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A Matter of Death and Life
A sermon by
Dr. Jim Somerville
Senior Pastor
(effective May 11, 2007)
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, March 9, 2008
I’m
hoping that we will have lots of chances to get to know each other well over the
next few months and years and decades. But, when I was talking to the senior
staff a few weeks ago about this day and about how it would go, I asked them if
there was anything special I should do during the sermon time. And some of them
said, “Well, it might not hurt if you could make some sort of connection with
the congregation.” I said, “Well, I hope I could make some sort of connection
with the congregation.” We talked about it a little more and finally, somebody
said, “Just preach the Gospel.” Which is what I hope to do, just preach the
Gospel because I didn’t come to talk about me, I came to talk about Him.
Just
a little while ago I was standing over there and somebody looked around and
said, “This looks like an Easter crowd.” And so maybe it is appropriate that our
text for today is a resurrection text—a few weeks before Easter.
Hear
the word of the Lord from John, chapter 11, verse 17 and verses 21-26. “When
Jesus arrived in Bethany he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for
four days. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here my brother would
not have died. But even now I know that God will give you what ever you ask of
him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I
know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to
her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though
they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do
you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord. I believe that you are the
Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.’” The Gospel of
our Lord, Jesus Christ, thanks be to God.
One
of my preaching professors once suggested that when you preach to any
congregation for the very first time, it’s a good idea to choose a familiar
passage of scripture. “Don’t go hunting around in Habakkuk for something that
will impress them,” he said. “Pick something that everybody knows and everybody
loves. That way even if they don’t know you, they will know the text and you’ll
be standing on familiar ground.” That seemed like a good idea then, it seems
like a good idea now and this passage from John 11 seems perfect for the
occasion.
You
may not know me, but if you have been a Christian for any length of time at all,
you are good friends with John, the writer of this Gospel. John is a good friend
of mine, too. I can almost hear him saying, “Jim, I want you to meet the
congregation of First Baptist, Richmond. And First Baptist, I want you to meet
Jim.” And we would say what people always say on those occasions, “Well, any
friend of John’s is a friend of mine.”
But
before we rush off to celebrate our newfound friendship, John wants to introduce
us to at least one other person. At the very beginning of chapter 11, he
mentions Lazarus. A certain man was ill. He says, “Lazarus of Bethany.” It is
the first time we have heard Lazarus’s name in this Gospel, but within a few
verses we have learned that he is the brother of Mary and Martha and someone who
is apparently very dear to Jesus. These sisters send word to Jesus saying,
“Lord, Lazarus, the one you love, is ill.” And I say, “Wait a minute, Lazarus,
the one you love? Who is this Lazarus? And when and how did Jesus come to love
him?” To come up with an answer we’re going to have to dig around in the Bible
just a little bit.
In
Luke, chapter two, verse 41, we are told that Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem
every year for the feast of the Passover and in Luke 2:42 we are told that when
Jesus was 12 years old, He went with them. What we don’t know is whether Jesus
ever went before that time. We do know that He went to Jerusalem again and again
afterwards. But perhaps you could imagine that this was a part of the annual
ritual for Jesus and His family—to load up the provisions and make the journey
from Nazareth to Jerusalem. And perhaps you can imagine that when they got
there, they always stayed at the house out in Bethany. It would fit the pattern.
Mark
tells us that when Jesus rode into the city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, He
looked around at everything in the temple and because it was already late He
went on out to Bethany.
Matthew says that after He left the city He spent the night in Bethany.
In
Luke’s Gospel, He visits Bethany at least twice.
In
John’s Gospel we hear about Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, from
Bethany. It isn’t impossible to imagine that Jesus was in the habit of going to
this home whenever He came to Jerusalem and that He had been doing it since He
was a boy. If you can go that far with me, then go just a little further.
Imagine that Jesus’ parents and Lazarus’ parents were good friends, maybe even
relatives. Imagine that Lazarus and Jesus were cousins of some kind, as
everybody in the Middle East seems to be - cousins of some kind. Imagine that
they were about the same age and that they looked forward to Passover each year
as kind of an annual family reunion. This whole big family getting together,
Jesus and Lazarus getting up early in the morning to go to the Festival to see
the sights and to hear the sounds and to lie awake late at night and talking
about all that they had seen and heard. Imagine these two boys playing together,
romping over the hills of Judea and trying to stay far away from those two pesky
girls, Mary and Martha. If you can imagine all that, then you can see how Jesus
and Lazarus might have become best friends.
