Sunday, April 6, 2014 –
5th Sunday of Lent
John 11
11 1-2 A man by the name of Lazarus
was sick in the village
of Bethany
4 When Jesus heard this, he said, “His sickness
won’t end in death. It will bring glory to God and his Son.”
5 Jesus loved Martha and her sister and
brother. 6 But he stayed where he was for two more
days.7 Then he said to his disciples, “Now we will go
back to Judea .”
8 “Teacher,” they said, “the people there want to
stone you to death! Why do you want to go back?”
9 Jesus answered, “Aren’t there twelve hours in
each day? If you walk during the day, you will have light from the sun, and you
won’t stumble. 10 But if you walk during the night,
you will stumble, because you don’t have any light.” 11 Then
he told them, “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, and I am going there to wake him
up.”
12 They replied, “Lord, if he is asleep, he will
get better.” 13 Jesus really meant that Lazarus was
dead, but they thought he was talking only about sleep.
14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is
dead! 15 I am glad that I wasn’t there, because now
you will have a chance to put your faith in me. Let’s go to him.”
16 Thomas, whose nickname was “Twin,” said to the
other disciples, “Come on. Let’s go, so we can die with him.”
17 When Jesus got to Bethany ,
he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days.18 Bethany was only about two miles from Jerusalem
20 When Martha heard that Jesus had arrived, she
went out to meet him, but Mary stayed in the house. 21 Martha
said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have
died. 22 Yet even now I know that God will do anything
you ask.”
23 Jesus told her, “Your brother will live again!”
24 Martha answered, “I know that he will be raised
to life on the last day,[a] when
all the dead are raised.”
25 Jesus then said, “I am the one who raises the
dead to life! Everyone who has faith in me will live, even if they die. 26 And
everyone who lives because of faith in me will never really die. Do you believe
this?”
27 “Yes, Lord!” she replied. “I believe that you
are Christ, the Son of God. You are the one we hoped would come into the
world.”
28 After Martha said this, she went and privately
said to her sister Mary, “The Teacher is here, and he wants to see you.” 29 As
soon as Mary heard this, she got up and went out to Jesus. 30 He
was still outside the village where Martha had gone to meet him. 31 Many
people had come to comfort Mary, and when they saw her quickly leave the house,
they thought she was going out to the tomb to cry. So they followed her.
32 Mary went to where Jesus was. Then as soon as
she saw him, she knelt at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my
brother would not have died.”
33 When Jesus saw that Mary and the people with her
were crying, he was terribly upset 34 and asked,
“Where have you put his body?”
They replied, “Lord, come and you will see.”
35 Jesus started crying, 36 and
the people said, “See how much he loved Lazarus.”
37 Some of them said, “He gives sight to the blind.
Why couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”
38 Jesus was still terribly upset. So he went to
the tomb, which was a cave with a stone rolled against the entrance. 39 Then
he told the people to roll the stone away. But Martha said, “Lord, you know
that Lazarus has been dead four days, and there will be a bad smell.”
40 Jesus replied, “Didn’t I tell you that if you
had faith, you would see the glory of God?”
41 After the stone had been rolled aside, Jesus
looked up toward heaven and prayed, “Father, I thank you for answering my
prayer. 42 I know that you always answer my
prayers. But I said this, so that the people here would believe that you sent
me.”
43 When Jesus had finished praying, he shouted,
“Lazarus, come out!” 44 The man who had been dead
came out. His hands and feet were wrapped with strips of burial cloth, and a
cloth covered his face.
Jesus then told the people, “Untie him and let him go.”
How do you die?
Please note, when I say ‘you,’ I am
not asking, ‘how does one die?’ This is
more pointed. It is not a general sort
of pondering question, how does a person die?
This is an invasion of your personal space. I have wrestled with it all week because I am
not sure how to answer it myself. I am counted
when I say ‘you.’ We sit with a story glaring
at us, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus.
