Sermon Audio
The Fourteenth Sunday After Trinity
Lazarus, Come Forth
St. John 11:1-44
My old friend Tom was a trial lawyer and a highly successful one. He lived in the toniest part of town and hosted a weekly poker game in the pool house behind his main house. His housekeeper, Ruby, put out paté and caviar for his guests.
At the dinner intermission we ate catered barbecue.
After I came to saving faith and developed the maturity in the Lord to grasp that gambling is not a good use of God’s money, I dropped out of the poker game. But Tom and I remained friends.
He belonged to two pricey country clubs and we played some golf. One time, I met him at his house to go to a college baseball game and we rode to the field in his Rolls Royce.
He owned a horse farm in the Kentucky bluegrass; that’s where his Thoroughbreds lived. Each year on the day after the Kentucky Derby he’d invite me to his farm and in the evening we’d attend an annual party at the farm of one of his neighbors. The governor always attended.
He knew how to live large, did Tom.
I’ve told you this much about him to set the scene for his funeral. It took place in the sanctuary of a church of one of the mainline denominations, there in the silk-stocking district where Tom had lived.
One of the speakers was a minister from a suburban church of the same denomination to which Tom’s two grown daughters belonged.
The minister told us that Tom held no church membership but visited occasionally with his daughters. He said he and Tom had become acquainted and Tom sometimes stayed on after the service for a visit. Not a word about faith or hope, just a reminiscence on the nice times they’d had speaking of sundry things.
Another speaker was a lawyer friend whose contribution was a reflection on Tom’s quaint habit of collecting alma maters. Tom had attended college in his native Kentucky and law school in Florida but he became a backer and financial supporter of the teams of various Texas schools his kids attended or he just took a liking to.
But the person I remember in sharpest focus from Tom’s funeral was not a speaker; she was a weeper. Forever etched in my memory is the image of his widow, Susan, dressed all in black. As she entered and made her way ever so slowly to a front pew, one relative supported her on each side.
Even with their help, she wobbled so that I feared she might collapse before she sat down. She didn’t; she sat sobbing throughout the service. She had shared with Tom a bountiful life; she had been an adoring wife. Now that he was gone she saw before her nothing but an endless black tunnel, void of peace, hope and love.
Never before or since have I witnessed a more arresting picture of utter despair.
And that, as you no doubt have guessed, brings us to the story of the resurrection of Lazarus.
(Read text.)
We must look at a translation issue. We read that our Lord “groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” But for us groaning suggests pain or sadness or both. The modern translations favor “was deeply moved in the spirit and was troubled”; they, too, fail to capture the sense of the original.
Better would be the rendering I found in a Greek dictionary: He was “deeply moved with anger” and was troubled.
Jesus is outraged. Why? He has just encountered Mary and an assembly of mourners following her. Both she and they are weeping.
Surely it is not their grief that arouses His ire. Have we not just read, “Jesus wept”? He too felt keenly the ordeal of His friend. Nor do we have any reason to suppose He doubted the sincerity of the mourners’ feelings.
The problem, actually, is quite the opposite of feigned sadness. Their grief is all too real for His liking. It is natural to mourn the loss of a loved one, but there is only one reason to feel despair over the departure of one who was a friend of the Lord, as Lazarus certainly was, and it is rooted in a failure of faith.
This is He who is one with the Father, who desires not the death of a sinner but that he should turn from his wickedness and save his soul alive. This is the Lord who surveyed the capital city of His covenant people and lamented:
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37).
Have these Jews not been promised a Messiah who will rescue them from the penalty of their sins? How can they lose hope?
And so Jesus can be in the same moment both loving and angry, filled with compassion for all who inhabit this decrepit human condition and irate that so many refuse to reach out and drink of the elixir He supplies:
“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him! (Psalm 34:8).”
