John 11:1-45 March 22, 2026
Like
the woman at the well,
Resurrection of Lazarus
Leon Bonnat
The story of Jesus raising Lazarus
only appears in the gospel of John.
Miracles for John are always more than just
miracles,
they are signs of
something larger.
They point to
something about Jesus and
they are there to show us something about the
activity of God
and the Holy Spirit in our world.
John actually calls them “signs”
So what is this miracle showing us?
Jesus brings resurrection and life, obviously.
But not just that, there’s more to it.
To decipher it, we have to review the story a
little.
There are a bunch of different details to look
at,
but I specifically want to look at Jesus
interaction with Martha.
So
Jesus is in another town and he gets word
that his friend Lazarus is very ill.
Now , you think he might go quickly to see him
and help him.
It says Lazarus and Mary and Martha were
special friends of Jesus.
Jesus had gone to help other people,
you might expect that he would have made
a special effort to go and help Lazarus. But
no.
Jesus takes his time and stays a while longer
wherever he was.
So
it’s four days after Lazarus is dead,
for four days Mary and Martha were grieving
over their brother.
And when Jesus arrives at Bethany,
you can kind of feel the anger in the air.
Martha meets Jesus on the road and says,
“If you had been here, my brother wouldn’t
have died.”
I mean she’s seen him cure so many people
before,
so many strangers, he could have come and
helped his friend.
So
Jesus tells her “Your brother will
live again.”
And Martha tells him:
“I know
he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”
Now,
Jewish people at that time believed
in the resurrection
on the last day, life after death
It was what the Pharisees were teaching,
So Martha is giving this line back of normal
rote stuff
everyone would have been taught in their
religious education classes.
“Yes, yes, he’ll rise on the last day. I know eternal
life.”
She may have even been annoyed by Jesus
religious response.
And
I can completely understand that if she was.
When someone dies, lots of people’s
inclination
is to tell the person who is grieving
“It’s okay, your loved one is in heaven now”
or “God needed another angel” or some other
platitude like that.
But telling someone those things are not as consoling
as people think they are.
Especially when the death is unexpected, or
the person is young,
their loved ones still have to remain here,
and deal with the pain and loss,
and pay the bills, and live alone,
and raise the kids by themselves.
Practically speaking, saying to someone,
“Your brother, or husband, or wife, or child
is in heaven”
is not usually comforting, and sometimes its
offensive.
But
it’s apparent that is not what Jesus meant.
That Lazarus would be raised on the last day.
Jesus doesn’t quite correct her, but he says,
“I am
the resurrection and the life.”
Jesus is saying, while I’m here, new life is
possible.
Jesus way is the way to life. Following Jesus
way leads to life.
He’s not talking about the after-life
He’s talking about resurrection here and now.
And that’s exactly what Jesus does.
Jesus
calls to the previously dead man:
“Lazarus come out” and Lazarus walks out,
his body still wrapped up in the cloths
he was buried in, and Jesus tells the rest of
the people to
“Unbind him and let him go”.
And that is the sign that this miracle points
to in John’s gospel.
Jesus is the resurrection and the life.
Not only in some point in the future, or after
death,
but right here and right now.
That doesn’t mean that Jesus is literally
bringing
dead people to life these days, that’s never
been a ministry of the Christian church,
but the gospel of the unconditional love and
forgiveness of God
has the ability to bring people, communities,
and the world
back to life, right here on earth in this
realm
in real time, all the time.
And
when religion doesn’t get in its own way,
the community of Christ can be part of that.
It has been part of that.
Jesus’ gospel of love and forgiveness has the
power
to give life to the world and bring about
resurrection.
That is IF religion doesn’t get in the way of
that.
A
lot of Christianity only sees that Jesus power
of resurrection
happens in the after-life.
That following Jesus
way is only about claiming Jesus
as our savior and getting
to heaven after we
die.
That God’s peaceful inclusive kingdom is only
a reality
in the after-life. That is a very safe story
to tell.
If God’s kingdom is just future thing after
we’re dead,
then we can keep running the earth our way.
The powers of this world can control
everything here,
like they have been.
We don’t need to adopt Jesus way of love,
forgiveness,
abundance, and sacrifice NOW,
we’ll get that later after we’re dead.
For now we can still say we worship Jesus and keep
holding
on to our greed, contempt, suspicion,
coercion, and violence.
This theology is not disruptive at all to the
status quo.
It actually serves the powers of the world.
But this sign of the raising of Lazarus points to the fact
that Jesus is telling us that God’s kingdom is
not just
for after we die. Jesus means to bring God’s kingdom
to the here and now. That means disruption,
that means change.
And that is upsetting to the status quo.
And according to John’s Gospel,
the raising of Lazarus was the very last
straw.