This is more than just an amazing miracle story. The story confronts us and we must answer. How do I die?
How do you die?
I grant the absurdity. Living people by definition have not
died. So how could we talk about how to
die? Every human life comes to an end, but
we live like that end is in a far off future, one we’d rather not discuss. We will all die and we all know that; yet
none of accepts it and each of us tries to put it off as long as possible. We are not interested, thank you, in the
question, how do you die?
If we believe the Bible, we should be. Paul tells us in Romans 6, ‘the wage of sin
is death’ (v.23). We sin every day. So we are paid with death every day. But, what does that even mean?
In a blog post, Australian pastor,
Andrew Prior writes, “Our things and our
doings blind us to new opportunities of being human; indeed, they prevent us
from becoming truly human. They prevent
us from finding that already present dimension of reality that the Gospel of
John calls ‘eternal life.’”[i] I think what he means, and I think what Jesus
means when he tells Martha that he is the “Resurrection and the life” (v. 25)
is that eternal life begins right now, today for those who are in Christ.
In Christ all sins are forgiven and
removed. In Christ, we do not receive
sin’s wage, death, because sin is no longer counted against us. Those not in Christ carry the weight of sin
every day. In little ways, they die
every day. Our things and our doings, the
possessions and activities that dominate the life of middle class people, blind
us.
We like stuff. We like thrills. We build our lives on possessions we acquire,
materials and things of which there is a limited number. Competition is inherent. New cars, expensive TV’s, fancy phones,
designer clothes – exploitation is involved in creating these things and only a
few people of the billions on earth end up having them. Dating back to the industrial revolution, our
society has 100 years creating and striving to own more and better
possessions. We have exported our ethos
all over the world. Consumerism has
become our dominant cultural value. Christianity
gets fit in around our consumption. Christianity
is defined by middle class Americans rather than middle class American being
shaped by Christianity.
Consumerism leads to all manners of
sin – exploitation, jealousy, envy, greed, theft, hoarding of goods, violence
(both to attain goods and to hold on to them and avoid sharing them); these
sins kill us every day, even we who are Christians. We would never admit it, but we are the experts who ought to know how to die
because we die daily. “You can’t take it
with you,” but secretly, we try.
Lord
if you had been here, my brother would not have died (v.21). Jesus’
response, I am the resurrection, is
intended to get her to see everything differently in light of who he is. He wants her to think about life and death in
a new way. Because she knows him her understanding
of mortality can change. And John wants
us to read his gospel and in reading know Jesus and in knowing think about life
and death in a whole new way.
Nothing is particularly evil about a
phone or a trip to the movies or a new TV.
You can serve God through the use of the phone. I can establish a relationship with someone
and eventually share Christ with him.
Maybe he won’t go to church, but he’ll go to the movies. We can host video parties where we watch the
big game on our giant flat screen and in that context form relationships in
which we give witness to the gospel.
These things can be used to glorify God.
But for the last century the culture around us has evolved into a
worldview. In this worldview, joy and
happiness come with new things and thrilling activities. This worldview is now entrenched. We are part of it.
I see many Christians getting their
energy and joy and excitement in purchases, in salary increases, in new gadgets,
big or small. They don’t realize how
much better Jesus is because they can’t see him. How they live in the now, by the worldview of
consuming/owning/hoarding materials (the best of all goods and services), shapes
how they think about life, death, and eternity.
It should be the exact opposite. The reality of eternal life with Jesus, as a
son or daughter of God, should be what defines how we live now. But we can’t really see that eternal life
with God. As Prior says, “Our things and
our doings blind us to new opportunities of being human.” The new humanity he refers to is the redeemed
humanity, the humanity that has discovered Jesus and been made new. This is the humanity of 1 Corinthians 15,
people with bodies that are incorruptible, that cannot become sick or die. This is the humanity of Genesis 1-2 that God
created as “very good.” We cannot
imagine it.
