A little over four years ago, just before Christmas, I got a call from someone who worships with my church via the livestream. Like the sisters Martha and Mary, she sent for me. Debbie told me that her ninety-seven year old father was in Mary Washington hospital just south of DC in Fredericksburg, Virginia. After several days of unresponsiveness he’d woken up at five that morning and announced— unexpectedly— that he wanted to speak with a Methodist minister. The following morning I strapped on my clergy collar, grabbed my prayerbook, and took the train down to avoid the traffic on interstate ninety-five. When I got to his room, I discovered that Merle is almost completely, totally deaf. His daughter had a stack of index cards and a supply of black sharpies.
She introduced us. Because his hearing loss made our communication necessarily one way, at first I listened to him. Merle’s initials are “MF” and he told that he’d always liked how his initials implied he was a bit of a hard-ass and a stoic. The persona suggested by his initials went with the purple birthmark on his bottom lip that made him look like he’d just walked away from a fight. Indeed, he told me, he’d fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam before settling down to carry mail for a living.
I listened as he told me about his life and his regrets, the chief one being a wife he left for another.
“I don’t know whether or not I’m fit for heaven,” he hollered at me, “Do you?”
I smiled and immediately thought of that verse from the Christmas carol, “And fit us for heaven to live with thee there.”
Notice: the final verse of “Away in the Manger” is addressed to Jesus.
We’re not the ones fitting ourselves for heaven.
“I don’t know if I’m fit for heaven,” Merle shouted a second time.
“Do you know?” he asked me.
I nodded.
And I mouthed, “Yes.”
Taking that as my cue, I moved to apply the certainty of faith to him. But because of his deafness, I had to write out all my priestly parts. The words had to take flesh. Like Sheriff Rick Grimes in Love Actually, I wrote it all out by hand in clear block letters with thick, black ink. Next I numbered them. And then, standing next to his bedside, I held them up to him, one at a time, to read.
“#1— Merle, do you repent of all your sins?”
And he nodded as earnestly as anyone I’ve ever seen.
“#2 — Do you put your whole trust in Jesus Christ and his grace alone?”
“I do,” Merle said, like he was promising a wedding vow— he was.
Cards #3 and #4 said, “Merle, in the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I announce to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
Card #5— “You’re home safe in Jesus Christ. Trust in his grace.”
And then I prayed with him, shouting it straight into his earball. And then I made the sign of the cross over him and I blessed him in the Triune Name. When I left him, he was clutching those cards like they were his golden ticket for a long journey. On the train ride home, it occurred to me that I hadn’t needed my clergy collar or the carefully calibrated index cards. And Merle certainly didn’t need any golf-leafed words like repentance and absolution to assure him that when he dies he would die into the life of a God who raises the dead. The promise could have fit on a single index card; in fact, the promise is so simple it sounds like a cliche, “What a friend you have in Jesus.”
“Look on my affliction,” the psalmist prays, “and deliver me.”
Jesus is all of Israel in the flesh. Jesus is the Israelite. Therefore, before we pray the psalms, Jesus prays the psalms; the psalm’s pleas for deliverance are prayers from the Son to his Father. And as Jesus opens up his own prayer life to us in the Garden of Gethsemane, we pray in no other way but in the Spirit through the Son to our Father. Just so, whenever we pray, we pray not to a Master we must appease but to a Friend who loves us— who is in love with each one of us.
“Look on my affliction and deliver me.”
Six days before he is high and lifted up, enthroned upon his cross, Jesus is back in their house in Bethany. Christ’s visits to the family were the only times of peace in his adult life and before he dies— he knows he’s going to die— this is where he wants to make his home. Expecting his return, Mary spent roughly the equivalent of forty-five thousand dollars on nard to anoint the feet of the friend who called her brother forth from his tomb.
“Lazarus, come out,” Jesus summons his dead friend.
His friend who has been dead for four days.
The formerly dead friend stumbles out of the tomb in his grave clothes, his eyes wrapped shut and his feet shackled in burial linen.
“Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus issues the command knowing it will set in motion the plot to murder him.
Christ’s raising of Lazarus from the dead, his sister’s grateful response, and the plot the miracle provokes— against both Jesus and Lazarus— the story spans sixty-seven verses in the Gospel of John. It is the longest dramatic unit in the New Testament. And the story itself sits at the center of John’s Gospel. According to the New Testament scholar, Frederick Dale Bruner, the brother of Martha and Mary is “the fourth gospel in miniature.” This makes it all the more surprising that the scriptures provide Lazarus absolutely no characterization.
