Life After Death – Crazy, Messy, & Exciting – John 11:1-45
/Lectionary Readings for March 29, 2020
Ezekiel 37:1-14 v 14 I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live again…
Psalm 130 v 3 Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?
Romans 8:6-11 v 6 So letting your sinful nature control your mind leads to death. But letting the Spirit control your mind leads to life and peace.
John 11:1-45 Jesus brings Lazarus back to life
Any time I preach or lead a group, regardless of age, I start the same way. I’m going to say three short sentences. Please repeat each sentence, with enthusiasm.
God made me. God loves me. God has plans for me.
First of all, let’s understand geographically where we are and the short distances involved.
To this day, Bethany is located about 2 miles away from Jerusalem on the southeastern side of the Mount of Olives; it’s roughly a 45-minute walk from Jerusalem if you’re taking your time
Locally, this would be the equivalent of Bethany being Safeway, the tomb being Panda Express, and Jerusalem being Susanville UMC (United Methodist Church). Walking between them is a good stretch of the legs, but nothing unusual.
To better understand the context of today’s reading, keep in mind that all four Gospels are written from a post-Easter point of view.
For John, “signs and wonders” made Jesus legitimate. All the miracles Jesus did were “proof” that Jesus was… special, different, blessed by God and an instrument of God. For John, Jesus was the Word of God (capital W), and was with God since the creation of everything (see John 1:1-4).
Interestingly, John is the only Gospel that includes the story of Lazarus’ resurrection. Is the Lazarus story “true” is a modern, journalistic sense? We really don’t know, and John certainly didn’t care. It’s a great story that helps John drive home his point that Jesus was God in the flesh.
Speaking of flesh, John uses the story of Lazarus’ resurrection to foreshadow Jesus’ own death and resurrection. Both men were dead for at least three days – long enough for Jews to believe that the soul had completely separated from the body. They were really dead. Which means that only a Divine act of recreation, an act of regeneration could bring these men back to life.
Now let’s consider this story from a more emotional perspective. And this is one of those stories that just begs us to put ourselves into each character’s place and ponder, “How would I feel or react if I were that person?”
Remember, Bethany was a small town – perhaps 100 or 200 residents at the time. And you know small towns – everybody knows everybody and there are no secrets.
So when someone dies, it’s a community event. And true to Jewish customs, verse 19 tells us that “people had come to console Martha and Mary in their loss.” So there was a crowd, and this crowd followed Mary and Martha to Jesus who then traveled with the crowd to the tomb.
Verses 35-38 describe Jesus as being both grief-stricken and angry. In our Bible Study this past week, someone pointed out how often these two emotions go together. Both of these are foundationally human emotions and, as such, reveal Jesus’ humanity immediately before Jesus invokes His divinity by calling Lazarus out. Fully human, fully divine.
Can you possibly imagine the moment Lazarus walked out of the tomb?!?
Can you imagine trying to comprehend being confronted by Divine power over death?
Can you imagine how that would shape your faith in God?
For some people, that power was overwhelming, and they responded by immediately plotting His arrest and assassination.
But for the people who were willing to be vulnerable, who were willing to risk opening themselves up to God’s mysterious mystical Spirit, who were willing to embrace a new future, uncertain of what that meant… those people experienced an internal spiritual transformation, a spiritual resurrection that mirrored Lazarus’ physical resurrection. They all had a new lease on life with a dramatically new perspective.
Through God’s continually creating and recreating Spirit, we too can experience spiritual, mental, and emotional transformations, resurrections that unlock new potentials for us.
That is the Good News of God’s love for us.
And that is the grace-filled, life-giving Good News that we can offer the people around us.
This week, as most of us feel trapped in our homes, bound by self-quarantining and safe-distancing, unable to move about freely – perhaps feeling a bit like Lazarus, I’m asking you to use the resources we have at our fingertips – our phones, our computers, and even the US mail, and reach out to as many people as you can and share a word of encouragement, a word of forgiveness, a word of compassion with the people you know.
We have the time and the resources. Like Jesus called Lazarus by name, God is calling each of us by name this morning – and every day – to step out of our own dark places and into our communities so that others may know about and enjoy God’s creative, forgiving, transforming love.
Amen? Amen!
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For more information about burial practices during Jesus’ time, visit these two websites:
Burial Practices in First Century Palestine – https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/people/related-articles/burial-practices-in-first-century-palestine
What were the Rituals Associated with Death and Burial in Jesus’Day? – http://blog.adw.org/2014/08/what-were-the-rituals-associated-with-death-and-burial-in-jesus-day/
To learn more about modern-day Bethany, check out Al-Eizariya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Eizariya