I do not doubt that He experienced the same conflicting emotions as my friend Tom’s widow Susan sobbed before her husband’s coffin, lost in her desolation. Does it not this day assail the heart of the Lord of hope, such hopelessness?
We have reached the pivot in St. John’s gospel. The author has presented to us the One John the Baptist foretold, the Messiah promised to God’s people Israel. We have watched as He has made the lame to walk and restored sight to the blind.
Of the seven signs, or miracles, John relates, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is the seventh and climactic one. We have seen our Lord take on hunger, thirst, ignorance, condemnation. We have looked on as He has provided His own with food and water to sustain them, light to banish their darkness and – soon to come – atonement to cancel their condemnation.
He has fed them with bread at the feeding of the 5,000 and with His teaching; we have harkened as He bade them “eat My flesh and drink My blood.”
We have heard Him gift-wrap physical things in spiritual terms: not simply bread but the bread of life, not mere water but living water.
We have seen Him restore life to the dead ere now, but this is different. The rabbis teach that the departed soul hovers over the body in the grave, seeking a way back in, for three days. Only on the fourth day, when the flesh begins to decompose, does the soul abandon hope and flee.
Lazarus has been in the ground four days. Miracle of miracles!
And of course our story looks forward as well. It presages Jesus’ own death, burial and resurrection. In the closing verses of chapter 11 the Sanhedrin, or ruling council, hatch the plot that will lead to Jesus’ trial and execution.
His gift of life – the raising of Lazarus from the dead – precipitates the authorities’ decision to prosecute and kill Him. The Life of the world must die. Or so they think.
All of this – in that strange way in which only God can make sense of human affairs – is for the doxa – the glory -- of God, both Father and Son.
When Lazarus walks out of His tomb, some believe, and they sing the praises of God. Glory belongs to God, eternal life to those who give Him glory. In Lazarus’ resurrection, we see vividly that what brings glory to God brings life to those who love Him.
But greater glory is still to come. In the passion narrative that is to follow, the Son will achieve the pinnacle of His glory when He is lifted up on His cross.
In John, “glory” is less about the hosannas men give God than God’s revelation of Himself, which occurs supremely in the Incarnation. Jesus will reveal God most poignantly in His perfect submission to His Father’s will and in His ultimate sacrifice that eradicates the sins of the world.
The master story teller who wrote this great book uses Lazarus’ sisters to paint two pictures of Jesus. We know from the episode in the next chapter involving these two – John may have assumed his readers already knew of it from the account of his colleague Luke – that Martha is the more conscientious and disciplined and Mary the more passionate.
Martha steps out with determination to meet Jesus in our story while Mary hangs back, and encounters Him after her sister. But either of them might have been looking in a mirror because they say the same thing: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
In His first response, to Martha, Jesus presents Himself as the Christ, declaring, “I am the resurrection and the life . . .” This is one of seven “ego eimi” – I am – statements of the Lord in this gospel. “I am the bread of life . . . the light of the world . . . the gate . . . the good shepherd . . . the resurrection and the life . . . the way, the truth and the life . . . the true vine.”
They evoke Yahweh’s response to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14) and link Son to Father.
This “I am” elicits from Martha her thrilling confession, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
With these words, the raising of Lazarus becomes a lived-out parable, the paradigm for the resurrection of that great and terrible last day. The Lord is not seeking from her some hope at a far remove from the present day but precisely this confession that He is – today, tomorrow and forever -- the life of the world.
She delivers it and He punctuates it.
But when Mary greets Him with the same words, He responds with that mixture of love and anger that swelled in His great heart. No one has ever been more human than God. This exhibition of His humanity arises at the cusp of that most dazzling display of His divinity, His resurrection.
This man is God; this God is man.
What caused Him to delay in coming? His love for His friends. How often do we ask God for something, only to discover that it was precisely the wrong thing. Martha and Mary love their brother and while he is ill they trust in Jesus’ power to save him.