We do not know his age or his trade. We do not know if he looked after his sisters or they looked after him. We know Martha busied herself with hospitality and was not afraid to give Jesus a piece of her mind. We know Mary sat at Jesus’ feet and attended to his teaching. We also know Mary was wealthy.
But Lazarus is just a name in the story.
The scriptures provide him no biographical detail or adjectival attributes.
We know the surrounding community from Bethany to Jerusalem knew Lazarus— there’s a crowd still gathered at his grave four days later— but we do not know what they knew about him.
His name means “God has helped” but we do not know who God helped.
We do not know anything at all about Lazarus.
Except.
We know two facts about Lazarus:
Martha and Mary loved him.
And so did Jesus.
Lazarus was their brother.
Lazarus was his friend.
The scriptures know Lazarus only as the friend whom Jesus loves. “See how he loved him!” the crowd whispers as Jesus weeps. “Lord, he whom you love is ill,” the sisters sent word to Jesus without needing to supply any other identifying information.
All we know of Lazarus is that Lazarus is Jesus’ friend.
What the scriptures do not tell us about Lazarus, they do not tell us on purpose. Their reticence is the revelation. The paucity of details about Lazarus is actually the abundance of Christ’s love. The scriptures do not tell us anything about Lazarus in order to to proclaim everything you need to know about Jesus.
Lazarus is not anonymous.
Lazarus is all of us.
You are Lazarus.
The scriptures do not tell us anything about him; so that, you can see that Christ’s love for you depends not at all on you. His love for you depends entirely on his choice— his eternal decision— to call you friend. In a world with so much bad news, the term “good news” does not even begin to capture the miraculous mystery.
The Maker of Heaven and Earth wants you as his friend!
Not long ago, I conducted a graveside liturgy in the cemetery outside my church. After I prayed the commendation, I watched as family members took turns with the shovel, casting earth upon Ludid’s ashes. Once the shovel had been passed to each member of her family, it returned to her husband of a half century.
“I’m going to marry you,” he had said to her the first time he met her.
“Wait for God’s will” she had replied.
I stood at the head of her plot and I watched as he insisted on filling her grave, shovel by shovel. Here’s the thing— her husband, Luis, only has three fingers on his dominant hand.
Nevertheless!
Shovel by shovel by shovel by shovel by shovel.
Every so often, Luis would kneel in the grass to pick out the sticks and the leaves and the pebbles in the pile of exhumed dirt. As though, he wanted her to have the perfect soil for her resting place. As though, she could see. Or, as though, she would see again.
Just before he took up the shovel, I committed her to the earth. At the head of her grave, I prayed in the Spirit through the Son to his Father. With the confidence of speaking to a friend, I prayed, “In sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life….This body we commit to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
And then Luis went to work. Shovel by shovel by shovel by shovel by shovel by shovel. When Luis’s seven fingers were finally finished burying his beloved, he looked exhausted from his labor.
We make a profound, grave mistake if we think the LORD Jesus loves any one of us any less than Luis loves Ludid.
Twice before the grave of his friend Jesus “groaned deeply within himself.” This is not mere weeping. This is a confrontation with the Powers of Sin and Death. More than mourning, the raising of Lazarus is the battle before the Last Battle. Jesus is not simply weeping. He is engaging the Enemy. Lazarus is the fourth gospel in miniature because Christ before his tomb is a preview of the Passion.
Christ’s confrontation with the Powers who hold Lazarus in their grip comes thirty-five verses after John has already told us that Jesus loved Lazarus. The sinner Christ is about to redeem from Death is already a friend of Jesus. Moreover, the Gospels never say that Lazarus is a disciple of Jesus. He is his friend. That is, the friends of Jesus are not limited to those who identify as his disciples. Lazarus is Jesus’ friend even though he is not his disciple. According to a Reformation principle, scripture interprets scripture— sola scriptura. That is, the scriptures are like a vascular system. Every passage is interconnected and mutually determined. Therefore, the place to begin understanding the story of Lazarus is not the Gospel of John but Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians.
Paul says explicitly what John only shows.
The apostle follows the salutation of his epistle with a doxology:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth in him.”
The way the words run matters.
In this gospel praise, Paul does not make any mention of redemption and blood, sins or forgiveness or grace— not one word— until he is seven verses into his ten verse doxology. Paul writes six long verses about you being chosen in Christ Jesus before he utters a single word about the cross. From before the foundation of the world, Paul says, the LORD Jesus chose you as his friend.