This was the thing that pushed the religious leaders
over the edge. This was the moment, that convinced them
that Jesus needed to die. It reads (from the
message)
49-52 Then one
of them—it was Caiaphas, the designated Chief Priest that year—spoke up, “Don’t
you know anything? Can’t you see that it’s to our advantage that one man dies
for the people rather than the whole nation be destroyed?”
From that day on, they plotted to kill him.
This is how the world reacts to resurrection
and new life.
This is how people react to God’s presence in
the world.
It’s controversial, it’s dangerous, it’s a
scandal, it’s a threat.
When the church remains safe behind its doors,
talking just about the after-life, everyone is
fine with it.
Even when the church spews condemnation and
hate, and violence, and holy wars there is
a level of comfort with that.
But when the body of Christ comes out of the
safety of the church with words of empowerment
and new-life for the previously bound,
when we preach good news to the poor
and release to the captives, recovery of sight
to the bind
and letting the oppressed go free,
then there’s trouble.
Then powers of the world get upset.
You
think it would be the opposite.
A society that was
aligned with Jesus would
be aghast at contempt
and violence and
celebrate compassion
and empowerment.
But we are not that
society yet.
We
are still far more comfortable with death
than we are with
life.
In the name of faith
and religion,
we justify violence
and war much quicker
than we do
compromise and forgiveness.
We, as a country,
feel justified spending billions
on bombing, but
object to spending money on
healthcare or food
stamps.
We
have some American Christians today who seem
delighted with the
new violence of war in Iran.
Even with all the
deaths of service people and Iranians,
people we claim to
be trying to help.
Some Christians are
even saying that this violence
will make Jesus
return again.
Our Defense
secretary was telling the troops that
before they shipped
out.
But
our violence won’t ever bring about the Kingdom of God.
Jesus didn’t ever say
that or behave like that.
And
it’s not just this administration.
This is our habit as
a country throughout our existence.
Out of its 250 year
history, the US has been
at war in some sort
of military conflict for 233 of those years.
That’s only 17 or so
years of peace in our
whole lifetime as a
country.
And
during this time, most of our elected leaders
and all of our
presidents have identified themselves
as Christian. And this
is at a time when a majority
of people in the US
identified themselves as Christian.
That
represents a serious disconnect between the
faith that we
espouse and the actions we follow.
Jesus
never used violence to advance or defend
his mission. When
Peter tried to do it at his arrest,
he rebuked him and
said those who live by the sword
die by the sword.
It
is an ironic truth, but in many ways, since we are so
used to it, violence
is comfortable, but love and
forgiveness and
empowerment feels like an affront.
To many, the gospel
of love feels like violence,
because it interrupts
the narrative that we’re
used to living by.
Just
like Jesus narrative interrupted the narrative
that the religious
leaders were living by.
They thought it was
best for one person to die
because they thought
that Jesus way
would destroy their
whole system.
And
our world still follows in their footsteps
kills the prophets
that have worked for
freedom and
liberation like Lincoln, Ghandi,
Martin Luther King
Jr., and others like Oscar Romero.
Bishop Oscar Romero was the bishop of
El Salvador who lived and
worked with the
poor and spoke out
against the government
violence in that
country for years and was
assassinated while saying
mass 26 years ago this week.
Romero
called this alternative narrative
“the Violence
of Love“ which he said feels
like violence because it upsets the status
quo
and the social order of things.
“It is this love“, he said, “Which left Jesus nailed to a
cross.“
Romero wasn’t talking about empty platitudes
of love and peace. Or just thoughts and
prayer.
He meant the work of resurrection, he meant
the
very real interruption
of new life into this
world of death
which is messy and political and is
dangerous.
But no matter how dangerous, he said we
should keep doing it.
He
said “Let us not tire of preaching love;
it
is the force that will overcome the world.
Let
us not tire of preaching love.
Though
we see that waves of violence
succeed
in drowning the fire of Christian love,
love must win out;
it is the only thing that can.”
Jesus
is the resurrection and the life.
Jesus is the interruption of life in a world
of violence and hate.
And the gospel of love, forgiveness, justice,
and reconciliation
that he brings has given strength and brought
back
to life countless souls.
And on that day in Bethany Jesus raised
Lazarus from the dead,
brought him out of his tomb, and had him
rejoin life
with his sisters and his friends. And with
that,
Jesus took the stench and sting of death away.
He took away the fear of death,
and the threat of death,
and consequently, the biggest weapon
that oppressors have against people.
And as Christians, we are called to believe in
that resurrection and that new life
that has come into our midst.
And even though it might upset some.
we – the church of Christ – are privileged to
be
called to be a part of sharing this resurrection
and
new life with the world
and one day, we will be a people
that supports life instead of death.
