John 11:32-44
The
shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35, “Jesus
wept.” I expect he wept often, and
that he laughed often, too. This time
what happened was that his friend Lazarus had died and, if that wasn’t bad
enough, his sister Mary suggested that it was Jesus’ fault for not getting
there fast enough when they sent word that Lazarus was sick. Was Jesus crying for Lazarus, for Mary, or
for himself? The answer is “yes”.
When
we lose someone through illness or through a painful death, we feel for what
they may have had to go through, and we feel for the sadness of the other
people who loved them, and we feel sad for ourselves, too.
In
one of his stories about ministering to a church in Evansville, Indiana, Walter
Wangerin wrote about the way that one woman experienced the death of her
husband.
“’He always came back, you
know,’ she says. ‘When he worked for the
L&N Railroad in the dining car – it took him all the way to St. Louis, but
he came back. When he worked at the
Vulcan Plow Works during the Depression, he came back. I used to pack a picnic basket and carry the
children on over to Sunset Park, and even if we started to eat without him,
well, he would come from work. We would
enjoy the scenery and then walk home and get there by bedtime. He always came back, Douglas did, always
untroubled.’
‘But he hasn’t come back this
time.’
‘And he’s left an ache like
stone in my stomach.’ …
Miz Lillian says, ‘I’ve
gotten used to the ache by now. It’s all
right. It’s all right. I call it a friend to me. This aching reminds me all the time of
Douglas. Mm. There is a gravestone in
Oak Hill Cemetery, on his grave, you know.
But it’s sort of a stone in me too.
The children and everyone else can mourn by that stone at Oak Hill. This one is mine. The widow’s stone.’”[1]
What is anybody supposed to do with that? (Because everybody at some point loses
someone and carries around some kind of grief.)
Sure, you live with the reality of loss, but what form does it take?
When
Jesus met that kind of loss, it touched him deeply. Standard translations say,
“he was greatly disturbed in spirit and
deeply moved.” [John
11:33]
Peterson’s translation says,
“a deep anger welled up within him.”
That might, given time, have come to form a
similar stone in his guts, a lasting and aching sorrow. Before it came to that, however, he made them
take him to the grave where Lazarus was buried and there he stood before a
stone that had been rolled across its opening to seal it off. How could Jesus not, on some level, have seen
in that stone, the one that would seal his own tomb very shortly
afterward? How could all his emotions –
love for Lazarus and his sisters, anger at the accusations being lobbed in his
direction, fear about the pain he would himself be forced to bear, all that we
ever feel around anyone’s death (including our own) – how could all of that not
have formed one big stone inside his own chest, one big lump in his throat, one
big weight heavy enough to crush him to the ground?
And
yet… Jesus
said,
"Remove
the stone." [John 11:39]
Martha,
the practical sister, told him he was just losing it. That kind of stone is there to wall us off
from the decay that goes on, like the emotional stone walls off the strongest
emotions so that even when there is grief, it doesn’t consume the rest of
life. There are reasons we do the things
we do to get by.
"Master, by this time
there's a stench. He's been dead four days!" [John 11:39]
You
tell him, Martha!
“Jesus looked her in the
eye. ‘Didn't I tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’
Then, to the others, ‘Go
ahead, take away the stone.’" [John 11:40-41]
Which
they did.
“Then he shouted, ‘Lazarus,
come out!’
And he came out.” [John
11:43-44]
They
had to unwrap him and uncover his face, and I wish we knew what went through
the heads of the people who did that. We
don’t get any description of what the rest of the reunion was like. I imagine it was a weird mix of happy and
creepy, disturbing and joyful.
In
some ways it was like a rehearsal for Easter, which was even stranger, because
there it was God who directly intervened and raised Jesus up, pointing to Jesus’
promise that it wouldn’t just be Lazarus who was restored, but that it would be
all of God’s people who would have access to eternal life through Jesus. He had told Martha when she had first met him
coming into town,
“I am, right now,
Resurrection and Life. The one who
believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does
not ultimately die at all.” [John 11:25-26]
To
live believing in Jesus is what we call “faith”. And it is faith, not our good deeds or our
religiosity or anything else, that lets Jesus set us right with God.
William Butler Yeats said,
“Too
long a sacrifice
Can
make a stone of the heart.
O
when may it suffice?
That
is Heaven’s part, our part
To
murmur name upon name,
As
a mother names her child
When
sleep at last has come
On
limbs that had run wild.”[2]
So
if Jesus tells us that it is okay, that those who have died are alive with God,
it is easier to roll away those stones that build up inside us, and when we
name those people, the way he named Lazarus, we feel their life rather than our
loss. At times like that, what we celebrate
once again are the good moments, the moments
when through such people’s lives a little bit of God’s own grace comes through
to us.
[1]
Walter Wangerin, Miz Lil & the
Chronicles of Grace (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 188-189.
[2] from
“Easter, 1916”.
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