“Master, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And in the figure of Martha we hear our own grief and our own perplexity in the face of death: We have to wait some more.īefore we get to the tomb of Lazarus, we must meet Jesus on the road. But we do not cry or wait or grieve alone.īut I am getting ahead of the story John tells. We hope and we doubt and we grieve and we cry. We wait in all the cemeteries of the world, and beside every tomb. Israel waited for centuries for the Messiah. All of those people who fill the pages of Scripture are dead. John’s gospel tells us that when God in Jesus Christ finally arrives Lazarus has been dead four days. God knows Lazarus is dying and yet he lingers. Jesus does not go immediately to Bethany. In this gospel story that tells the whole story of Scripture there is also the great mystery of God’s inexplicable waiting in the face of death. He always is when he’s talking about death. While the disciples think Lazarus is simply taking a nap and that there’s no earthly reason for their Rabbi to risk so much, Jesus is serious.

“Rabbi…the Jewish leaders are out to kill you, and you’re going back?” We are told that God wills to venture God’s very life: The Son, we are told in the beginning of the story Scripture tells, will crush the head of the serpent, the source of death, his final enemy he will trample the snake who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy humanity.Īnd as the story of Lazarus continues, we are told that God in Jesus Christ will draw near to Jerusalem - will approach danger and death, will put Godself in harm’s way, will take a great risk - in order to save Lazarus. It will become an occasion to show God’s glory by glorifying God’s Son.” And just as in Genesis, we who are dying, separated from the God who made us from nothing for love alone, are given a promise: He has contracted the same disease that infects every man, woman, and child. And Jesus loves Mary in all her illness and Mary loves Jesus because the one who is forgiven much loves much. You remember Mary, the woman who Luke tells us “lived a sinful life,” the one who anoints the feet of Jesus with perfume and drys them with her hair. These are the words of Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, to Jesus. “Master, the one who you love so very much is sick.” It’s important that we know BOTH of those things.

And we are told that Jesus loves Lazarus. Like Genesis, the story begins with a diagnosis of the human condition, and of the disposition of the heart of God towards humanity even in this horrific illness we bear. Lazarus is, in the words of Ezekiel read earlier, “the whole house of Israel.” Lazarus is you and me, and everyone one who has ever lived or ever will live. Lazarus is Adam and Eve and Abraham and Sarah and Samson and Delilah and David and Bathsheba and Daniel and Isaiah.

This gospel reading contains the entire library of the Bible in one chapter. And in a sense that is not hyperbole, for every story about God or man or the cosmos in all the libraries of the world that offers forgiveness or healing or justice or deliverance or mercy or truth is about Christ.Īnd yet I want to suggest that this morning’s gospel about Lazarus retells the scriptural story of God and man and the world from beginning to end. He says the world could not contain all the books that could be written. John tells us in the last line of his gospel that there are many stories about Jesus he leaves out.

The story of lazarus