It is true that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. It is true that at the right time, Christ was crucified for the ungodly. It is true that the Father’s only begotten Son came after us when we were lost and forsaken in the Far Country. But Jesus does not love you in spite of yourself; he loves you because he knows who you are— because before there was anything (before God uttered a single “Let there be…”), there was in the eternal heart of the Triune God the thought of you.
The unique person you call me.
Was predestined.
The way the words run matters.
From before the foundation of the world…
Before atoms and quarks and nucleic acids, he chose you.
And he purposed everything in creation for you.
Not because you are a sinner he would eventually die to save. But because he wants you as his friend. We call him King. We think of him as a Servant thinks of a Master, but he wants you as his friend and as his equal, his bride and his body— eternally.
The cross does not create his friendship with you.
The cross happens in the context of his friendship with you.
Christ does not make you his friend by dying for you when you did not deserve it; already you were his friend and that is why he dies for you though you do not deserve it.
Long before Jesus redeems his friend from the grave, we have already learned, “The one whom you love is ill.” The cross occurs within the context of his friendship with you; it does not create the possibility of friendship with you. This larger frame of love and friendship helps us read this passage rightly. The way the words run matters.
For example:
When Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been dead for how long?
Four days.
When Jesus learns from Bethany Lazarus is ill, he delays how many days?
Two days.
Do the math.
Jesus knows Lazarus has already died.
Jesus delays because he loves Martha and Mary.
It says it right there in the Gospel.
Jesus waits because he loves Lazarus’ sisters.
In other words, because they are his friends, he first gives them time to sit with the death.
He gives them space to grieve.
Jesus already knows Lazarus has died.
This is why when word reaches them from Bethany, Jesus responds to the letter by saying, “This illness is not unto death.” This is a callously cavalier prediction if Lazarus’ life hangs in the balance. But it is an odd claim if Jesus already knows his friend has died, for then Jesus can only mean that this illness will not end in death.
Our God is not a God who keeps us from dying.
Our God is a God who raises the dead.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached at the funeral of his grandmother, “Our hope is not in resurrection. Our hope is not in heaven. Our hope is not in the afterlife. Our hope is the LORD Jesus— the God who has died and is alive for evermore.”
As I held each index card above the hospital bed for Merle to read, the nurse standing vigil over him shot me a look of exasperation.
Or maybe outrage.
It was the Card #4 that had tightened her sphincter, “I announce to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.”
Including the wife you left for another.
The look on the nurse’s face was as easy to read as the black sharpie’d ink on the index cards, “Where do you get off? Who are you to forgive his sins? Who are you to speak for God?”
And of course she was right to judge me wrong. Because it’s right there in the Bible— only God can forgive sins. I have no authority to forgive them. I have no basis to speculate on who God is or what God will do. I have no power to promise you a future— like you, I’m not getting out of life alive; how can I possibly promise a Future. I have no prerogative to speak for God.
Unless, Jesus, the Friend of Sinners, is the fullness of God.
“Look on my affliction and deliver me.”
What the psalmist did not know, could not know, is that the God to whom he prays is the LORD who prays to his Father before the tomb of Lazarus, “Look on his affliction and deliver him.”
“Give him life.”
Again.
This psalm is a prayer Christ makes his own; so that, the miracle he works for Mary and Martha can be a promise he gives to you.
Consider the alternative.
What if Jesus had come when the sisters sent for him?
“LORD, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Martha is not wrong.
But if Lazarus had not died, then Mary and Martha would have spent the rest of their lives not knowing what they discover as soon as Jesus commands their dead brother to obey him. They would have continued to live believing that every affliction eventually ends in death. They would not know that their friend whom they love and who loves them is the God who raises sinners from the grave.
Jesus loves them too much to have come any earlier.
By tarrying two days, Jesus gives them something better than a miracle.
He gives them a promise.
Lazarus will die again just as surely as you are not getting out life alive. But when Lazarus dies again, Mary and Martha will know that not even death ends in death. They will bury him the way Luis buried Ludid, picking the stones and the sticks from the soil.
As though he could see.
As though he would see again.
Sweating in the winter cold, Luis struggled with the shovel to smooth out the soil above his beloved’s remains. “I want it flat,” he said to me, “so the grass and flowers will grow evenly on it.”
When he was done, he handed me the shovel and placed his incomplete hand on my shoulder and, in his soft voice, he repeated a promise to me.
From Paul.
Thessalonians.
“We do not grieve as others do who have no hope.”
