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Gospel: John 11: 1-45
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?
***
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.”
***
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.
***
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 to the 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
