Chris Breslin—Year A Lent 5
Anthony: All right, let’s transition to our final pericope of the month. It’s John 11:1–45. We’ll read just a shortened version of that. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for the fifth Sunday of Lent / Easter Preparation, March 22. Chris, read it for us, please.
Chris: Sure.
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” 4 But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 5 Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, 6 after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. 7 Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” 8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” 9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world. 10 But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.” 11 After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” 12 The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” 13 Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. 14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. 15 For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” 16 Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” 17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” 28 When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” 29 And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” 38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 41 So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” 45 Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.
Anthony: So how does the story end, Chris? Does he bring him back to life? Of course he does, and I think many of our listeners will know the rest of the text there. There’s just so much here. So, I wanted to give you a chance just to riff. What are you interested in us hearing? Teach, Teacher! Let’s hear it.
Chris: Yeah. I did preach on parts of this passage in the last year or two. And it’s interesting ’cause I was doing a little bit of cleanup. Several weeks earlier I’d had a lay person preach with not a whole lot of experience. And they did an overall really good job preaching on the Mary and Martha story from earlier.
And congregation walked away with so much good stuff from that passage. But I felt like there was a little bit of an oversimplified kind of Martha, the busy body, Mary, the serious spiritual one, vibe happening. And it just needed to be a little more filled out. So, that’s what I mean by cleanup.
So, we get to this story. And so, I chose this text. And we get to this story and we find these sisters. And if you have siblings, you know how very interesting dynamics come out when you are hosting an important guest. And now they, these same sisters are in a moment of deep grief and they are completely univocal.
We clipped the passage, but Mary also repeats what Martha said about, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Anthony: Yeah.
Chris: So, it’s fascinating. We just read a passage about pointing fingers related to suffering, but this is quite different than “Who sinned, his father or mother?”
The praise is coming out sideways. They actually believe that Jesus could and would have countered Lazarus’ death. And so, they’re blaming Jesus a little for not being there. So, I think that this is like a beautiful and weird display of faith that probably most people can connect to.
If you’ve ever been deep in surprising grief, like whether you fall on the “got to get things done” or the “sit at Jesus’s feet and soak it up end” of the spectrum, you understand what it feels like to experience great loss and to try to figure out what the heck happened and what could have been different.
Anthony: Yeah.
Chris: There’s this old religious, like, old, old religious self-help book of Ars Moriendi, The Art of Dying. And it is like an instruction manual for how to be with people. And it tries to anticipate and name and short circuit some of the common struggles or temptations in dealing with death. This was written at a time of, like, plague where there was just death everywhere.
And the three kind of temptations or common struggles that it isolates are that when you experience death, not your own death, but death around you that you’ll lose faith, that you’ll despair, or that you’ll become impatient with that feeling of emptiness and loss and grief and try to mobilize death or move beyond it or do something to buffer, that deep feeling of pain.
It’s interesting in exploring this passage, like, I’m interested in exploring this passage as folks experiencing one of the worst days of their lives and still very imperfectly and maybe even problematically coming up with a way of looking at and pointing to Jesus. And it doesn’t seem like that really bothers Jesus that much to be blamed because their blame bears witness to their trust.
Anthony: I appreciate you saying that it bears witness to their trust in him. I have heard so many sermons about the contrastive styles of Mary and Martha, and I think Martha, sometimes from my perspective, gives a bad rap. It’s often, be Mary, don’t be Martha. But people have got to eat. That’s part of it too.
Chris: Also, it’s also interesting in this passage, Mary’s, like, kind of slow dwelling presence sensibility has her back with Lazarus and it’s actually Martha’s, like, more active and activated personality that has her first meeting Jesus …
Anthony: Yeah.
Chris: … when he arrives. And so, yeah. I do think it’s important to recognize that these are complicated real people, like all of us. And we’re really being given the gift of seeing them relate to Jesus in different ways, sometimes different ways and sometimes ways that are really unified in common.
Anthony: We talked earlier in the episode about how the kingdom of God emerges slowly but surely not often at the speed we want it to go. And I just couldn’t help but think of the connection in some ways to this story.
Jesus is the king of the kingdom. He is the kingdom’s wherever he’s at. And yet he’s late based on the timing of what we want. Oh boy, there’s a lot to unpack there too. I think Jesus proclaimed himself as the resurrection and the life. And we didn’t get to this part in the text, but Jesus weeps. And I’m just curious, is there something for us to mine there in terms of a teaching? Why would he weep when he knows what he’s about to do, raise Lazarus from the dead?
Chris: I had a post-it note on my monitor for years. I think the only reason it’s not there is maybe I moved or maybe just the sticky gave way eventually. But it was from a Eugene Peterson kind of counsel for pastors. And one of the things that he said that pastors attempting to emulate the good shepherd Jesus, one of the things that we would be, is unhurried.
And so, it can really be a challenging thing to try to be, and I think this passage really is like the greatest fear for if we approach ministry in an unhurried way, is that we actually might miss something big or important or might even be blamed for something that, that we could have been present for.
And I take heart that Jesus shows us that is okay and he is that committed to the bit that that might happen. But I also take heart in a lot of motivation that when Jesus is present with them, he is so present that he cries. That famous scripture memory verse, “Jesus wept.”
Anthony: Yeah.
Chris: I don’t think I’ll ever encounter that verse or this part of John’s gospel without thinking of Mako Fujimura, the famous Japanese American Christian artist. And the way he makes art is through this really particular Japanese practice where he pulverizes precious metals and applies them with this like water and glue. And it’s kind of like watercolors, that there’s a certain level of chance and chaos and happy accidents and how things come out, even though he is very skilled and has great purpose.
