also
filled with such deeply human characters. Martha, ever the practical one, responds
immediately to Jesus, “Seriously bad idea, the stench.” Death is an unpleasant smell, for those of
you who may not have spent time around the bodies of those who have passed, but
death bound up in a cave in the desert for multiple days? No thanks.
That would be nasty and Martha is already grieving. She doesn’t need everyone to be ill on top of
it.
Jesus,
though, insists, and then He looks up.
The Greek here is ἦρεν [eren] from αἴρω [airō], which means “to take
up, lift, raise.” But it also means
to “bear, carry; take away, remove.”[2] This is the same verb that’s used in one of
John’s other signs of Jesus’ divinity, the healing of the man at Bethsaida who
couldn’t walk. “Take up your bed,” Jesus
told the man then, who lifted it up; ἦρεν.[3] It’s the same verb that will be used later in
John to describe Joseph of Arimathea lifting up the body of the crucified Jesus
to bury Him; ἦρεν.[4]
Jesus
is not physically lifting His eyes to the skies with His hands the way He would
a mat or a body because the gospel writers also understood metaphor. But He is making a very deliberate point
about changing His posture, His gaze, looking beyond what’s in front of Him
with the understanding of the weightedness of the gesture. We in the 21st century might miss
it because prayer, for us, is usually either looking down or looking up; for
those of us who grow up around Christianity, especially, we’re taught pretty
early that you close your eyes and bow your head or you raise your hands and
look up at the ceiling. There’s a whole
branch of medieval Christianity dedicated to the physical place in the sky
where God lives, just past a thing called the firmament.
We
believe now that God isn’t in our hands or in the sky, or at least not only there,
but the notion of a thing you revere being literally above you is an old, old
idea. Jesus, stuck in grief and anger
and probably really over the whole “people I love die” concept; Jesus, Who
knows that raising His dead friend casts long shadows toward the death coming
for Him; Jesus, reminded so solidly by Martha of the reality of a mortal body
and the doubt that anything other than gross decay will greet them; Jesus, Who
is standing at a tomb, crying, raises His eyes to His Godself and says,
essentially, help me.
Our
question of the day today is about a time when someone helped you see the
bigger picture, and part of needing that help is realizing that we can get
stuck in the details. Whether it’s me
getting fixated on having all my belongings just so before I move or Jesus’
grief strangling His ability to think on a God-level or your own story of how
seeing beyond what’s right in front of you seemed impossible, we who are built
for community sometimes need to have someone standing far enough outside to
remind us that there is more than this.
Jesus, perhaps, needed to be reminded that there was more than the tomb
filling His vision, the grief filling His heart. So He looked up, and prayed.
“Father,
thank you for hearing me. I know you always hear me. I say this for the benefit
of the crowd standing here so that they will believe that you sent me.”
Remember,
this is the last of John’s signs; he’s writing this story in his ongoing proof
that Jesus was more than a regular man.
Rev. Dr. Melinda Qivik writes, “Jesus knew the presence of God’s power
in that place of grief, and his word of command is the province of utter
confidence that ‘nothing is impossible with God.’ … When Jesus cries, “Lazarus,
come out!” the dead man rises.
“The word
of the Lord is the force that brings life out of death, in the stories of the
bones and of Lazarus. The Lord speaks and it comes to be. The universe and all
that lives came into existence on the power of God’s word…Even when everything
about Lazarus’ death makes it impossible for his sisters and the gathered
friends to imagine he could walk out of the tomb, when Jesus calls to him, he
comes. Resurrection is God’s realm. It is not for a human being.”[5]
It’s a
whole other sermon series to talk about the relationship here between Father
and Son and how Jesus, as both God and man, is talking to some facet of
Himself, but for right now it is enough to say that Jesus was too thickly in
this and needed to raise up, to carry Himself beyond the immediacy of
grief. He needed to take away, to remove
the things that kept Him from seeing that God was at work, was doing great big
things, that Martha’s doubt and the onlookers’ skepticism were not nearly as
powerful as the faith that He would call to Lazarus and Lazarus would appear.
Which, of
course, Lazarus did. “Untie him, and let
him go,” Jesus tells the stunned crowd, and He means the burial clothes wrapped
around His friend’s body but He might also mean how many ways people are going
to look at Lazarus and see only this moment of death-into-life; don’t get stuck
here, lift up your eyes, untie him, let him be more than this event. What freedom God offers us to be more than
one moment, one event, to be more than our grief or even our happiness; to be more,
so much epically more, lifting us up to a whole story of resurrection, of life
beyond measure. What holiness, to remove
the things that make us forget God always hears us, always loves us, is always
nudging us to see glory all around.
Thanks be to God for it, and may we learn to listen for such
possibilities. Amen.
[3]
John 5:9, https://biblehub.com/text/john/5-9.htm
[4]
John 19:38, https://biblehub.com/text/john/19-38.htm
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