Advent Lutheran Church

"When Jesus Is Too Late (Lent 5)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”  This Gospel lesson provides for us a portrait of Jesus that we don’t often see, or think about.  We usually don’t think of Jesus as the sort of person who had people he considered to be his friends.  Oh, he had his disciples, his students who traveled with him; he had the crowds who turned out in huge numbers to hear him speak; and he certainly had a number of people who came to him for healing.  But we don’t think of him as someone who might drop by for coffee and conversation, as we might do with one another.

            But the Bible tells us that Jesus did indeed have close friends.  At least that’s how Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are portrayed.  Jesus apparently had dinner fairly frequently at their home, and may have been their houseguest from time to time. 

We know a little something about Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, mainly from other stories in the Gospels.  Martha: she’s the take-charge, task-oriented, focused, get-it-done person.  She’s the Lutheran in the family.  Mary: she’s just the opposite.  She’s not the practical one.  She was the art major in college.  She’s smart, but not careful.  She always manages to send money to save-the-whales or save-the-seals or save-the-whatever, but she never seems to be able to scrape up enough to pay the rent.  And then there’s Lazarus.  He’s the one we know least about.  When we see him in Scripture he’s either sick, dead, or very surprised to be alive again.  Through it all, he never says a word.  The Bible says that Jesus loved this family, loved all three of these people as his friends.

This One who you and I call Lord and Savior, we also refer to as our friend.  The hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” says it well: he knows our every weakness, our every flaw; and still he sticks with us, loves us no matter what, no matter when.  He’s our friend.  But did you ever stop to think that that’s how he sees us?  Later in John’s Gospel, in Chapter 15, he tells his handful of disciples, “I do not call you servants any longer … now I have called you friends.”  He says those words not only to his First Century disciples but to believers of every time and place – to you.  You are someone Jesus sees as his close, intimate, personal friend. 

So does that qualify you for special treatment?  According to this Gospel lesson, apparently not.

One day, while Jesus was somewhere else, his friend, Lazarus, became ill.  When word reaches Jesus, his response is remarkable: he sits tight, does nothing.  This is not what we expect from a friend.  You wake up in the middle of the night in the middle of a medical emergency, you call 911 and you call a friend – not necessarily in that order.  And you expect some action!  You expect your friend to show up and wait by your side while the ambulance is on the way, maybe even go to the hospital with you.  But that’s not what Jesus does:  “… though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”

Here’s a tip on reading the Bible.  When you get to a passage in the Bible that upsets you, or confuses you, or irritates or offends you – especially offends you – stay with that passage and do some digging into what it means.  I have a colleague who says that every Gospel lesson contains what he calls “a stone in the road,” a part of the text that’s troubling to us.  As Bible readers we have a few options: we can simply ignore the stone, we can acknowledge it and go around it, or we can hit it head-on.  I think it’s always best to hit it head-on, because that offensive text in the Bible just might be God’s way of getting our attention.

That’s what we have in this lesson: an irritating, confusing verse.  A literal, hard interpretation makes it even worse: “Therefore, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he remained in the place two days.”  It was because Jesus loved Lazarus that he waited until it was too late.

If that’s confusing to us, you can just imagine what was going on in that house in Bethany, the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  When Martha and Mary go out to meet Jesus, they go separately but they say the same thing: “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  That brief lament is the entrance to a whole houseful of confusion and disappointment and pain.  Maybe you’ve lived in that house.  Life becomes especially challenging, so you pray about it.  Your primary relationship is a real struggle and it’s getting worse, so you pray for peace.  Your business is on the ropes and so you pray for a rebound.  Someone you love is ill and you pray for healing. 

But Jesus doesn’t come.  And the very thing that you fear the most is the thing that comes to pass.

The hard truth is that Jesus is not our rescuer who swoops in at the last minute to save the day.  He is our savior who arrives after the last minute has come and gone.  There is no indication in Scripture that Jesus has come to help you with your plan for your life.  Instead, he has come to give you a new life.  If you have your life pretty much the way you want it, you just need a little assist here, a tweak there, a little adjustment over there – you don’t need Jesus.  Jesus doesn’t come with an assist; he comes with a whole new life.

So, often times he waits.  Sometimes he waits until the plan we’re working on doesn’t work anymore.  That’s when he acts, because that’s when we’re ready for the new life that he brings.

