Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus upends things, both metaphorically and literally:
1. In John 1, Jesus takes the place of the tabernacle as the place God dwells.
2. In John 2, he cleanses the Temple and replaces it with his body.
3. In John 6, he says he is manna come down from heaven.
4. In John 7, he says he is the water from the Feast of Tabernacles, and
5. In John 8, he says he is its light.
6. In John 10, he says he is a shepherd-king like David was.
With these six holy things and places, Jesus is changing them, summing them up, and fulfilling them, in his own person. Jesus opens the scriptures and transforms them. Jesus takes these onto and into himself like a reversed prism, where these six colors of light come together and combine into brilliant sunlight. All the glorious colors predicted by the prophets integrate and intensify in this man, that “the manifold wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers.” (Ephesians 3:10)
In John 11, a seventh numinous thing is taken up by Jesus, replaced and defeated: Death, The Last Enemy. A time is coming, and now is, when the voice of the son of man raises the dead.
When Lazarus gets sick, Jesus is in no hurry, and seems to predict wrongly that this is not a “sickness unto death.” Jesus leads his disciples to Bethany a few days late, and by the time they arrive, Lazarus is dead.
Siblings always react differently to these situations. Martha comes out to greet Jesus, while Mary can’t bear to leave their house. Jesus says “Your brother will rise again.” (11:23) Martha automatically replies with the common belief, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” (11:24)
Everyone around her believed this. Three times a day observant Jews repeated the Eighteen Benedictions, the second of which says twice that the Lord “makes the dead alive.” Ezekiel, a few chapters after the shepherd-king passage alluded to yesterday, writes of his vision of God overcoming death. Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones, and at the word of the Lord, breath enters into them, sinews join them, flesh appears, and the “whole house of Israel” is made alive (Ezekiel 37:1-15, with another reference to the coming David-king-shepherd in v.24).
Martha knows this and expects it, but to her in her grief, these promises are far more distant and hard to believe than the reality of her brother’s cold body in a grave. It is not the last day, not yet. Jesus brings this from the far-away future into the present tense, accomplishing his transformation of death itself, and in typical Jesus style, asking a question: “I am the resurrection and the life. … Do you have faith in this?” (John 11:25a, 26b) Martha replies that she has faith in HIM. She has heard the truth in his voice, and trusts Jesus.
Martha signals Mary secretly, and Mary runs out to Jesus, repeating her sister’s words without knowing it. John tells us Jesus “yielded himself to his turmoil” (10:33) and wept. (10:35) As they approach the tomb, Jesus commands that they roll away the stone. Martha resists – she knows what dead bodies smell like – but Jesus’s command is obeyed. And there is no odor whatsoever.
Jesus prays a prayer similar to Elijah’s in 1 Kings 18:37, not for himself but for others, so we know this is the Father’s gift. Then he shouts, “LAZARUS, COME FORTH!” Still shrouded and tied up, Lazarus emerges from his tomb, and embraces his family again. He is alive.
This is the sign of signs, and the culmination of the “daytime” half of John’s gospel. Many follow Martha’s lead and believe that Jesus is the one shepherd Ezekiel spoke of.
No one expected that Ezekiel’s image of a whole country raised up at the end of days would be applied to a single human in the present day. But this transformation of death into life is right in line with Jesus’s six previous transformations of the holy places and things. It’s a glorious bit of heaven brought to earth.
And what’s my primary reaction? I have to admit it. I’m envious.
Mary and Martha got their brother back, for a time. What I wouldn’t give for my friends who have lost brothers, who have lost children, for my own losses, to have even a moment of the way things used to be, the say all the things we left unsaid. My reaction to this gift given to others is to hide in my room like Mary, to protest, rightly, that this isn’t fair.
Then I stop and look at myself — really, truly look at myself — at the darkness in my own heart. This has all happened before.
Martha certainly felt it wasn’t fair that Jesus was so slow to arrive. In that moment when she faced him, four whole days late, the reality of her brother’s death was sinking deep into her soul, heavy as that stone closing his grave, past any denial or hope. She clung to the words of Ezekiel, with numb fingers, only hoping for a distant future but despairing in the dim gray present. All this while she was face to face with the One Ezekiel was pointing to.
That One reached out to her in her disappointment and grief. His declaration reaches out down the centuries to me, and his question meets me where I am, like Martha, envious, cold, and hanging on by my fingertips:
“I am the resurrection and the life; whoever has faith in me, even if he should die, shall live, and whoever lives and has faith in me most certainly does not die, thoughout the age [as far as the eye can see]. Do you have faith in this?” (John 11:25-26 DBH)
Do I? Can these bones live? Lord, you know.