They must learn that Jesus’ power extends far beyond anything they can imagine, far beyond the grave. Because He loves them as a friend, because He wields the authority of the Christ, He can and will summon their brother from His tomb and return him to them.
A few days ago I had a talk with an earnest young man in the county jail. He told me he had made a request of God and was now awaiting its imminent fulfillment.
When I pointed out that such lions of the faith as Joseph, Peter and Paul have suffered grievously for their belief this fellow went straight to the Scriptures to one-up me. For him and others like him, certain texts stand out as though etched in neon. From Mark 11(:24): "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.”
And from the Sermon on the Mount: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
10 “Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:7-11).
Wrenched out of context, these passages sound like Christmas Day every day. We begin to wonder why every sincere Christian has not won the lottery, married Robert Redford or Julia Roberts, moved into a mansion and purchased a dozen Lamborghinis in various colors.
Yet only one has. His name is Osteen.
But, but, but . . . my young friend protested, he hadn’t asked for anything so crass. He had sent up that noblest of prayers, a heart-felt petition for the salvation of one near and dear to him.
Alas, even when our motives are sound – I will never say pure -- we may not be praying in accord with God’s will. Martha and Mary wanted their brother to live. They watched him die . . . and they witnessed a heart-stopping display of God’s power . . . and got their brother back in the bargain.
They also received a deeper understanding of God’s love for His children. He is not a doting parent who seeks to indulge His children’s every whim. A father of that sort acts out of love for himself.
We read in Proverbs 13(:24): “He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly.”
And from Hebrews 12(:7): “If you endure chastening, God deals with you as sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten?”
Our omniscient Creator cares for His children too much to leave us to our own desires. Despite what you might have heard to the contrary, He has not determined to make us happy. His interest lies in making us holy.
Speaking as one who falls short in the holiness equation, I beg you consider: Will you put your trust for salvation In yourself or in the One who called out, “Lazarus, come forth”? He delivered Lazarus from a physical grave; He beckons you to step out of a spiritual one. Amen.
Lazarus, Come Forth
St. John 11:1-44
My old friend Tom was a trial lawyer and a highly successful one. He lived in the toniest part of town and hosted a weekly poker game in the pool house behind his main house. His housekeeper, Ruby, put out paté and caviar for his guests.
At the dinner intermission we ate catered barbecue.
After I came to saving faith and developed the maturity in the Lord to grasp that gambling is not a good use of God’s money, I dropped out of the poker game. But Tom and I remained friends.
He belonged to two pricey country clubs and we played some golf. One time, I met him at his house to go to a college baseball game and we rode to the field in his Rolls Royce.
He owned a horse farm in the Kentucky bluegrass; that’s where his Thoroughbreds lived. Each year on the day after the Kentucky Derby he’d invite me to his farm and in the evening we’d attend an annual party at the farm of one of his neighbors. The governor always attended.
He knew how to live large, did Tom.
I’ve told you this much about him to set the scene for his funeral. It took place in the sanctuary of a church of one of the mainline denominations, there in the silk-stocking district where Tom had lived.
One of the speakers was a minister from a suburban church of the same denomination to which Tom’s two grown daughters belonged.
The minister told us that Tom held no church membership but visited occasionally with his daughters. He said he and Tom had become acquainted and Tom sometimes stayed on after the service for a visit. Not a word about faith or hope, just a reminiscence on the nice times they’d had speaking of sundry things.
Another speaker was a lawyer friend whose contribution was a reflection on Tom’s quaint habit of collecting alma maters. Tom had attended college in his native Kentucky and law school in Florida but he became a backer and financial supporter of the teams of various Texas schools his kids attended or he just took a liking to.
But the person I remember in sharpest focus from Tom’s funeral was not a speaker; she was a weeper. Forever etched in my memory is the image of his widow, Susan, dressed all in black. As she entered and made her way ever so slowly to a front pew, one relative supported her on each side.
