Roll Away the Stone

Lazarus and Belief

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.” After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “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. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

John 11:1-44

I was at a peace vigil earlier this week, and I almost don’t want to say it because it feels like praying in public, which Jesus tells us not to do. It might sound like the only reason I went was so that I could say in a sermon, “I went to a peace vigil.” But running that risk, I testify I was at a peace vigil. There was singing, there was a poem, but mostly there was a lot of silence. A vigil is a “watch,” and we were silently watching for peace. Peace has not come.

The thing about a vigil for peace, which might sound obvious, is that we only hold vigils for peace during war. When there is already no conflict, when things are quiet and still, you don’t have to watch for peace because it’s already here. There’s no trouble to address, nothing that needs to be glorified, it just is peace. It’s already glorified.

That biblical word, “glorify,” what is it? It means to “reveal God’s glory” through something. Beautiful music glorifies God when it reveals his glory; a parent’s sacrifice glorifies God by pointing to his sacrificial love. You don’t need to glorify peace because the peace God gave us is already glorious. It’s not the already glorious things that need glorifying, it’s the horrible things. Of course, nobody would say, “We should have war so that we can have peace vigils,” or, “Thank God we had this war so that we could get together and pray for peace.” That’d be nonsensical. We don’t pray in the midst of war to make the awfulness of war glorious, but to make God’s glory appear where it seems impossible.

Today in John’s gospel we have another vigil, this one from Mary and Martha. They are waiting and waiting for Jesus. Instead, they get death.

Sometimes we might wonder, why didn’t God create the world without suffering? Why did God make the snake that tempted Adam and Eve? Why did God allow a world where people could die? But I don’t think this is the clearest way to think about it. Remember that it is from a place of nothingness, emptiness, that God created everything that is. Death, while we have a name for it, actually is an absence: a return to nothingness. We are subject to it because we split ourselves off from God to join the world instead of staying in communion with God. Without God, dying is less an active process and more the cold machinery of entropy back to nothing. God didn’t create death, but rather, he created life—all life—pushing constantly against death. He made the life that is the only reason we can perceive death at all.

But this side of the Fall, death is the default. Nothingness, emptiness, nihilism, zero. Without God, things decay towards it. Plants grow, but then they die, get destroyed, burn out, and burn up, all exploding from the Big Bang, that moment in time of God’s creativity exploding into light, water, and life. Eventually, he rested and called it good. But Sabbath is temporary. His work was not done. The patterns of life he laid continue.

And if there is one chief, central pattern we need to understand about the life that God created, it is resurrection. If we need to understand one thing about the Creator, it’s that his very essence overcomes death over and over, and he will. As John says at the very start of his gospel, in the beginning was Christ, for he is light and life.

This is the backdrop for John telling us this story with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Good friends of Jesus whose passion was caring for the poor and sick in their community. Now it was Lazarus who was sick. So they tell Jesus, who says something strange. “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” He doesn’t say this casually or flippantly; he loves them. But after this strange thing, he then does another strange thing: he waits. And waits. And finally, after this delayed start, when they reach Mary and Martha, they hear news that was utterly not shocking to Jesus, “Lazarus is dead.”

The danger in this passage is hearing that strange saying, seeing Jesus waiting, and saying, “God is fine with death because it gives him an opportunity to look good.” No. The whole reason Jesus is here on this earth is that God is not fine with death. He is overcoming it. Mary and Martha kind of know this, but only in part. They are like, “Yeah yeah, we know Lazarus will rise again on the last day when we’re all resurrecting, but he’s dead now. We are hurting now. You could have saved him now had you been there then. Where were you?” Jesus, in the most loving and authoritative way possible, doesn’t say where he was, but who he is: “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am. The name God gives to Moses, I am. His very name and being is resurrection. He is life.

So no, God is not fine with death. God is so not fine with death that Jesus, even though he is overcoming it, utterly confident that he will, knowing it, he weeps. He is not only sad about death, he is even angry about it. When English translators take John’s words as describing Jesus as “greatly disturbed” and “deeply moved,” or “troubled,” they are underselling it. The words here are more like angry—he’s angry at death. There is a great irony in how we often have trouble sitting with God’s anger in the Old Testament, because it seems against life. But if we drill down to why God is angry in Scripture, if we were to fully understand why, we could see it’s because he is angry at death. He cries when we sin because sin is death. And he weeps every time, whether through sin or disease, death takes another one of his children. He doesn’t shame us when we feel sad and angry about death in our grief. He doesn’t tell us to just get over it. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?”