How did Jesus say it? “I am the one who
raises the dead to life! Everyone who has faith in me will live, even if they
die. 26 And everyone who lives because of faith in
me will never really die” (v.25b-26).
One commentator writes that life in Jesus is life of another order, a
new order. The great blessing is not
that Jesus raised Lazarus. Lazarus would
die again. In fact in the very next
chapter, the religious leaders plot the death of Lazarus as part of their plan
to stop Jesus. He’s just been raised and he’s on an officially sanctioned hit
list (12:10).
The great blessing of this story is
what Lazarus’ raising means: it is a sign of Jesus as the resurrection and the
life. He is the life. Does Martha
believe it? Do we? If we say yes, then what does it mean for how
we live and how we view death? From the
point of view of the Gospel of John, everlasting life in Jesus is the same on
both sides of the grave – now and after we are resurrected. When we live in Christ we begin eternity now.[ii]
This all comes down to
worldview. Do we see Jesus? Or are we seeing as the world in which we
have grown up has conditioned us to see?
If we keep the worldview that has been imposed on us, a world view of
materialistic consumerism, one in which joy comes from acquisition, then we are
driven to buy and own. We have to train
ourselves to share and be generous because we’re conditioned to greed,
hoarding, envy, coveting, and eventually violence, direct or indirect. These sin-soaked mentalities bring
death. That’s one worldview.
Another comes when by God’s grace we
are freed from the destructive worldview we’ve always known. By the Holy Spirit we are changed and we take
on a resurrection worldview. It comes as
we see Jesus, fix our view on Him, and live with the Spirit in us.
Martha lived many centuries before
the industrial revolution, so her worldview was different than ours, but for
different reasons it was just as stuck in death as ours is. Jesus told her to roll away the stone. “But Lord,” Martha said, “you know that
Lazarus has been dead four days, and there will be a bad smell” (v.39). She had a death mentality. She had just professed faith that Jesus is
the Messiah to his face. That was not enough to help her think
differently. She believed in death and lived
toward just as we do. Avoid it while
living toward it.
Jesus rejects the smell of death
literally and in the sense that death whether it comes from the sins of a
materialistic worldview or another sin-filled worldview stinks. The rot of death reeks and Christ won’t have
it. Death is the opposite of what God
has in store for us. In Jesus, God is
with us. He is Immanuel – ‘God with us.’
Thus, when we are seeing Jesus and with Jesus and his Holy Spirit, we get the
opposite of death.
The resurrection view is not only
for Lazarus that special day in 30AD. He
did not get a bonus by being lucky enough to live in the days of Jesus walking the
earth in the Incarnation. That miracle of Jesus
raising him was a sign of a new way of seeing and living – the way of Jesus. Similarly, today, there are indicators of the
resurrection worldview. Think of coming
alongside of and helping “the poor, the sick, the lonely, the depressed, the
slaves, the refugees, the hungry, the homeless, the abused, … the despairing,
[the orphan and widow, and the confused];” working on behalf of the ‘least of
these’ … is a sign of the presence of Jesus today. When we bring healing and
love, community and family, truth and hope, we are playing a vital part in the
mission of Jesus and his church. Jesus
brought hope in the first century; he continues in the 21st as he
works through the deeds of his church to rescue people from the stink of
corruption and death.[iii] Our work of loving anyone and everyone and
doing is proactively and sacrificially is a sign that our vision is colored by
the Eternal Kingdom. Our now is built by
our sense of eternity. When we see Him
and see as he sees and work for healing and truth, motivated by Jesus-love, we
are living eternity now. It is then that
we have the resurrection worldview.
How do you die? The best answer is ‘I don’t know how I die
because I am living forever with Jesus.
My body will die and then be raised.
I am already living eternally. I
cannot say how I die because I have a resurrection worldview.’ That’s the best answer. We can give that answer with Jesus’
help. From now until Easter, ask Him to
push all distractions to the background and help you see as He sees.
AMEN
No comments:
Post a Comment