When Mary arrived where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”
33 When Jesus saw her crying and the Jews who had come with her crying also, he was deeply disturbed and troubled. 34 He asked, “Where have you laid him?”
They replied, “Lord, come and see.”
35 Jesus began to cry. 36 The Jews said, “See how much he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “He healed the eyes of the man born blind. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”
38 Jesus was deeply disturbed again when he came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone covered the entrance. 39 Jesus said, “Remove the stone.”
Martha, the sister of the dead man, said, “Lord, the smell will be awful! He’s been dead four days.”
40 Jesus replied, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believe, you will see God’s glory?” 41 So they removed the stone. Jesus looked up and said, “Father, thank you for hearing me. 42 I know you always hear me. I say this for the benefit of the crowd standing here so that they will believe that you sent me.” 43 Having said this, Jesus shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his feet bound and his hands tied, and his face covered with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.” (Common English Bible)
“We Were There: Lenten Edition,” Week One
“Rise up, Lazarus!”
These words I hear, they are not words I ever expected to hear.
I was gone, or so I thought. In heaven, with my creator and my ancestors, I thought this would be my world forever. I was content with that. I was content to wait for my sisters to join me, in God’s good time.
But then my Lord’s voice rang out in my ears, and everything changed. Suddenly, I was back—back in the tomb, shroud wrapped round me like a babe, as he beckoned me forth into the light.
Is it wrong to say that I resented this intrusion upon my rest with my ancestors? The Son of my God has called me, and so I must listen, I must heed Him. And to be reunited with my sisters is a gift nobody else could have given me.
And yet, I must confess myself torn. Yes, there was so much left for me to do, but I have seen the other side, known the peace it brings, experienced the satisfaction of oneness with my creator.
Yet like the phoenix of the myths of old, I rise up when He calls my name. I rise, I rise, I rise.
This is a new sermon series for our first Lenten season together. Across the board, feedback concerning Valley’s Advent first-person devotional series, We Were There, was overwhelmingly positive. Buoyed by this feedback, Dr. Lola Kiser and I crafted a similar focus for not only our upcoming Holy Week devotional book, but for this sermon series as a way to lead up to that devotional book. This means that each Sunday through Lent, all the way up to Easter Sunday, my message will begin in the first-person, through the eyes of someone who would have experienced Holy Week. We begin the series this week with Lazarus, the man whom Jesus raised from the dead here in John 11.
We begin this series with Lazarus for a couple of reasons. First, it is at his home in Bethany—which is en route to Jerusalem from Galilee—where his sister Mary anoints Jesus with oil in anticipation of His coming crucifixion and burial. Lazarus is witness to this, and to the back-and-forth between Jesus and Judas Iscariot which ensues. But the second reason we tell Lazarus’s story here today, instead of Mary’s or Martha’s, is because it is Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead, and amid the forty days of Lenten wilderness, I want us to begin from a place of resurrection so that we might keep our eyes on the prize.
The layers of grief in the Lazarus story also, I think, help
us put this year’s Lent in particular into theological context, because much
like the coronavirus pandemic, there is so much in this story that, in real
time, feels absolutely agonizing—first Lazarus getting sick, then Jesus not
arriving in time.
The resurrection of Lazarus, then, is not a quick-fire
miracle cure like the sort we talked about together on Ash Wednesday. This is a
drawn-out story, one in which grief is elongated and ongoing, and in which the
cure itself takes longer in arriving than we might have first hoped. Does that,
too, sound a bit like our experience of the past twelve months?
Perhaps it is especially easy to draw these parallels because covid-19 first really began impacting our day-to-day lives during Lent last year, so much so that Valley very purposefully left the purple mourning shroud upon our outdoor cross, and the purple Lenten paraments upon our sanctuary. Lent was not six weeks last year—it was, and has been, eleven months and counting.
We should empathize, then, with the full force of Martha’s greeting of Jesus to begin this last passage of the Lazarus narrative: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
Half a million of our siblings in the United States, and four
times that number outside the United States, have died. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.