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We’ve been reading these long stories in John, and the thing about them is that they all end up in the same place: belief. Why is belief so important? We can really fixate on the intellectual side of it, that belief is primarily “I need to sign off on a set of unprovable hypotheses, and anyone who doesn’t intellectually sign off on them is cut off from God.” Don’t mistake me—theology is important, and getting beliefs right is important because beliefs have consequences. Theology is how we grow in our relationship with Jesus into more and more truth. But when Jesus is face to face with us, like he is with Mary and Martha, belief is about the connection between our hearts and his. A relationship we didn’t know was possible. We Presbyterians have traditionally held that belief is not even something we do, but a gift God gives us, for none of us can “decide” to believe, we either do or don’t. And so belief is the heart of your heart saying “yes” to a relationship—a gift from God that he opens our eyes to see and hearts to believe—with and in and through Jesus to the rest of the world. A relationship between Jesus and yourself, a relationship with yourself in Jesus, and a relationship to the rest of the world through Jesus. The path to all these relationships is belief, and the core to all of them is the rhythm of resurrection.

To believe in Jesus is simply to say “yes” to the new life that God already embedded in your soul, the life that has overcome death, is currently overcoming death in a million ways in a life of faith, and will totally overcome death in the end. As we see with Lazarus, the blind man, and every person Jesus heals and raises and encounters, it is a life where pain is not erased, but included, sanctified, and glorified.

There’s that word again, “glorify.” Jesus says it a lot in John. To “glorify,” to “reveal God’s glory through” something, is done whenever we lift something real up before God. As Jesus told Nicodemus, the Son of Man will be glorified just as the bronze serpent was, physically lifted up so that even mortality can show God’s glory. His body was human so that it would be directly touched by death and thus show God’s glory even in death. Through belief, any of us can bring anything before God that it may be transformed by his glory. You can bring your heartache, your pain, your backache, your bruises, your aging, your embarrassments, your regrets, anything, lift it up before God, saying, “God, I know you are going to work through this somehow, and I don’t even know how yet. Here is something awful, here is something that is not working. Here is even war. Show me how you will reveal yourself through this, Lord.”

Jesus does. His friend Lazarus, “the dead man,” so dead that the stench is bleeding through stone, comes out. But do you see how you can be Lazarus too? Whether you have an illness, your body’s breaking down, your mind’s not working right, you can’t remember stuff like you used to, you can’t work how you once worked, you don’t have the family life you dreamed of having, these all bear the stench of death on them through your bandages. But the question that really matters is: do you believe?

Do you believe that he loves you? Do you believe that he is the resurrection and the life and there is nothing he can’t work through? Do you believe God’s resurrection power just decides to stop before he reaches your neighbors or do you believe that he came to be savior for all? Do you believe that his glory can be revealed in absolutely everything?

Some of us feel that being born into this world is deeply unfair. We were born into a world that, if left to its own devices, would keep returning towards oblivion. But in the midst of oblivion, God did not say, “Well, it’s a cosmic joke, c’est la vie.” God looked at oblivion and said, “I will not abandon my children to nothingness.” To make sure we knew it, he came in the form of one of us so that you would know he feels everything you feel. He walked your walk, not just talking his talk. And he just wants you to believe that sin and death are not in charge, because this transforms your whole way of life so that resurrection love is working through you in all that you do.

No matter how much you believe it, no matter how real it seems that death is in charge, that awfulness is in charge, that our nation is hopelessly corrupt, that our society is becoming more and more immoral, fear not. Believe. Especially if there is a stone of doubt between you and Jesus that cannot move, believe. Not because God wants you to trick yourself into agreeing to something untrue. But because the truest thing, the deepest thing, the realest thing is the glorification of even the thing we thought could not be glorified. Jesus says, “Bring all of your suffering, all of it, to me. Bring it through me and I will show myself through the places deep in the caves you thought were too dark for life. Believe in me. Roll away the stone. Come out.” Amen.