Personal Jesus
John 11:1-45
If it’s Sunday, it must be a chapter-long reading from the Gospel of John. This week Jesus visits the home of the sisters Martha and Mary. This is the same Martha and Mary, who Luke tells us, welcome Jesus into their home but have rather different ways of showing hospitality. Martha busies herself with all the chores while Mary makes like a disciple and sits at Jesus’ feet listening to him talk, much to the annoyance of her sister. That story is not found in John, but in this Gospel we’re told that the two sisters also have a brother, Lazarus.
Jesus appears to be quite close to all three siblings, such that when Lazarus falls ill, the sisters send word to Jesus, apparently hoping that he will come visit. The message reads, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” The Gospels were all written in Greek. The Greek language has several words to convey love. There’s a word for romantic love, a word for love between family members or friends, and another word for Christian love, i.e., a love that is not grounded in attraction or association of any kind but merely in a shared humanity.
You might think that because it’s Jesus who loves, the Gospel writer would use the word for Christian love, but he doesn’t. Jesus is said to love Lazarus like a brother, like a friend. This is not an abstract love. Think of your close friends. You grew up together, or you went to college together, or you worked together, or you lived in the same neighborhood. You have shared experiences and memories. Birthday parties, picnics, graduations, weddings, funerals.
That is what Jesus has with his friend Lazarus. True, John doesn’t tell us anything about the nature of their friendship, like how they met, whether they went fishing together, or if they had the same sense of humor. Nevertheless they are friends in the same way that you are with your friends and that I am with my friends. Jesus and Lazarus are close enough that when Lazarus becomes seriously ill, Martha and Mary send an urgent message to Jesus: “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” In other words, come quickly!
But Jesus doesn’t come quickly. He stays right where he is for another two days! Only then does he leave for Bethany. What is going on here? I thought Jesus and Lazarus were friends? Why would Jesus not immediately rush to the need of a friend?
We’re not the only ones scratching our heads. The disciples want to know why Jesus would even entertain the thought of returning to Judea when the last time he was there (as described in chapter 10) some of his fellow Jews were prepared to stone him to death because he claimed to be one with God.
In all fairness, claiming to be one with God is outrageous. The only reason that those words on Jesus’ lips don’t sound outrageous to us is that we know how the story ends. We know that Jesus is who he says he is. But in his day, no one knew that, not even his disciples. In fact, they don’t even pick up on Jesus’ metaphor of sleep for death. They think that Lazarus is literally sleeping.
By the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been dead for four days. Before he even reaches the home of Martha and Mary, Martha comes out to meet him. She wants to tell him something. Something that can’t wait. Something that she has been welling up inside her for the past four days. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
How does she say the words? With anger? With anguish? With despondency in her voice? However she says it, Martha is expressing a sentiment that is shared among many who are mourning the death of Lazarus, including her sister Mary. When Mary comes out to speak to Jesus, she echoes her sister word for word: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Back at the house, even the other mourners, who may not know Jesus personally as do the sisters, but who have clearly heard of his reputation, openly wonder, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
One thing shown by these sentiments from Martha, Mary, and the community that consoles them is that their tears of lament are drawn from the well of faith. Martha and Mary believe that if Jesus had shown up in time, then their brother would still be alive. The people who witnessed Jesus open the eyes of the man born blind believe that he could have kept Lazarus from dying. Even with her brother’s death, Martha still believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. No one in this passage lacks faith. Their continued faith in Jesus even in the midst of death is remarkable. What they’re wondering is, if Jesus had the power to keep Lazarus from dying, why didn’t he?
This is a question you may have asked yourself at some point in the wake of a death, a dreaded diagnosis, or a divorce. “Lord, why did you not show up when I needed you?” “Why did you keep me waiting?” “Why did you not answer my prayer?”
Or maybe you didn’t want to give voice to such questions because you thought they might suggest a lack of faith. “Christians shouldn’t question God’s will” is a lesson that many of us have learned in church, either implicitly or explicitly. “Everything happens for a reason” is a familiar refrain shared by many well-meaning believers to people who are suffering.
But God does not need to be protected from our questions. God does not need a defense attorney, even though some Christians regard any questioning as an attack on God’s character. Jesus is not offended or threatened by Martha’s and Mary’s lament. He doesn’t chastise them. He doesn’t say, “How dare you question me? Don’t you know who I am?”
Nor is he stoic and above it all, as may have seemed the case at first when he told the disciples that Lazarus’s illness was for God’s glory. That’s fine for God, but what about Martha and Mary? What about Lazarus?
As I’ve said before, it’s easy to misread the Gospel of John if you don’t look beyond the surface of the text. But if we take a closer look, we see that far from being indifferent to Martha and Mary’s grief, Jesus shares in it. When Mary leaves the house to meet Jesus, everyone who was in the house consoling her follows her out the door because they think that she is headed to the tomb where her brother lies.
There’s something deeply moving about this community that clings together so tightly, that literally accompanies Mary in her grief. But Mary is not going to the tomb; she is going to see Jesus, and when she does, she kneels at his feet and says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” If Martha’s delivery of those words is open to interpretation—perhaps we hear anger, anguish, or forlorn hope—the fact that Mary falls at Jesus’ feet removes anger from the equation. She is broken. And seeing her brokenness before him, Jesus’ own heart breaks.
Listen again to how John describes the scene. “When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Jesus is so disturbed and moved that he begins to weep. He weeps to such an extent that people take note of it. “See how he loved him,” they say. Jesus weeps. He weeps for Martha and Mary who have lost a brother. He weeps for this community in mourning that has lost one of its own. He weeps for himself, mourning the death of his beloved friend.
But Jesus has not come to Bethany solely to mourn. He has not come just to pay his respects or to console the family of Lazarus. He has not come to deliver a eulogy. He has come to raise the dead. And no one—not Martha, not Mary, not any of the disciples—could have ever imagined that this was in the realm of possibility, because it wasn’t. Lazarus has been dead for four days!
Death was final. Death always got the last word. Until it didn’t. Until in the face of death Jesus declared, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
While Martha and Mary and many of the gathered mourners all believe that Jesus had the power to prevent Lazarus’s death, no one dared imagine that Jesus could resurrect him because that wasn’t a thing that happened. Death was final. Death always got the last word.
Until it didn’t.
Until in the face of death Jesus declared, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
This is one of seven “I am” sayings in the Gospel of John. Of the seven, it’s the one that best reveals the full nature of Jesus’ love—a love that descends into the valley of death. Jesus walks that lonesome valley not because he loves in some abstract sense, but because he loves you.
When I was leading the English ministry of the church in South Korea, one of our regular members was a woman from Finland. Maria was her name. Maria shared once in Bible study her belief that even if she were the only person in the world, Jesus still would have been crucified and raised just for her. I really like that idea because it underscores just how personal Christ’s death and resurrection is. Jesus does not die for some abstract idea like freedom, as does the main character in the movie Braveheart. He dies for those he considers his friends. Later in the Gospel of John Jesus will say to the disciples, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Jesus lays down his life for his friends. Friends like Peter, James, and John. Friends like Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Friends like you and me. Not only does he lay down his life, he is raised to new life. In his resurrection, Jesus shows that death has lost its hold on him, and on us. What no one gathered there outside Lazarus’s tomb could have foreseen was that Jesus had not come to delay death, he came to defeat it…and one day he will come again…to destroy it entirely.