Last Sunday I was at First Lutheran Church in Tulsa.  I had been asked to do some work with that congregation’s leadership as it begins a time of transition.  I was there from Thursday night to Sunday afternoon, and one of my responsibilities was to preach on Sunday morning.  They have two services, the first at 8:15, so I showed up around 7:30.  As I was getting ready in the office, a member of the church council stuck her head in the doorway and said, “Uh, pastor, there’s a young man out here who wants to go into the sanctuary and pray.”  I said, “Well, that’s one of the reasons we’re here, so go ahead and show him into the sanctuary.”  She said, “This one is a little different.  Maybe you should talk to him.”

I walked out to the narthex and found the only person in it, a young man around 18.  He was standing still and weaving back and forth.  When I got within 15 feet of him there was the unmistakable scent of methamphetamine.  I introduced myself, found out his name was Josh, and asked if he wanted to pray.  He nodded yes.  “What do you want to pray about?” I asked.  “Life,” he said.

So we walked into the empty sanctuary, sat in a pew, and I held his hand while he told be a bit about his situation, his life.  Then I prayed for Josh, and as I was speaking the prayer I was thinking to myself, “It’s going to take a miracle for this young man to pull his life out of the ditch.”  When I ended the prayer, I gave Josh a blue stone.  He said, “You carry blue stones in your pocket?”  I said, “It looks a little weird, but I do, and here’s why.”  Then I told him that the stone represents Jesus and his constant love for us; that no matter where we go or what we do, we are never out of God’s loving reach.  Josh smiled, as best he could, and put the stone in his pants pocket.

We left the sanctuary – Josh didn’t want to stay for worship – and as I watched him weave his way through the narthex back to the streets, I thought again, “It’s going to take a miracle.”  And then I remembered the blue stone that he had accepted, and who it represents.  This is the One who brings miracles, who brings new life.

That’s what Lazarus discovered, and he didn’t even ask for it.  He couldn’t; he was dead!  He could only receive his new life as a gift.  That’s what Scripture tells us, and it doesn’t tell us any more than that.  Which opens up a whole host of irresistible questions, like “What was it like, Lazarus?  What did you experience?”  The Bible doesn’t address those questions, or what happened in that little village of Bethany after Lazarus had been raised from the dead.  How did the villagers treat him?  What was his attitude toward them?

The great American playwright Eugene O’Neill toyed with those questions in a play that he wrote and titled “Lazarus Laughed.”  It takes place in Bethany, in the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  It’s just after Lazarus has been raised.  Lazarus sits in a corner of the house, and the villagers all crowd in the room; it’s packed full, standing room only.  They pepper him with questions.  “What did you see?  What did you feel?  What was it like to be dead and then alive again?  Tell us, Lazarus!”

Lazarus is quiet for the longest time, and then he opens his mouth to speak.  He says one word, the first word he’s spoken since coming back from the dead.  He says, “Yes!” 

And then, slowly, he begins to laugh.  Not a soft chuckle, but a full, deep laugh of pure joy.  And he can’t stop laughing! 

When he finally settles down, he tells his friends this: “There is only life. There is only laughter, the laughter of God.  It soars to the heights; it resounds to the depths.  There is no death, really.  It is not what it looks like from this side.  Death is not an abyss or entrance into nothingness or chaos or punishment.  Death is a portal, a passageway into deeper and brighter life, eternal change, everlasting growth.  That is what lies out ahead of us in death.  We were born of the laughter of God and we move toward the laughter of God.  There is only life.

“Therefore, we must learn to live, to celebrate, to love, to accept, to affirm.  We must learn to participate in God’s love of life – to feel about this existence of ours the way God feels when God looks at creation and God’s own heart is filled with ecstasy. There is only life, my brothers and sisters. This is the challenge, not death.  The grave is not what you think.  It is an empty space, a doorway into more, not less."

The rest of the play is a depiction of what happens in that village of Bethany as the townspeople are increasingly affected by Lazarus’ laughter.  They no longer fear death, so they embrace their newfound freedom and have a growing appreciation for life and greater joy in living it.  This threatens the power of the Roman authorities, who threaten Lazarus to get him stop laughing, but to no avail.  Finally the emperor threatens him with death: “If you do not stop that laughing, I will have you executed.”

“Go ahead,” Lazarus says, “there is only life!”

Well, it’s only a play.  But its theological point is right on target: With God there is only life.  That’s the gift that Jesus comes to bring, and he brings it not on your timetable but on his.  That puts you squarely at his mercy – the mercy of your truest friend, the mercy of the friend who loves you as only God can.

Amen.