And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.” And when he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.” (John 11.41-44)
Our selection from Scripture today is the story of the raising of Lazarus, the last of the seven signs that the evangelist John provides in his text, these signs pointing to the true identity of Rabbi Jesus, revealed to the people through the wonders that he works. As the last sign, it should be understood as the most important, its importance underscored by its being the longest of the seven stories that contextualize the signs or wonders.
Condensing the story, we can say it tells of a close friend of Rabbi Jesus’ named Lazarus, their friendship so close that the evangelist describes him as “the one you love.” Lazarus takes ill and his sisters, Martha and Mary, send word to the Rabbi to tell him that Lazarus is not well. Given the distance and the conditions of travel, Rabbi Jesus arrives after Lazarus has died. In fact, he has been in his tomb for four days.
His sisters are disconsolate, as we would expect, both of them holding extended conversations with Rabbi Jesus when he arrives at their home, the conversations allowing the Rabbi to assure them that their brother “will rise again.” As is more often than not in this gospel, there is confusion about what Rabbi Jesus’ words mean, giving him an opportunity to amplify and clarify his words.
Asking to see the tomb, Rabbi Jesus leads the mourners to the burial site where he is overwhelmed with emotions, something the evangelist has said little about prior to this episode. But here, he tells us that Rabbi Jesus loved Lazarus and his two sisters, that he became angry (variously translated as groaned in spirit or troubled) at the fact that Lazarus has died, and he weeps at the tomb, three powerful emotions that each of us is very familiar with, the Rabbi’s emotions humanizing the story and emphasizing its importance in the movement of the gospel.
Standing outside the tomb, Rabbi Jesus commands those standing nearby to remove the stone that covers the grave, resulting in Martha urging him not to open the grave because of the smell of decomposition, saying to the Rabbi, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” Undeterred, Rabbi Jesus assures her that he knows what he is doing. After the stone has been rolled away, he utters a prayer, then shouts a command into the emptiness of the grave, “Lazarus, come out!” And within seconds, Lazarus appears, “bound hand and foot with wrappings, his face also wrapped around with a cloth.”
Whereupon, Rabbi Jesus orders those closest to the grave to unbind the man, the removal of the burial cloths symbolizing that he is no longer dead, but lives again. As we might expect, the onlookers are stunned, some of whom are so moved by the wondrous sign that they have witnessed that they “believed in Jesus,” a response we have seen in some of the other signs and elsewhere in the gospel, the evangelist in this way inviting his reader to a similar response.
Given the length and the layers of the story, we can offer no in-depth analysis here, letting others more schooled and less hurried to delve into the depths of the episode. For our purposes, we may want to focus our attention on something that Rabbi Jesus says to Martha in the conversation they share when the Rabbi arrives in Bethany at her home. At one point, he says to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.”
Of course, we have heard the Rabbi make similar statements in this gospel, such as “I am living water,” or “I am the bread of life,” or “I am the light of the world.” Now, he says “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is a common motif in the gospel, a recurring effort on the part of Rabbi Jesus to tell people who he is, although they are slow to understand. (It makes for an interesting contrast with the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus is always telling his disciples not to tell anyone who he is, the so-called “Messianic secret” the underlying theme in Mark’s text.)
Certainly, these “I am” statements offer us an opportunity to consider the identity of Jesus and to draw our conclusions, the same invitation that the Rabbi made to his listeners, now inviting us to an understanding of who he is. The purpose of John’s text is to move us to that clarity, putting before us the signs, asking us to see in them sure proof of the identity of Jesus, the one who was sent to do the works of his Father in Heaven.
However, we also can take a moment to ponder our own identity, asking ourselves how we might provide to others an understanding of who we are. How do we end the statement, “I am?” Psychology teaches us that people usually respond with the most obvious answers, such as “I am a man or woman”; “I am a husband or wife”; I am a dad or a mom”; “I am an office worker or a street cleaner.” These are the typical answers that we give because these are the ways we most often see ourselves.
