Sermon: The Rest of the Story – Fifth Sunday in Lent (John 11: 1-45)

I saw a play recently, it was called, simply, Home. It told the story of a young black man and his journey living through America in the middle of the 20^th century. As you can imagine for a man living in the segregated south in the 1950s, and living through the Vietnam War, his life was not easy and he faced many difficulties and injustices. His friends and family would tell him to keep the faith and pray to God for help. However, as his struggles continued, he would respond by saying, “God’s not answering his calls right now. He’s out of the office. In Miami on vacation.” At the end of the show, when some of Cephus’ struggles resolve and he receives a life changing gift that brings the story to a happy ending, he exclaims to the audience, “I guess God is back from Miami!”

The line always got a chuckle out of me. I had never thought of God going on vacation before, but the sentiment was relatable. Have you ever felt like God was on vacation? Perhaps there was a time when you were struggling, when it felt like life was throwing everything it had at you. Maybe you prayed and prayed but things remained difficult, and it felt like those prayers went unanswered. Was God in Miami? Maybe. At times, I’m sure that seems like as good an answer as any for people who look around at all the pain and suffering in the world and ask themselves, “why isn’t God doing something about that?” Maybe God is on vacation.

This is also a question that comes up in the Bible, including several occasions in our text for this morning. The story of the death and resurrection of Jesus’s friend Lazarus is one of the great miracle stories in the Gospels. It is an example of God, in and through Christ, intervening to offer help in a time of tragedy. Yet, it also includes characters wrestling with doubt. The whole story takes up the first 44 verses of John 11, which was the Lectionary reading for today. What we shared a moment ago were selections from this story. In those selected verses we highlighted the occasions when someone confronted Jesus with the question, “Why didn’t you help Lazarus before he died?”

Everyone in this text wants to know why Jesus didn’t prevent Lazarus’s death. Or why Jesus waited days before he went to see Lazarus’s family. His behavior doesn’t make sense to people. Lazarus was sick, and people knew that Jesus had a reputation for healing the sick. He should have been able to do something. He wasn’t in Miami; he was just down the road on his way to Judea. It doesn’t happen, though. Lazarus gets sick and passes on, and Jesus waits. All he offers by way of explanation is to say, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for Gods glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

So, for the purposes of John’s gospel, he died so that Jesus could resurrect him, and reveal God at work in the world, even in the face of Earthly death. Furthermore, it foreshadows Jesus’s own death and resurrection, showing that the knowledge and power that Jesus has is the reason he goes so calmly and confidently toward his own death. This all makes sense to those of us who read and study the Bible. Makes sense in a literary way, makes sense with John’s theology. However, some might struggle to make sense of it on a personal level, when you think about those affected. Lazarus still experienced illness and death. His family and friends, including Jesus, mourned. This story may be about the revelation of the power of God in Christ, and a foreshadowing of Jesus’s death, but even so, it’s fair to wonder about Lazarus. Did he have to die? Was he a pawn of some kind, used to make a point? Can even Jesus get away with saying that this tragedy was so that God could be glorified in bringing him back?

All questions worth wrestling with when we read Bible stories like this one. That’s because when life gets tough, and we are faced with tragedy, like the unexpected and untimely death of a loved one, we are faced with other questions, like “why did God let this happen?” “Why didn’t Jesus work a miracle?” And when faced with those questions, and the life struggles that accompany them we start to wrack our brains for answers. We turn to texts like this, and see Jesus’s explanation for his inaction and odd behavior. In the face of doubt and pain we might take Jesus’s answer at face value. This tragedy must have happened so that God could be glorified. My loved one may have died, but Jesus will raise them again. Whatever that means, whatever that might look like. So, we begin to get that idea that God has a purpose and plan in all this suffering.

As a pastor, I have to keep in mind that this is not always helpful theology to those who are suffering, oppressed, in pain, or facing loss. Still, we dole it out sometimes because we’re not sure what else to say. But also, because we have some form of belief in it. We believe that God is good all the time, and all the time God is good. So, like the characters in that play I saw, we encourage more and stronger belief as the remedy for suffering and loss. Because we believe in the goodness of God, God doesn’t just go to Miami on vacation. So just believe like I do. Believe in God and things will turn around. Believe in Jesus and be healed.

The thing is, belief isn’t always at issue. We see that in the Lazarus story. Belief in Jesus wasn’t the problem. Belief in the resurrection of the dead wasn’t the problem. We can see in this story that people believe that Jesus is special, and is able to do special things. On three occasions people ask Jesus directly or wonder aloud, “Why didn’t you heal Lazarus and save his life?” He gets this question from Lazarus’s sisters, first Martha and then Mary, and this question is asked by a group of people in town. They believe, that is why they are expecting more from Jesus in this moment. Martha even declares belief in the resurrection of the dead. When she makes that statement, Martha is referencing an apocalyptic belief of the time. That the body would die, one would cease to be, and then there would be resurrection “on the last day.” On a more cosmic scale this meant that the old world, the present world, would have to be destroyed and end so that the new world could come and take its place. That was most likely her apocalyptic belief.

