John 11:1-45
Fifth Sunday of Lent: April 10, 2011
We have arrived at the last Sunday of looking at stories from the gospel of John where individuals encounter Jesus. Nicodemus, the woman at the well, the man born blind - each living lives that have taken a toll on them or others.
When these characters meet Jesus, they are in some way given new life. For Nicodemus, Jesus freed him from participating in a religious system based on stale and empty belief that only supported the status quo, a status quo that was destroying the marginalized in the society. For the woman at the well Jesus offered new life by challenging a system that made women perpetually economically vulnerable. For the man born blind, Jesus healed his ailment and restored him to community by challenging a system based on false judgments and blame.
But each person, I would argue, represents more than just themselves: they represent all of those people who have been beaten down by unjust and oppressive systems and institutions. They stand in for people who have been killed by the injustices of this world – literally and spiritually. In each character’s story we are given a chance to see a myriad of people who are victims of their time and culture. And we see Jesus showing us this doesn’t have to be true. Things can change.
It’s good to note that all these stories are unique to this gospel – not in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Part of why that matters is that for John, not only are these stories critical to understanding who Jesus was, but we know that John sees them as all interrelated. One way these stories are connected is that in each one John is writing at multiple levels. And in all of the stories people fail to move beyond the literal level and consequently miss seeing who Jesus is – or rather what Jesus reveals to us about who God is.
Another way our stories are connected is that each of our characters make some sort of statement about believing in Jesus. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, all through John’s gospel the author plays on the word, “belief.” People believe things about Jesus along the way, but some beliefs are better than others. Through the constant irony found in the play on words, and even through humor, we, the reader, are supposed to see the differences of belief, evaluate them, and in the end, we are to find out what constitutes real belief.
Going all the way back to Nicodemus, remember that John is, in part, deriding those whose belief is based solely on having seen the miracles Jesus performed. And, at the end of the gospel, we get the punch line: When the disciples are gathered in the room with the risen Christ, Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not “seen” and yet “believe”.
Belief is at play in our story this morning as well. Today, we have the most extraordinary miracle yet: someone is brought to new life who was not just spiritually or metaphorically dead, but dead, dead. And so we could say that when Lazarus meets Jesus, he is given new life, in a literal sense. But we can’t stop there…or rather we can’t begin there. We can never see only the literal story in the gospel of John. When we read the whole passage, we see that Jesus met some folks along the way to Lazarus. And those people are struggling with belief in Jesus. The stories of what happened to them are just as, or really more, important as the miracle.
Once Jesus comes to the town where Lazarus lived, he first meets Martha, one of Lazarus’ sisters. Martha was a bit angry with Jesus at first; “If you have been here,” she says, “my brother would not have died.” But she believes he is capable of a miracle. He can do anything he sets his mind to: “Even now,” she says, “I know that God will give you whatever you ask.” Martha believed in Jesus, but it was all about the miracles for her. She wants him to come in on his white horse with his super powers and fix everything. She is like so many that believe in Jesus as a super-human, able to fix all that ails us. Unsurprisingly, if we have been paying attention to the gospel of John, by the time Lazarus is raised we will see this belief isn’t enough.
Mary, Lazarus’ other sister, was just plain mad. She echoes her sister: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” But here there is no follow up comment showing her confidence that he can do the miracle. She might have believed something about Jesus before, but the death of her brother has taken that all away. And with no hope whatsoever, it is Mary who mourns most deeply. It’s Mary who doesn’t believe Jesus can bring new life. Lazarus is dead, Lazarus will stay dead.
After Jesus meets these two women, he weeps.
We usually think Jesus was weeping over the death of Lazarus, his friend. But that doesn’t fit the order of the story – John made it clear that Jesus was confident all along that Lazarus would be raised to life. He would have no reason to mourn his death. It is only after he has met Martha and Mary that Jesus was “greatly disturbed,” as the gospel says. And that makes sense to me: He is devastated by Martha and Mary’s response. He knew them, and had high hopes that they would understand. After all, this is, John reminds us, the Mary who we all thought understood. This is the Mary who anointed Jesus with oil and wiped his feet with her hair – arguably the most intimate moment Jesus had with anyone in the gospels. She was the one it seemed knew something the others didn’t about the death and life of Jesus. Yet here, she doesn’t believe at all. She has given up hope and sees only death. And so, Jesus wept.
Finally, we meet the crowds, and their response is just as troubling for Jesus. The crowds, grieving with Mary and certainly not believing in Jesus, inevitably point the way to death; in fact, they invite Jesus to join them on the road to death. “Come and see where we have laid him,” they say. “Come and see.” This is how Jesus called his disciples: “Come and see,” he said to them when he first called them. “Come and see a new life.” And now he was being invited by people he knew, some of whom I assume he loved deeply, to come and see death. Jesus was the walking, breathing, manifestation of life, and they not only couldn’t see that, they invited the resurrection and the life to walk the road to death. Jesus wept.