Even with their help, she wobbled so that I feared she might collapse before she sat down. She didn’t; she sat sobbing throughout the service. She had shared with Tom a bountiful life; she had been an adoring wife. Now that he was gone she saw before her nothing but an endless black tunnel, void of peace, hope and love.
Never before or since have I witnessed a more arresting picture of utter despair.
And that, as you no doubt have guessed, brings us to the story of the resurrection of Lazarus.
(Read text.)
We must look at a translation issue. We read that our Lord “groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” But for us groaning suggests pain or sadness or both. The modern translations favor “was deeply moved in the spirit and was troubled”; they, too, fail to capture the sense of the original.
Better would be the rendering I found in a Greek dictionary: He was “deeply moved with anger” and was troubled.
Jesus is outraged. Why? He has just encountered Mary and an assembly of mourners following her. Both she and they are weeping.
Surely it is not their grief that arouses His ire. Have we not just read, “Jesus wept”? He too felt keenly the ordeal of His friend. Nor do we have any reason to suppose He doubted the sincerity of the mourners’ feelings.
The problem, actually, is quite the opposite of feigned sadness. Their grief is all too real for His liking. It is natural to mourn the loss of a loved one, but there is only one reason to feel despair over the departure of one who was a friend of the Lord, as Lazarus certainly was, and it is rooted in a failure of faith.
This is He who is one with the Father, who desires not the death of a sinner but that he should turn from his wickedness and save his soul alive. This is the Lord who surveyed the capital city of His covenant people and lamented:
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37).
Have these Jews not been promised a Messiah who will rescue them from the penalty of their sins? How can they lose hope?
And so Jesus can be in the same moment both loving and angry, filled with compassion for all who inhabit this decrepit human condition and irate that so many refuse to reach out and drink of the elixir He supplies:
“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man who trusts in Him! (Psalm 34:8).”
I do not doubt that He experienced the same conflicting emotions as my friend Tom’s widow Susan sobbed before her husband’s coffin, lost in her desolation. Does it not this day assail the heart of the Lord of hope, such hopelessness?
We have reached the pivot in St. John’s gospel. The author has presented to us the One John the Baptist foretold, the Messiah promised to God’s people Israel. We have watched as He has made the lame to walk and restored sight to the blind.
Of the seven signs, or miracles, John relates, the raising of Lazarus from the dead is the seventh and climactic one. We have seen our Lord take on hunger, thirst, ignorance, condemnation. We have looked on as He has provided His own with food and water to sustain them, light to banish their darkness and – soon to come – atonement to cancel their condemnation.
He has fed them with bread at the feeding of the 5,000 and with His teaching; we have harkened as He bade them “eat My flesh and drink My blood.”
We have heard Him gift-wrap physical things in spiritual terms: not simply bread but the bread of life, not mere water but living water.
We have seen Him restore life to the dead ere now, but this is different. The rabbis teach that the departed soul hovers over the body in the grave, seeking a way back in, for three days. Only on the fourth day, when the flesh begins to decompose, does the soul abandon hope and flee.
Lazarus has been in the ground four days. Miracle of miracles!
And of course our story looks forward as well. It presages Jesus’ own death, burial and resurrection. In the closing verses of chapter 11 the Sanhedrin, or ruling council, hatch the plot that will lead to Jesus’ trial and execution.
His gift of life – the raising of Lazarus from the dead – precipitates the authorities’ decision to prosecute and kill Him. The Life of the world must die. Or so they think.
All of this – in that strange way in which only God can make sense of human affairs – is for the doxa – the glory -- of God, both Father and Son.
When Lazarus walks out of His tomb, some believe, and they sing the praises of God. Glory belongs to God, eternal life to those who give Him glory. In Lazarus’ resurrection, we see vividly that what brings glory to God brings life to those who love Him.
But greater glory is still to come. In the passion narrative that is to follow, the Son will achieve the pinnacle of His glory when He is lifted up on His cross.