Belief wasn’t the problem. Martha and the others in her village had belief, and they believed that Jesus fit into this worldview. The problem was their understanding of Jesus. At least according to the author of John. They believed in Jesus, yes, but Jesus wasn’t doing what they expected him to do. He had his own way of doing things that aligned with a different vision of death and rebirth and eternity. Many of the people in this story react the way they do because their belief about death scares them. Death is very final. The body and the soul are a unit, inseparable. The soul does not float away to heaven when the body dies. The end of the body is the end for the individual. Until the last day when the world ends and God raises the dead back to life. So, Martha believes that her brother is dead, and that when he is raised back to life it will not be until the “last day.” If Jesus was going to save him it would have had to happen before Lazarus’ death. Jesus, however, is about to reveal something new about death.

That something new is the Gospel of John’s understanding of what the idea of eternal life means. For John, this idea of eternal life comes from a combination of traditional Hebrew beliefs, such those expressed here by Martha to Jesus, mixed in with some Ancient Greek philosophy. In John’s worldview our existence is not made up of beginnings and endings. Just because the body dies it does not mean that the self also dies. Things continue on. We travel through this life for a time, and then God removes us to a new path of existence, or state of being.

Maybe this is why Jesus seems so unworried in the face of Lazarus’s death. He knows that death does not have the final say in our relationship with God. Lazarus had not blinked out of existence when his body gave out. There was more going on there. So, Jesus’s decision to respond by waiting two days to go to Lazarus’s family may seem inhumane at first. That’s because it is. Not inhumane in a cruel way, but inhumane in the sense that God is beyond human understanding. So, the Christ who has come to teach and reveal this God may also be beyond understanding at times. Jesus explains this in a section of the story I did not include in our reading this morning, so I offer it to you now. The rest of the story, Jesus’s response to Martha, in John 11:25-26. “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Now, you may have noticed, Jesus says the word “believe” a lot in that statement. And maybe you noticed, and hopefully remember, earlier in the sermon when I said that the issue facing us was not belief. That may require some clarification, then. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  What does it mean to believe a statement like that? According to Ron Allen and Clark Williamson, this statement means that resurrection is not a single event in the future. Resurrection is “a quality of existence characterized by life that begins new.” In this healing and resurrection story of Lazarus Jesus reveals God and anticipates this kind of eternal life. New life is part of this “quality of existence” as they put it. So, if resurrection is not a single event in the future, then belief in Jesus is not only a belief in one future event that will set everything right. After all, Lazarus may have been resurrected in this story, this event reversed his death, but I don’t think it was permanent. He will experience death again, as everyone does. Mary and Martha may still gather by their brother’s bed as he prepares to die, for a second, and likely, final time. Jesus is not here to cheat death, but to fold it in to the spiritual realm of God. It is an offer of life now, after the death event, and always.

We believe in a God that is good, and who created the universe as good. In such a universe resurrection is creation’s response to death. In God’s creation the resurrection and the life exist together, which is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. The hope offered is that the metaphysical state and eschatological beliefs about death cannot separate us from God, or from God’s desire for our well-being and thriving as part of creation. In fact, it means continued oneness with God even after our bodies stop. This is what we are invited to believe in; that in the life of Jesus, we see this is already happening.

The idea that Lazarus’s death is primarily an opportunity to reveal God’s glory can be true through Jesus who is the resurrection and the life. It also can be a dangerous theology to suggest that any death or illness or disability is ours as part of some plan to glorify God. People don’t get sick or die to glorify God. What causes death does not bring glory. This includes things like violence and war. Killing and destruction of creation certainly do not glorify God. God is glorified through the living of life, through care and service to life. Through the well-being and thriving of life. God is glorified when we respond to trials in ways that honor our hope in the resurrection, but also in valuing the living of life. We can do this by caring for those who struggle and suffer, serving those in need, and walking with our neighbor, especially in times of grief and mourning. Through the shedding of tears as Jesus does in this story. Our hope in the resurrection can be inspired through the goodness and faithfulness of the life we live in the here and now, even in times of darkness and trouble.

It’s not always about belief. The rest of the story is how we respond to our beliefs. If we respond to our belief in Jesus as the resurrection and the life by expecting that our belief means that God will solve all our problems when we ask, we may be disappointed. However, if our belief in Jesus as the resurrection and the life makes us open to perceiving God at work in creation even now, even in times of hardship, even in ways that surprise us or are hard to understand, then we are responding faithfully. Then, we are responding to our belief that God is good and that Christ reveals God with us, always. We believe that God doesn’t leave us to go on vacation to Miami. God is already in Miami, and so are we. When you believe in the resurrection and the life, it’s all Miami. And at the end of winter in Michigan, that certainly sound like good news.

Amen.