The stories that lead up to the end of Lent, the gospels, and the beginning of Holy Week, are really some of the best stories, not only from the gospel, not only from the Bible, but are well known throughout the secular world. One reason is the great skill of the author, St. John the Evangelist. The other reason is that John is presenting to us Jesus, the Savior, the one who has promised that we should have eternal life. His narrative enters into the very reality and the heart of our own lives.
Today’s Gospel reading (John 11:1-45) centers again around Martha and her love for Jesus. Martha knows how to capture the Messiah. She sends for Jesus, who is a great distance away at this time because his public life was over. He has settled quietly away from the public with his disciples. He knows that he has been rejected by the chief priest and the Pharisees and the people that meant the most to him.
When Martha sends for him, she simply says, “Master, the one you love is ill.” That’s all. She doesn’t tell him to come. She doesn’t tell him how bad it is. We already know from earlier readings that Jesus loved Martha, and loved Mary, and loved Lazarus. We already know that Jesus has stayed at their home in Bethany, a stone’s throw from the temple of Jerusalem, when he went there to pray.
We expect Jesus to immediately get up and go to Bethany. But he doesn’t. Jesus says to his disciples that he will linger for a while. Seems odd, doesn’t it? His beloved friend is critically ill. Why doesn’t he rush to his bedside? But he has a very good reason for not leaving right away. He knows that Lazarus has already died. So he waits, choosing to arrive during the wake and burial.
When she hears that Jesus finally is near, Martha rushes out to meet him and she’s a little annoyed because she felt that if he had come earlier, he would have healed her beloved brother, Lazarus, like he had healed so many others. If he had come earlier, Lazarus would be alive. She says 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.”
She’s hoping that he will do something very special.
Jesus said to her, “Your brother WILL rise.” Martha said to him, “I now he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”
And then Jesus said these words,
“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.”
Then Jesus asks her,
“Do you believe this?”
And she says,
“Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”
“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.” What does Jesus mean?
He means exactly what he says. He means that He himself can give eternal life to all who come to Him, but they must believe. And if they open their hearts and they believe in Him, they already have eternal life, because He is the Son of God, and God is life, not death. There is nothing about death in God. He lives and His Son comes down to tell us that He lives, and He continues to live even after He dies, as we people of faith will live.
So death now becomes a passageway. It isn’t a terrible event. What Jesus reveals to Martha, who loves him, is that we are destined for eternal life, that death is only a transition, as long as we believe. It’s a movement. It is moving from one place to another. Death is not the end because Jesus says, “I am the way, I am the truth and I am the life.”
The crowd then takes Jesus to the tomb and he does something unexpected. He mourns. And you say, “Why? If Lazarus is with God and he’s safe, there’s no need for mourning.” But Jesus knows differently.
We know that when someone passes from us and that we can no longer reach them in the ordinariness of daily life and they go on a distant journey into a darkness that we do not understand, we mourn, because WE have lost something, not because THEY have lost something. But our mourning is in faith, and we believe that they have gone home to a God who loves them more, if that is possible, than we do.
But what Jesus mourns for is something different. He mourns for the fact that this world is a rough and cruel place. And it isn’t God who has made it that way, but we ourselves. People’s lives are full of loneliness, full of difficulty. There are so many fears and our hearts hunger and sometimes fear and sometimes get lost in the malaise that comes with just being a human being.
But we were created to love. That’s what Jesus says and that’s what the gospel says. “Someone who loves you is ill” and Jesus goes to him to heal him. It is the love story of God. God loves us, God cares, God is concerned, so much that He allows His Son to take on the pain for us, because only through the Incarnation could the pain of our daily existence be experienced by God Himself.
And to what extent? We will know next week when we celebrate the Last Supper, the supper of love where He says He will always be with us and, even though He will die, He will be with us, because we are destined for life, not death. And then He will be nailed to a cross and He will die. And yet they will remember He did not die in the sense of disappearing into the nothingness of existence. He lives and He is risen.
Out of that, we begin to understand what we were created for. We were created for life. But in this world, there is one thing, in order for us to reach out to this truth, this truth that is true whether we believe in it or not, to reach out to this truth, we must put our faith in something besides ourselves. For our little world, we must put our faith in love with each other, with God.
And for those who love and for those who have faith, we have no trouble understanding the words of Jesus, “I am the light of the world.” “I am the truth.” “I am the life.” We know that we will pass through many darknesses, not only death, but the darkness of being on the edge of despair, the darkness of disappointment, the darkness of feeling all alone, the darkness of rejection. When those times come, we must know that He is with us and we must turn to Him in faith.
Believe in him? No, much more than belief. This faith isn’t just believing that He exists. Even the devil acknowledges that He exists. This faith is giving yourself into his hands like a lover does to someone he loves, becoming a part of Him that we might become truly like Him, calling God our Father, sharing the spirit that He himself has given to us.
And this is the lovely story that is given to us today. It is to prepare us for the betrayal of the Savior of the world, for the nailing of Him to the cross through our own sins, and to put our belief that He has risen as He said He would.
This is what John wants us to understand. In Lazarus, we have the sign and symbol of the truth of every human being, that we are not created for a time, die and disappear into nothingness, but we are created to love God and to love each other and to love this world.
Let me end with a story told to me by a friend. He went to Jerusalem in the spring of 1997 and was in a grocery store in Jerusalem, of all places, doing some last-minute shopping. It was the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when all the Jewish people come to the place of worship in order to repent of their sins. My friend was at the vegetable counter, among the potatoes and scallions and everything else that was there. He picked up a flyer that tells you how much everything costs. And on the back of this flyer were the words of a Rabbi calling his people back to God:
“As the shadow of Yom Kippur nears, I fear that my Jewish people are in deep trouble. The source of my fear is this: God is crying, and we are not there to wipe away His tears.”
Between now and Easter, Jesus is crying. He is crying for all the people that are at the tomb, those who are wondering who he is and what he is. He is weeping because he sees the world in need of God, and God is crying to become a part of it and is being rejected, and He sees the world turning into something that He would destroy, except that He loves the people in it.
The feeling that the Rabbi had, and the feeling that we should bring into Holy Week, is that we are called to love God and to be one with Him and to be one with His world.
It’s a responsibility. It’s a responsibility that calls us to look around us and see what makes God weep. To see what makes, not only God, but also makes us weep. Look at the immense task of turning this world into a world that cares, a world that loves, a world that is touched by Jesus who weeps for Lazarus and every Lazarus that has been ever born in this life.
It is the image of Jesus crying and knowing that his Father waits to have His tears wiped away, that makes this day and this celebration so special. For it is in the mourning of Jesus and in His weeping — he does not weep over himself, he weeps over us, that we might finally bring this world and bring each other to a world that it was created for: a world of forgiveness, a world of caring, a world not without its problems, but a world based on the faith of Martha.
Martha doesn’t say, “Do something.” She just says, when she sends her message to Jesus, “Master, someone you love is ill.”
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!