John 11 ~ The Story of Lazarus
Lazarus and the story of one person being called out of the tombs to life again! Jesus must have received a lot more dinner invitations after that☺, because who hasn’t wanted someone they’ve loved and lost back?
John Mogabgab, former editor of “Weavings,” re-tells a Buddhist story of a woman who’d lost her young child to disease, frantically carrying the child from house to house, asking for medicine to restore him. Finally, she is sent to the home of Buddha, who tells her to find a house where no one has ever died and collect its mustard seeds. So she starts out, but after a while realizes, every house has lost its loved ones. All of us lost an icon in our movement of faith recently ~ The Rev. Elder Freda Smith.
Why do we read this story as if Jesus ended death? He did not, and it takes only one more chapter before authorities decide to end Lazarus’ new shot at life because his presence is attracting too many followers to Jesus.
One child dies every 8 seconds from preventable diseases ~ if only they’d had clean water to drink and bathe in. I remember the homeless along the banks of a river outside Lahore ~ people, young boys tossed aside for some reason {Maybe like the one I spoke with, because they refused to marry a girl or woman}, jumping in, scooping up water I didn’t even want to get close to into their mouths. I think of Detroit still.
“If you had been here,” Martha and Mary say in succession to Jesus, “our brother would not have died.” Where are we? Where have we been? Do we just expect God to whisk in and take care of things?
“Even now,” Martha adds, “I know God will give you whatever you ask.” ~ “Ask and it shall be given unto you,” we sing, memorizing the words of Matthew’s Jesus. ---Do you always get what you ask God for? Have you always?
Everyday I pray for peace on earth and goodwill among all. . . . I’m still waiting ~ and it’s not because I don’t pray the right way or long enough or hard enough. It’s kind of my job; I know how to do it☺. And besides, isn’t God supposed to know all and see all ~ you know, if we sit or if we stand kind of thing?
Stephen Bryant, a Methodist minister, says omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence are words humans made up about God to avoid dealing with reality and a Presence that stalls 4 days while Lazarus dies and lays in a stone cold tomb, then weeps over the loss of a beloved friend at the gravesite, and then finally calls him out and sets him free again.
What is it we’re supposed to believe in because of this story? That’s the purpose of every story in this Gospel chapter 20 says ~ “These are recorded so that you may believe…and through believing, have life in Jesus’ name.”
How do we have more life because of this story? How are our lives/our living changed because of Lazarus come back to life?
Michael Simone, a Jesuit says, this story is about a 2nd shot at life that everyone who follows Jesus’ way can have; that “the victory is won, but the battle is not complete.”
It’s not complete, I think, when the number of teenagers dying of HIV/AIDS has tripled in Africa in the past 20 or so years.
It’s not complete when thousands upon thousands have died at a border south of the United States. It started long before the current White House resident.
It’s not complete when anti-Semitism is on the rise globally, and crimes against LGBTQIA peoples have never really abated.
Jesus hates death in this story. We translate that word in verse 33 as “sighing” at the gravesite, but scholars say it is more like Jesus was angry and sad and scared all at the same time, and made a noise that sounded like a horse snorting. It wasn’t pretty or proper. ~ Maybe it sounded like all the people marching to their deaths at Auschwitz ~ things we read about as the world marked the 75th anniversary of the “liberation” of that camp. Or maybe more like the 7000 gay men who were not liberated because of who they were. Or maybe more like all the agony and anger represented in the paintings of Ceija Stojka (1933-2013}, a survivor, who communicated “a rage not dulled.”… Maybe it sounded like the voice of Samson Mettler out in South Dakota, standing up to a new bill that would deny medical treatment to trans youth.
Jesus changes in this story, and what changes him is at the heart of John’s message for us. Something set Jesus free ~ he’s not afraid to make noise. And I think we get our answer to what that was in the very beginning of the story, with the note the sisters sent ~ “The one you love is ill.” Scholars want to argue over which Greek word {phileo or agape} is used here, but John goes back and forth with those words, and here uses the same Greek word he will use earlier when Jesus gets in trouble with authorities for saying “God loves me.” The point is not whether Jesus and Lazarus were BFFs, but that Jesus loved Lazarus with the same love/with as much love as he believed God loved him {Jesus}.
Love ~ loving someone the way we believe God loves us ~ changes us and helps us go back for those who need us in order to have life again.
Rev. Lucia Chappelle out at Founders MCC making trips to the border to care for people seeking a better life, is going back for those who need us in order to have life.
Greta Thunberg taking on people like the US Secretary of the Treasury is going back for all of us in calling for the taxation of businesses that pollute the earth and destroy it.
I don’t think John was worried about people believing in an afterlife. That’s pretty much a given in the text. Martha says, “I know my brother will live again on the last day,” in verse 24. What John is concerned about, what John wants his community to be concerned about is raising up new life now/going back for the people who most need us in this world and loving them the way God loves us.
What mattered over 30 years ago when Act Up was born was not how someone got a disease, but how people could live with it.
What gives life to all of us, John’s story is saying, is love and the way it calls us out of the pits we sometimes get ourselves into or fall victim to.
“Eternity,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel, “is not perpetual future, but perpetual presence.” Maybe Jesus with those words about “whoever believes in me will never die,” was promising to be with us wherever we find ourselves ~ maybe, in the words of a song of yesteryear, “you’ll never walk alone,” and calling us, who walk and talk with Jesus to do the same for each other.
Love is not an emotion in the Bible. It’s a call to action ~ the kind of action that unbinds and sets us all free, as Jesus will the crowds standing around Lazarus-resurrected to do.
What changed Jesus and saved Lazarus was love. It can do the same for us and for our world, which seems like pretty good news to me. +Amen
Rev. Elder Pat Bumgardner