In John, “glory” is less about the hosannas men give God than God’s revelation of Himself, which occurs supremely in the Incarnation. Jesus will reveal God most poignantly in His perfect submission to His Father’s will and in His ultimate sacrifice that eradicates the sins of the world.
The master story teller who wrote this great book uses Lazarus’ sisters to paint two pictures of Jesus. We know from the episode in the next chapter involving these two – John may have assumed his readers already knew of it from the account of his colleague Luke – that Martha is the more conscientious and disciplined and Mary the more passionate.
Martha steps out with determination to meet Jesus in our story while Mary hangs back, and encounters Him after her sister. But either of them might have been looking in a mirror because they say the same thing: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”
In His first response, to Martha, Jesus presents Himself as the Christ, declaring, “I am the resurrection and the life . . .” This is one of seven “ego eimi” – I am – statements of the Lord in this gospel. “I am the bread of life . . . the light of the world . . . the gate . . . the good shepherd . . . the resurrection and the life . . . the way, the truth and the life . . . the true vine.”
They evoke Yahweh’s response to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14) and link Son to Father.
This “I am” elicits from Martha her thrilling confession, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”
With these words, the raising of Lazarus becomes a lived-out parable, the paradigm for the resurrection of that great and terrible last day. The Lord is not seeking from her some hope at a far remove from the present day but precisely this confession that He is – today, tomorrow and forever -- the life of the world.
She delivers it and He punctuates it.
But when Mary greets Him with the same words, He responds with that mixture of love and anger that swelled in His great heart. No one has ever been more human than God. This exhibition of His humanity arises at the cusp of that most dazzling display of His divinity, His resurrection.
This man is God; this God is man.
What caused Him to delay in coming? His love for His friends. How often do we ask God for something, only to discover that it was precisely the wrong thing. Martha and Mary love their brother and while he is ill they trust in Jesus’ power to save him.
They must learn that Jesus’ power extends far beyond anything they can imagine, far beyond the grave. Because He loves them as a friend, because He wields the authority of the Christ, He can and will summon their brother from His tomb and return him to them.
A few days ago I had a talk with an earnest young man in the county jail. He told me he had made a request of God and was now awaiting its imminent fulfillment.
When I pointed out that such lions of the faith as Joseph, Peter and Paul have suffered grievously for their belief this fellow went straight to the Scriptures to one-up me. For him and others like him, certain texts stand out as though etched in neon. From Mark 11(:24): "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.”
And from the Sermon on the Mount: "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?
10 “Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:7-11).
Wrenched out of context, these passages sound like Christmas Day every day. We begin to wonder why every sincere Christian has not won the lottery, married Robert Redford or Julia Roberts, moved into a mansion and purchased a dozen Lamborghinis in various colors.
Yet only one has. His name is Osteen.
But, but, but . . . my young friend protested, he hadn’t asked for anything so crass. He had sent up that noblest of prayers, a heart-felt petition for the salvation of one near and dear to him.
Alas, even when our motives are sound – I will never say pure -- we may not be praying in accord with God’s will. Martha and Mary wanted their brother to live. They watched him die . . . and they witnessed a heart-stopping display of God’s power . . . and got their brother back in the bargain.
They also received a deeper understanding of God’s love for His children. He is not a doting parent who seeks to indulge His children’s every whim. A father of that sort acts out of love for himself.
We read in Proverbs 13(:24): “He who spares his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him promptly.”
And from Hebrews 12(:7): “If you endure chastening, God deals with you as sons; for what son is there whom a father does not chasten?”
Our omniscient Creator cares for His children too much to leave us to our own desires. Despite what you might have heard to the contrary, He has not determined to make us happy. His interest lies in making us holy.
Speaking as one who falls short in the holiness equation, I beg you consider: Will you put your trust for salvation In yourself or in the One who called out, “Lazarus, come forth”? He delivered Lazarus from a physical grave; He beckons you to step out of a spiritual one. Amen.