Hopefully, the season of Lent offers us the opportunity to reflect on who we are in a different way, not dismissing the ordinary ways in which we see ourselves, but asking us to find a deeper identity, to reflect on who we are at our core. If we put in the time and the effort, we begin to answer with something like “I am a child of God,” and, if we practice Christianity, then also “I am a follower of Jesus.”
I would suggest that we move these identifiers from the background into the foreground, seeing them as the foundational stones on which all our other identities should be based. If we begin with “I am a child of God” or “I am a follower of Jesus,” then those realities should influence and impact our personhood in all its dimensions, including how we parent, how we interact as spouses, how we work in the world.
Put simply, if we begin with our self-understanding as sons and daughters of God, brought to a closer relationship with him through the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth, then we will parent in a certain way, be a husband or a wife in a certain way, and be a plumber and a poet in a certain way. Our various identities are held together and formed into a unified whole by our core identity as beloved children of God.
As we near the end of John’s gospel, we see this is precisely how Rabbi Jesus came to understand his own identity, his many references to himself as the light of the world or the bread of life or living water held together by his understanding as fundamentally sent into the world by the Most High God to do his works. Claimed by God and called his son both at his baptism and at the Transfiguration, he saw his sonship as foundational to everything else he did in the world.
When we allow our core identity as children of God to undergird our lives, permeating and influencing everything else we do, we approach each and every responsibility with that self-identity directing our steps, telling us how we are to parent, how we are to love our spouse, how we are to work in the world. These more ordinary roles suddenly are cast in a new direction by the impetus of our status as children of God, born into the world to do the work of God.
With this understanding, we may want to look more closely at the story of Lazarus because in it we find Rabbi Jesus offering us a roadmap on how a son or a daughter of God should task themselves in the world. As he stands before the tomb of Lazarus, the smell of death in the air, the Rabbi weeps, seeing the wrong that death does, becomes angry at the power of evil, and then confronts it, demanding that life is restored, ripping from the clutches of the tomb the one incarcerated behind the rock.
As children of God, then, we are called to evidence the same actions and reactions in the face of all that is wrong in the world, weeping at the sight of so much death, feeling enraged that the world is weighed down by evil, and then demanding that things be made right again, shouting into the tombs in front of us, “Lazarus, come out!”
And we should never doubt that death and tombs come in many shapes and sizes. A single mom working three jobs to put a roof over her children’s heads is in the throes of death, locked in a tomb, a rock blocking any way out. An elderly couple skipping meals so that they can pay for their medicine is staring death in the face, pushed into a dark hole, a rock rolled over it. A child growing up in a Chicago ghetto, running drugs for soulless hoodlums, already knows the smell of death, and feels himself slipping into a grave, wanting a chance at a life, but a heavy boulder blocking any chance of his having one.
These are the wrongs that cry to the high heavens for redress, the Most High God sending us into the world to make right what is wrong, to do his works, as Rabbi Jesus did his works, refusing to abide by the rules of the world that allow the poor to stay stuck in poverty, where the hungry keep empty stomachs, and where the old and infirm wither away growing older and weaker with each passing day. We stand before these tombs and, as children of God called to do the works of our Heavenly Father, we cannot and should not walk away, oblivious to the obvious wrongs that stare us in the face.
Instead, we do as Jesus did. We cry at the brutality. We become angry at the sight of evil. And we demand that life be restored, calling for all the Lazaruses of the world to come out of their tombs, demanding that the death straps around them be released, and that they be allowed to walk freely in the world because they too are children of God, and as such, they are our brothers and our sisters.
And delay is not an option, anymore than it was an option for Rabbi Jesus. When the disciples tell him not to risk returning to Judea, the home of Lazarus, because his enemies are intent on stoning him to death, he answers them, “Are there not twelve hours in a day? If one walks during the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world.” It is his way of telling them–and us–that the window of opportunity does not remain open forever. We must work while we can still see the light.
Any delay in doing our duty, any inaction on our part, only means darkness moves closer and claims more of the world, snuffing out light and life with each step across the sky, night claiming what belongs to the day. For those of us who understand ourselves to be children of the light, then there is but one option, the same one that Rabbi Jesus took, summed up in the words he says to his followers, “Let’s go to Judea.”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 