It is a fair—more than fair, really—if difficult challenge to both pose and try to answer. We tried tackling it a bit last autumn, in our Whatabouts sermon series, but it returns with a vengeance here.
John the Baptist is dead by this point in Jesus’s public ministry. And if the Lord has a new forerunner, a new herald to go before Him, it is now Lazarus. Lazarus has been where Christ will soon be, and has been brought back to share the news. Lazarus’s death foretells Christ’s own, and Lazarus’s resurrection will ultimately be eclipsed by Christ’s. For while Lazarus requires the direction of another, and the assistance of others to remove his burial clothes, Jesus requires no such beckoning, and He leaves the wardrobe of death behind Him in the empty tomb.
Lazarus, then, is something of an audience proxy in this story, by which I mean we are intended to see ourselves in him. I served a senior minister who was fond of inviting people into the stories of the Bible by asking them in whom they saw their lives, or themselves. And in the amount of waiting we have had to endure, together, for a final cure, we may well see ourselves in Mary and Martha. But John’s intent is likely that we are to see ourselves as Lazarus—as the everyman being called forth from the grave and into resurrection. And then Lazarus’s mortality is similarly reflected in Christ’s own in the very next chapter, when his sister Mary anoints Jesus in Bethany, right before the start of Holy Week, in anticipation of Christ’s own death and subsequent stay in the grave.
So we may find ourselves a bit betwixt and between in a story such as this—seeing our proxies in the sisters, with the Gospel’s author intending for us to see our proxy in their dead brother. But it can be both. God’s truth reveals itself differently, to different people, based on their (and our) experience, and out of that experience, everything else about our faith in God grows.
And that is fine, because that is how the story of Lazarus is supposed to work. Jesus says as much before resurrecting His friend—He prays to God and says, “I say this for the benefit of the crowd standing here, so that they will believe that you sent me.”
Jesus is banking on the assembled crowd experiencing, together, the witnessing of a resurrection. He is banking on that shared experience resulting in a tangible, demonstrable, life-changing impact upon its witnesses, not just Lazarus and Mary and Martha.
What if we, also being an assembled crowd of witnesses, talked less about proving the resurrection, as though it were a theorem or a geometric exercise, and more about experiencing the resurrection? Because when we divorce proof of divinity from lived experience, when make the proof only about the reasoning and the logic, we are separating the proof from its very reason for existing in the first place. God did not embody divinity in Jesus Christ for us to win arguments, God embodied divinity for us to experience grace, and to change lives by facilitating the experience of grace for others.
To me, that is at the heart of a devotional series such as ours that is meant to do its job. It is not meant to win the argument that there is a God who was incarnated in Jesus in Nazareth, it is meant to invite its audience into the experience of a God who was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth.
Which is not to say that argument and a good debate do not have their days—after all, that back-and-forth forms the core of several days of Holy Week. But even then, it is the experience of learning the lessons of those public debates, the experience of letting Jesus teach us as our Savior and not merely as a pundit winning an argument, that is meant to be life-changing. Even in matters of argument and debate, our experience of it is what changes us.
We see this played out across Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah, Simon becomes Peter, and Saul becomes Paul, all through experiencing God’s presence in their lives. Their experience transformed them because experiencing God is meant to be transformative. We were never meant to encounter our creator and walk away the exact same.
Neither, then, could Lazarus, and neither, then can we. From dead to living, from sinful to loving, from selfish to giving, we experience God and choose as a result to be transformed by God.
For all these figures—Lazarus very much included—that transformation was not a one-off. It was ongoing. Lazarus is transformed from dead to alive, but you had better believe the scene of his sister anointing his lifegiver en route to Jerusalem would have had an impact on him, just as the scene of his resurrection had the desired impact on the assembled crowd. Resurrection begets resurrection. Transformation begets more, and deeper, transformation. All because we experience them, and continue to experience them, in our lifelong quests to become better and more perfect creations.
Jerusalem, and all that will take place within, awaits on the
horizon. We will arrive there soon. And when we do, may it be the next stop on
our own path, like Lazarus, out of the tomb and into new life.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
February 21, 2021