The belief wasn’t there. But Jesus doesn’t give up. He’s determined to bring them to true belief – to new life. When they get to the tomb, he tells Martha to take away the stone. And here we see her wavering faith: She tells him Lazarus is really, really dead…he has been there rotting for a while. She doesn’t think she should roll away the stone. She too has lost her faith even in the possibility that Jesus can do miracles. And Jesus says to her, “did I not tell you if you believed – truly believed – you would see what life in God is all about.”
Curiosity must have gotten the best of the folks there that day –because they eventually rolled away the stone. And now Jesus meets Lazarus. In this encounter, we don’t get to know what Lazarus thinks or feels or believes; we know only that he was dead and then alive. What we get to know is what Jesus does in this encounter: First he prays to God so that everyone knows that what they are about to see is from God – what they are about to see is an example of how God operates in this world. God brings life in death filled places. Then, he calls Lazarus out. And lo, and behold, Lazarus walks out of the tomb. Another miracle! He’s done many by this time, but this is a biggie. He raised someone from the dead. And all those there – those who didn’t believe Jesus could do anything – they all, we’re told believed because of it. “Many had seen what Jesus did” John writes, “and so they believed.
But here’s the catch – and really, let’s be honest, there’s always a catch with John. Jesus didn’t stop at the miracle. That’s not where he stops, and that’s not where belief can stop. After he called Lazarus from the tomb, he gives a very clear instruction to everyone gathered there. “Unbind him.” All along, John tells the reader over and over, believing because of seeing what Jesus did was not enough. The people gathered at the tomb that day saw what Jesus did, but they didn’t hear what he said. And in that lies all the difference in what it means to believe.
Jesus brought new life – new possibilities in the midst of death and despair. But it doesn’t end there. Lazarus is still bound – more must be done before he is truly free. Lazarus is the culmination - he is all the other characters wrapped into one. Nicodemus stands by Lazarus at the tomb – though freed from his own oppressive way of understanding religion, he is now dependent on a whole community of people changing their ways if he is to be accepted. The woman stands at the tomb with Lazarus. She’s been shown a new possibility by Jesus – a life where women treated as equals – yet she faces a culture entrenched in its old ways. The man born blind can see more clearly that there is not blame or shame in who he is, yet no one believes him and in the end he remains an outcast. All three have been raised to new life by Jesus, but remain bound until the people unbind them.
Lazarus represents all the people who have been pushed into despair because of things that keep them bound. He represents all who are alive in the flesh but are victims of death-dealing systems. He represents the dead person walking. Jesus tells them that their belief, which was a trusting in Jesus to make everything better through miracles and signs, was creating a world of dead people walking.
Belief can’t be a passive act – it can’t stop at assertions about how great Jesus was – that he was God, that he was the savior, that he was a miracle worker. We need to move beyond that. If we don’t, we will be left looking for the next miracle, and we’ll leave people bound in their bands of cloth at the tomb. Belief is joining with God in the act of bringing people to life.
Anna Carter Florance, a theologian and preacher, wrote beautifully about this passage: She says, God raises the dead, but we are the ones who have to unbind them. God calls us out of our tombs, but we are the ones who have to let one another go free. And then she asks,
“How many resurrections have you witnessed that have failed because the resurrected one could never undo all those bandages by herself?
How many times have you seen a miraculous recovery turn into a relapse because the community didn’t do its part to let the recovering one “break free” of the old patters and habits that kept him in bondage?
How many times have you seen someone finally get a new start, a new job, that turns into a dead end because of a boss’ inflexibility or a market that always hurts the most vulnerable.
How many times have you seen someone freed from prison only to go right back in because people can’t stop blaming people for their problems so won’t lend that helping hand?
There’s nothing more tragic than a miraculously resurrected human being – one who has been touched by the divine grace and power of God – who trips and suffocates on her own bandages.
The gift of new life – of new possibilities – given to us in the life of Jesus is extraordinary. But if all we do is stand back and marvel and never live into those possibilities, we will leave people at the tomb, unable to move.
Jesus showed us with his earthly life a way that is possible – that changes people’s lives by challenging those things that keep them down. But he is on the way to the cross. He will die. The resurrection is in our living. It’s in entrusting our lives to Jesus and walking in his way. Unbind him he says. We have to take away the bands of cloth. We have to trust that new life is possible and then do our part to bring it about. That’s what it means to believe in Jesus. Amen.