And for him, Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s graveside is the center of John’s gospel. It is structurally, but thematically too, and that Jesus’s tears give way for Lazarus’ resuscitation. But for Jesus’ resurrection, Mako has a quote in one of his books. He says, “Jesus’s tears transformed Mary’s view of her Lord, soaking the hardened ground of Bethany, Jesus’ tears co-mingled with hers. Jesus was not only a savior, but proved to be an intimate friend. The glory of God shown through the deep friendship with the Son of man, and John took note of it.”
Yeah. I feel like, also for ministry leaders and pastor types grieving publicly can really be a challenge. It feels like we need to be tough and have it all together and say the right thing rather than sometimes just falling apart a little more publicly than we care to.
I think of Henri Nouwen saying that that he’s learned that much of praying is just grieving. And yeah, I think Jesus models that. Also related to this one last thing. In the last year, I read a really fascinating book by Andy Root. He teaches up in Minnesota Twin Cities. And he writes a lot about the ministry in a secular age. And this book is called Evangelism as Consolation and talks really beautifully and imaginatively about just like Jesus in this story, just our being with people in an age of sadness and sorrow is great ministry and proclamation of the good news. He said, “Evangelism in these sad times is ultimately the confession that God meets us in our human sorrow and through our sorrow, takes our person into Jesus’s own person. And this is good news.”
Anthony: Yeah. I was sharing with a friend just in the last week about an opportunity we’re meeting as a church plant team. And I was feeling sorrow over feeling rejection by somebody. Not on our team, but someone adjacent to our church. And I’ve confessed that I’ve struggled to be vulnerable in this way often with a team.
And I shared with them what I had experienced that week and I wasn’t anticipating it, but emotion just swept over me as I was talking about it. And I, in one sense, I was trying to keep a cap on it. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, try to fight back tears, like sometimes I’m watching a movie and I don’t want anybody to see that I’m crying. I tried to put a cap on it, but it just seemed like it was the right thing just to let it go and to be honest about what I was feeling as a result of what had happened. And I didn’t think a whole lot of it other than sharing it. But one of the team members said to me afterwards, he said, “Anthony, we needed that from you. Because your tears allowed us, gave us permission to feel some of what not only you were feeling, but what all of us had been feeling.”
And I just think, like you said, there’s just something about that. I’ve read a lot of Root’s books, but I haven’t read Evangelism as Consolation. I’m going to put that on my list, because there’s a lot of sorrow. And I, as I’m looking at our text as we kind of wrap up our time together, I know our sorrow is leading somewhere.
And I see verse 39, “Jesus said, take away the stone.” And it’s got to be a foreshadowing, right? “Take away the stone.” And as his final words in the text are, “Unbind him and let him go.” Unbind Jesus from death, let him go. And his resurrection certainly is our objective truth in reality that we participate in his resurrected life. Hallelujah. Is there anything else from this text you’d want to kind of point out, bring to our attention?
Chris: I’ll probably preach this text in a few weeks. And this is one of those cyclical texts that, you’re right on the cusp of Easter. And I’m just so thankful for this episode in the life of Jesus in that it gives our people a real chance to see themselves as included with Christ’s death and resurrection.
With this preview, those first fruits of the new creation. And in some ways, for all the ways that Jesus’s death on the cross includes us and is like the quintessential suffering of humanity, I think, of, like, … a Jesus will suffer until the end of the world sort of thing.
It’s an episode like this where it’s just messy and it’s just family and it doesn’t happen at the right time. And there’s a little confusion about … So many family lives end when it’s like so and so got checked into the hospital for some minor thing and then they never got out.
And so, yeah. It’s just a beautiful passage to see ourselves in and to see the ways that Jesus enters into our grief. Here’s our deep longing and desire for death not to win and not to continue to hurt us and not to continue to make us live and make decisions based on fearing death. And that Jesus says it in a way that’s just so human and real and accessible, still to us and for us and with us.
Anthony: And I think as pastors, ministry leaders, as proclaimers of the gospel, we have to continue to come back to this reality, that we are co-participants in Christ’s suffering and he suffers with us and he’s in the midst of it.
And in a world that feels like it’s on fire and dying at this very moment, that is indeed good news that God is with us in this moment in human history. Hallelujah. Praise him.
Well, Chris, or Rev. Bres, as we affectionately know you, I’m so grateful for you, your friendship, your guidance especially as we continue to to hitch our wagon to what Jesus is doing in Durham, North Carolina. I’m praying for you. I’m excited about the baseball season that’s just around the corner for you and your children. So, blessings being upon you. Thank you for joining us, and I want to thank our team of people who are behind the scenes that make all this work, Reuel Enerio, Elizabeth Mullens, Michelle Hartman. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the good work that you do to make this possible.
And Chris, as is our tradition on the Gospel Reverb, we end with a word of prayer. We’d be grateful if you’d pray for us and with us.
Chris: Sure. Pray with me.
Jesus. Light of the world. Help us see, like Thomas Merton prayed. We have no idea where we are going and do not see the road ahead of us and cannot know for certain where it will end. But you encounter, you touch, you heal, and you reveal still.
Jesus, flesh and blood Word, who lives in our neighborhood, help us to receive your words. When we can’t, speak to us. Enable us when we don’t want to, dig out our ears. And when those around us won’t, let us continue to know and to speak your truth. We trust you always. Though we may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, we will not fear for you are ever with us. You will never leave us to face perils alone. Amen.