“ Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.””
The raising of Lazarus, a follower of Jesus during his earthly ministry, is no doubt one of the greatest miracles that Jesus performed pre-cross. It was so great in fact, and had such a profound effect on those that not only witnessed it but also just heard about it, that the Jewish leadership sought to kill… re-kill?… Lazarus in order to put a stop to the ripple effect of transformations happening in people’s hearts on account of his new life (John 12:9-11).
Reading through the account of Lazarus’ death and eventual revival certainly gives way to a few opportunities to raise an eyebrow and scratch your head. Why did Jesus not rush to Bethany to heal his friend? In fact, why did he need to go there at all in order to heal him? We see just a few chapters before this (and many other times in the other three Gospels) that Jesus was most certainly able to heal from afar (John 4:46-54), and we know that Jesus heard about Lazarus being sick before he died (John 11:3). So what was different about this time? Why did Jesus wait, letting his friend “fall asleep,” as he says in 11:11?
Because we believe in the good, perfect and unchanging nature of God, there must a good, perfect and unchangeable answer to this question. If you go to Hiawatha, or any gospel-preaching church for that matter, it is probably no surprise that the answer is… the gospel. The answer is that because Jesus died on the cross, the fear of physical death is broken. The answer is that the separation that Jesus was overcoming was so much larger than the stone that lay between Lazarus and his sisters. The answer is that our God stepped off of his throne and into our world as a squalling, homeless infant, knowing that this day would come, where he would stand not twenty feet away from his friend who lay lifeless in a cave, his sisters sprawled at his feet weeping that he could have done more… that he should have done more. And he knew that these people who he loved would not understand. Martha’s insistence that the stink of death would be too much for Jesus was proof of that. Of course we would think that the God of the world, the God of life itself, would be repelled by our odor, our stink of death. And yet it’s into that stink, that lifeless tomb, that Jesus calls. And it would be into another lifeless tomb that he would be carried just a few months after this.
Can you imagine Jesus’ voice booming out, sending ripples of life into Lazarus’ body? Did the others there feel it too? Did their bodies respond to his voice, like a dead man getting shocked by a defibrillator? Or maybe more like a sleeping bride, stirring at her lover’s voice? Did they know then what Jesus was… who Jesus was? Maybe. But maybe not. Because as wonderful as this miracle was, and as much as we cleave to it when we stand at a loved ones bedside who is succumbing to the pains of life, or perhaps as we sit in our living room with our children playing at our feet, watching as the world pulls herself into isolation as a seemingly unstoppable virus rips through her… as wonderful as it is to think about Jesus calling into that tomb and reversing death itself, that is not the point of Lazarus’ story. When life is restored, Lazarus finds himself still wrapped in his burial clothes, including his face. He woke up in darkness, alone. He probably struggled with the linens as he stumbled out of the cave. This miracle could have ended with Lazarus popped out of the tomb already, unbound and fancy free, as they say. Instead, he was given life, but not true freedom. If you look at the passage, who was it that helped him the rest of the way out of his burial clothes? Jesus called on the men and women who were there, his friends and family, including his sisters, to help unbind him. This is one of those tricky ‘already but not yet’ passages, one that whispers life yet still moves the story forward, yearning for something more. And I think this is a wonderful picture of where we are at as a church today.
If you are a Christian, if you have looked inside yourself and realized that you are not enough, regardless of what culture tells you today, and that you need God and that the only way you can get to him is to cross the bridge that he himself built, then you are Lazarus. You were a dead man, sitting in his own death stink in a tomb. And yet, Jesus has called your name, and has called you into life. But there is an incompleteness about it. We are living, yet not yet complete. We are united to Christ, yet still bound in our burial clothes. Until the time when our burial clothes are removed for good and left lying in the tomb next to Jesus’ own burial clothes (John 20:6-7), Christ has called us, his church, to help unbind each other. We will spend most of our lives in this state, living yet still shrouded in the remnants of death. And it is the body, the church, that Jesus uses to comfort and care for each other.
So as we go into this time of unknowing, or any time of uncertainty or pain or illness, we can take comfort that we have a God that is bigger than death, who will move us from this temporary life to one that is eternal and unblemished by the stink of sin. The call will go from active (“Take away the stone”-John 11:39) to passive, to already done (“The stone had been taken away”-John 20:1). And while we wait for that, we can rejoice that God has given us the church, our family, to lean on, to help peel back layers of the burial clothes that we found ourselves in when we first heard our name rushing towards us from the light outside of our tomb. Even from afar, we have so many opportunities to push in to each other, to whisper the gospel through our prayers and conversations and encouragement and service. We have been given a whole community of people who can rejoice and laugh and hug (well, I mean, maybe don’t do that one right now) and sing, even as we trip over our burial linens that are dragging behind us. That is the church. We are the church. And we know that this fear and uncertainty and sickness has an end, one that is barreling towards it with unmovable certainty.
LAURA RINAS / GUEST CONTRIBUTOR