All
of this, of course, is pure speculation. I don’t want any of you going home and
telling your friends and neighbors this afternoon that now you know the untold
story of Jesus’ boyhood. We’re putting together the pieces and they may not all
connect in just the right way. There are some things we can’t know, but we do
know this: we do know that Jesus loved Lazarus and we know that those kinds of
relationships take time.
We
also know that Mary and Martha had a relationship with Jesus that exceeded
casual acquaintance. Mary was the one who sat at Jesus’ feet while He was
teaching. Martha was the one who came to Him and complained to Him about her
lazy, no-good sister. Mary was the one who poured out a pound of expensive
ointment on Jesus’ feet. And Martha was probably cooking and serving His dinner
on that same night. It is not hard for any of us to imagine that Mary and Martha
and Lazarus thought of Jesus as an old and dear friend. Which would explain why,
when Lazarus became ill, Mary and Martha felt free to send for Jesus. What it
doesn’t explain is why, when they did, Jesus decided not to come.
He
tells His disciples that this is not the kind of illness that leads to death.
Rather, it is for God’s glory that the Son of God may be glorified through it.
But then it does lead to death. Lazarus dies and you have to wonder if the Great
Physician has misdiagnosed the illness. Or, is this the first hint we get in
this story, that when Jesus talks about the death, He doesn’t use the word in
the same way we use it. Because there is another hint, just a few verses later.
When
Jesus has dawdled wherever He is for two more days He tells His disciples that
He needs to go back to Judea because their friend Lazarus has ‘fallen asleep’
and He needs to wake him up.
You
can’t blame the disciples for being confused, can you? Jesus had said that this
was not the kind of illness that leads to death and then He tells them that
Lazarus has fallen asleep and needs somebody to wake him up. One of the
disciples says in his most patient voice, “Um… Lord, if he has fallen asleep,
he will be all right” (thinking that Lazarus would wake up the next morning just
as everyone else wakes up). And so Jesus has to put it into language they can
understand. He has to use their word for what has happened to Lazarus. He says
to them, “Lazarus is dead.” But even as He says it, you get the feeling that He
spells the word with a small ‘d.’ Which is not the way most of us spell it.
We
spell death with a capital ‘D.’ It is the last word in so many situations. The
word we use when all hope is gone. When it becomes clear that that project you
have been working on for six months is never going to materialize, you might say
that it’s dead. When that relationship that you have been trying to keep alive
for months and years finally breathes its last—you might say its dead. When the
surgeon comes out of the operating room and shakes her head and tells you, “I’m
sorry, we did everything we could.” We say that someone is dead. For us to say
that sort of thing, to say that someone dead, that something is dead is to say
that all hope, every hope, our last hope is gone.
Which
is why the disciples might have wondered why they were going back to Judea at
all. If Lazarus was dead, then he was dead. There was nothing that could be done
for him and there was no way they could get back in time for the funeral. The
last time they were in Judea, Jesus’ enemies has been picking up stones and
threatening to kill Him – it was risky business to travel back in that direction
and they told him so. But when Jesus insisted, Thomas (the one we call the
doubter) said, “Let us also go with him and, if we have to, die with him.”
Thomas had his faults, but a lack of courage was not one of them.
And
so they got up from where they were and they went toward Jerusalem. They crossed
over the Jordan River and went up that long winding road between Jericho and
Jerusalem. They topped the Mount of Olives and turned left and went two miles
down toward Bethany.
As
soon as they came to the outskirts of the village, they got the news that
Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now that may seem like a minor
detail to you, we already know that he is dead, why would John bother to tell us
it had been four days? Except that there was, in those days, among those people
– the belief that the soul of a person hovered near the body for three days
after death. And of course, it was always possible during those days, and often
prayed for, that the soul would re-enter and re-animate the body—that the person
would come back to life again.
For
John to tell us that Lazarus had been in the tomb four days is to tell us that
all hope is gone, his soul has left the building.
And
so it is a hopeless Martha who comes out to meet Jesus. She says, “Lord, if you
had been here, my brother would not have died.” And it must have stung, like an
accusation. “Jesus, if you hadn’t had other things to do, if you had only
dropped everything and come to be here, Lazarus, my brother, would still be
alive.” Maybe she didn’t mean it that way. Maybe she meant it as a statement of
faith, “Lord, I know you are the Great Healer. I have watched you heal the blind
and the maimed and the lame. If you had been here, I am sure my brother would
still be living and breathing.”
Maybe
she meant it that way. Jesus doesn’t seem to take it that way. You can almost
see the hurt on his face which prompts Martha to say, right away, “But even now,
even now, I know that the father will give you whatever you ask of him.” There
was a long silence. Jesus looking on Martha’s face, seeing all the grief that
was there, all the hurt and disappointment and finally He said to her, “Martha,
your brother will rise again.”
