Jesus said to the Pharisees: “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” So the Jews said, “He is not going to kill himself, is he, because he said, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’?” He said to them, “You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” So they said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “What I told you from the beginning. I have much to say about you in condemnation. But the one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.” They did not realize that he was speaking to them of the Father. So Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.” Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.
The Gospel of the Lord.
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“You will die in your sins,” Jesus says to the religious authorities. That’s a grim promise.
But Jesus is reading their hearts. It isn’t that God will not forgive their sins. Rather, the authorities do not see Jesus as the way to God.
They see him as in the way.
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Jesus is in the way of their religion.
He’s in the way of their egos.
He’s in the way of their convenient lifestyles.
He’s upsetting their plans, flipping tables, and turning their belief system upside down, while dining with tax collectors and prostitutes, forgiving sinners, and breaking the Sabbath.
On Palm Sunday we will see the scribes and Pharisees’ frustrated desire to remove Jesus from their way finally begin to unfold.
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It’s a humbling question to consider, but when do the Lord’s teachings, or the pull of our conscience, get inour way?
For example, Christ’s command to, “forgive, not seven, but seventy-seven times,” gets in the way of holding a grudge.
His command to, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” gets in the way of judging or condemning other people.
His command to, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” gets in the way of giving into temptation.
His command to, “Follow me,” gets in the way of charting our own destiny or taking the driver’s seat.
As we approach Holy Week, may show the Lord that he is never inthe way; rather, he is the way to God, where we discover true life in abundance.
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Image credits: (1) Jesus, Pantocrator, Sinai (2) Jesus Cleansing the Temple, Bernardino Mei (3) Group Bible Study
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
The Gospel of the Lord.
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The woman caught in adultery is a harrowing story, which we’ve all heard before. After being caught in the very act of adultery and publicly humiliated, she is thrown at the feet of Jesus, as the religious authorities ask him to issue a verdict.
Should she be stoned or not?
Withdrawing, the Lord begins doodling in the dirt. What, exactly, was he writing? Some say he was buying time to collect his thoughts. Others say that he was writing a personal account of each of those men’s sins, reminding them that they, too, are human.
Perhaps the Lord was doing something even greater, issuing a sweeping verdict against the entire nation of Israel, accusing everyone of being imperfect – and in need of change.
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In the Old Testament, God made several covenants with his people, which demanded mutual fidelity, lest blood be shed.
As it’s written in the Book of Exodus, “You shall not have other gods besides me.” Yet Israel repeatedly breaks their end of the covenant by worshipping false idols and giving into the desires of their flesh.
As the Lord cries out through the prophet Hosea: “She [Israel] is notmy wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove her adultery from my face.”
In spite of Israel’s infidelity, God reveals himself to be a loving and forgiving God, “down to the thousandth generation.”
All Israel needed – or, in the case of today’s Gospel, all these men and this sole woman needed – was to repent and Jesus would wipe away their sins like a palm sweeping across dirt.
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If the Lord were kneeling before us today, what offenses might he write against us?
Jesus can wipe all of these away just as easily as he can write them – if only we repent.
Now a man was ill, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and dried his feet with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was ill. So the sisters sent word to him saying, “Master, the one you love is ill.” When Jesus heard this he said, “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was. Then after this he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in a day? If one walks during the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks at night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” He said this, and then told them, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, but I am going to awaken him.” So the disciples said to him, “Master, if he is asleep, he will be saved.” But Jesus was talking about his death, while they thought that he meant ordinary sleep. So then Jesus said to them clearly, “Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.” So Thomas, called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go to die with him.”
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, only about two miles away. And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; but Mary sat at home. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha said to him, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”
When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary secretly, saying, “The teacher is here and is asking for you.” As soon as she heard this, she rose quickly and went to him. For Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still where Martha had met him. So when the Jews who were with her in the house comforting her saw Mary get up quickly and go out, they followed her, presuming that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell 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 had come with her weeping, he became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Sir, come and see.” And Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.” But some of them said, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”
So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.” And when he had said this, He cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”
Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him.
The Gospel of the Lord.
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I find this to be the most haunting passage in all of the Gospels.
Lazarus, a dear friend of Jesus, is deathly ill. Jesus knows it… and does nothing about it. Not until Lazarus is dead for four awful days.
By then, the tomb had been closed tightly shut, the band of mourners had returned home, the weight of grief – and the awful sense of loneliness unique to death – began settling in.
According to Jewish custom, Lazarus’ soul departed the day before, three days after his death. Thus, by human standards, he was truly dead.
It’s in this context – one entirely avoidable – that Jesus decides to show up. Why did he wait?
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I’m sure one could hear a pin drop when Martha first laid eyes upon Jesus. Her sorrow, her lack of understanding, her questions of “why” and “what if” swirling within her. Suddenly, she falls to her knees, breaks out in tears, and says what we might’ve been thinking.
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Martha and her sister Mary loved Jesus. They listened to him preach. They witnessed him heal. They believed in him as Lord. Mary even spent all she had on costly perfume, pouring it over the feet of Jesus in adoration when he stayed in her and Martha’s home.
But when they needed him, Jesus was nowhere to be found.
Something tells me these two sisters experienced what many of the Saints have described as a “dark night of the soul,” the belief that God has abandoned you. But even in the darkness, even in the night, there is faith.
What makes the night dark is not an absence of belief, but more an absence of understanding.
In Martha’s case, she doesn’t understand why something so preventable had to happen. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
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In her inner turmoil, Martha reveals the complexity of faith.
Authentic faith is never bland, black and white, disembodied, or sanitized. It’s often gritty, pebbled with questions, mixed with grief, yet strengthened by hope.
Faith is the agent inside of us that wrestles with mystery, that grapples with God, that serves as our lifeline to the Divine. But Martha shows us that authentic faith also includes trust.
After pouring out her anguish over what has happened, she continues by saying to Jesus, “Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Martha does not ask Jesus for anything specific. She doesn’t ask him to unwind the clock or to undo the past. In her mind, it isn’t possible. Lazarus is dead. But she still believes in the creative power of God. Jesus can do something good.
Like a wave receding back into the ocean, Martha’s grief washes over Jesus, but then it recedes back into the depths of her heart. What she leaves exposed is blind trust. ‘Whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Martha speaks for all of us who need God to do something new in our lives. All of us who wrestle with grief, who question “why,” who may be experiencing our own “dark night of the soul.”
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What is the Lord’s response to her faith – and to the crushed crowd surrounding them?
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The shortest sentence in all of the Gospels. Three simple words.
“And Jesus wept.”
In a tremendous display of his humanity, Jesus wept over the death of his friend, Lazarus. He wept over the brevity of life. He wept for Martha and Mary in their sorrow. He wept for every soul around the world who lost a loved one that day.
He wept for all of us who’ve experienced the sting of death. And he wept knowing that this entire scene was merely a dress rehearsal for him, who would be next.
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While we all pray to be spared from suffering, prolonging our lives for as long as possible, the deeper challenge is to look beyond the grave.
Poetically, the raising of Lazarus is only the 11th chapter of John’s Gospel. There is literally another half to be written.
Up to this point, everything that Jesus has done rests within the realm of the physical world – with no better example being the raising of Lazarus. But John signals to us that the Christian journey is not tothe grave; it’s through it.
While precious, this life is only half of our story.
May Martha’s faith become our own – that even in our brokenness, we’d approach Jesus with tender faith, worshiping him as, “Lord.”
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Image credits: (1) (2) Raising of Lazarus, Jusepe de Ribera (3) Christ Risen from the Tomb, Bergogne