It
sounds to me just like the kind of things preachers say to people at funeral
homes when there has been a death in the family. They try to offer a word of
hope and they end up saying things like, “Well, at least he’s not suffering
anymore.” Right? They say, “Well, I believe everything happens for a reason,
surely there was a reason for this.” They say things like, “Well, now he’s with
his momma and daddy in heaven.” They do the best they can—they try to comfort.
In
Jesus’ time those Jews who believed in life after death believed that it didn’t
happen right away. They believed that when you died, you were dead and you
stayed dead until the Day of Resurrection, until that ‘great getting up morning’
at the end of time. And so to say something like, “Your brother will rise again”
would have been common among those people and what Martha said in response was
probably the common reply. “I know, I know he will rise again in the
resurrection, at the last day.”
But
that’s not what Jesus means at all and He reaches out His hand and He raises her
chin, looks her in the eye, He says, “Martha, I am the resurrection and the
life, the one who believes in me, even though he were dead will live, and those
who live and believe in me will never die. Do you believe this?” And Martha
replies with one of the highest confessions of faith in all of scripture. She
says, “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who
is coming into the world.”
If it
seems that Jesus has been spelling death with a small ‘d’ while everyone else
around him has been spelling death with a capital ‘D,’ it seems here that while
everyone else is spelling life with a small ‘l,’ Jesus spells it with a capital
‘L.’
Life,
for him, means something much more than having a beating heart and drawing
breath into your lungs. It is not only whatever Lazarus was doing before he
stopped doing, when Jesus talks about Life, He talks about life abundant, life
everlasting. He says that this is what He came to bring. And what He came to
bring is as different from mere existence as plunging into the Pacific Ocean is
from splashing a little cold water on your face. “I am the Resurrection and the
Life,” Jesus says. “Those who believe in me, even though they die will live and
those who live and believe in me will never die. Those who die,” he says (small
‘d’), “will Live again (capital ‘L’) . “And those who live like that and believe
in me will never experience, (capital ‘D’) death. Count on it.” And then He asks
Martha, “Do you agree?” And to her credit she says she does. She says it without
even seeing any evidence of it. But the evidence is coming.
A
little later in this same story, Jesus is standing there at the tomb. Martha is
there, Mary is there, all those who came out to grieve with them are there and
Jesus asks someone to roll away the stone. Martha begs his pardon, she says,
“Lord, it’s been four days. There will be a stench.” Or as it says in the King
James Version, “Lord, he ‘stinketh.’”
But
Jesus says, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of
God?” He tells them to roll away the stone. They do. And then He lifts His eyes
toward heaven and He says, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know that
you always hear me, but I am saying this for the benefit for those standing
around. So that they might believe that you have sent me.” And with that He
looked toward that tomb and said, “Lazarus, come out.” And in one of the most
dramatic moments of all scripture, John tells us in five words, “The dead man
came out.”
His
hands and feet were bound in strips of cloth. His face was wrapped in a cloth.
Jesus said, “Unbind him, let him go.” And they did and John tells us that some
of those who were there who had never believed in Him before, became believers
that very moment.
Wouldn’t you? It’s one of those remarkable moments. It impresses everyone who
hears the story. But I get the feeling John didn’t tell this story to impress
us.
You
have to go back to something that Jesus said earlier to make sense of it all.
When He first told His disciples that Lazarus was dead, He said, “For your sake,
I am glad that I was not there. So that you may believe.”
If he
had been there when Lazarus was ill, He would have healed him. He would have
lifted him up from whatever illness had knocked him down. The disciples would
have been impressed by that, as Martha was impressed by His healing power. But
they wouldn’t have learned anything about life and death. They wouldn’t have
learned the difference, for instance, between death with small ‘d’ and death
with capital ‘D.’ They wouldn’t have learned the difference between life with a
small ‘l’ and life with a capital ‘L.’ Because they were there, because they saw
what happened that day, they learned this lesson: That whenever Jesus is
present, death is never the last word.
And
it’s a good thing to know because it was just after this that some of those same
disciples stood there looking on as their Lord, Jesus, was nailed to the cross,
bleeding and dying. Some of them watched as the last breath of earthly life left
His lungs. If they hadn’t been there in Bethany, if they hadn’t seen what had
happened with Lazarus, they might have believed that it was the end of Jesus
that day. But because they had come to believe, they began to believe that this,
even this, was only the beginning.
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