Sermon
of March 13, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: John 11:1-45
“Jesus
Came to Bridge the Gap Between... Life and Death”
In
that story of Jesus and Lazarus, Mary and Martha, there are two things I think
that stand out. One is that in that passage we find one of the great “I am”
sayings of Jesus. I remember a minister that I knew that did a whole Lenten
sermon series on the “I am” sayings: “I
am the bread of life,” “I am the way and the truth and the life,” “I am
the light of the world,” and here Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the
life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live and whoever lives
and believes in me shall never die.” “I am the resurrection and the
life”—a great phrase that just stands out as one of that collection of great
“I am” sayings. The second part of this passage that’s very prominent is
the actual healing or the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. And I want
to work with that for a little while and have us think about how Jesus does help
us to bridge the gap between life and death…how Jesus makes a difference in
different aspects of life and death in our lives: how he did for Lazarus, how he
did for Mary and Martha, and how he still does for us today.
I
want to begin by looking at how Jesus makes a difference for us between life and
death in terms of our physical lives and physical deaths.
For that’s what stands at the very center of this, the belief and
understanding that Lazarus had died and came alive again when Jesus called him
out from the tomb. Depending on your outlook and your faith you may see this
differently. Some think that this is just a plain and simple miracle; absolutely
Lazarus had died and Jesus resurrected him as a foretaste in a way of his own
resurrection.
Others
who like to look at things critically and don’t like to take things just at
face value will try and imagine, “Well, what really happened here?” Was
Lazarus really dead or was he maybe in a coma or some kind of suspended
animation, and if so what did Jesus do that drove him out of the coma or the
suspended animation? Did Jesus have some form of knowledge of primitive CPR (as
we would call it today) and he was able to raise Lazarus that way? People who
are skeptical might think of it that way. At the very heart of it, though,
something happened that made a dramatic change in Lazarus’ well being that he
was laying there in the tomb, witnesses saw him, Jesus called him and he came
out. Something dramatic happened that changed from a certain death to certain
life.
I
had an evolution of my thought last night about this during the corned beef
dinner. I know this is not a surprise to some of you how my sermons come about,
but it had nothing to do with the dinner, it’s just I always think about these
things and the sermon is always developing and one of things that I realized is
if you look at a lot of Jesus’ healings and this raising of Lazarus there is
something that Jesus does that is quite different from anybody else:
Jesus doesn’t just let the person lie there and ignore him. And
that’s what happened in so many other instances where people are healed in the
Bible.
There’s
a story of a man who is lame, who can’t walk, by a place called the Sheep Gate
Pool also in the Gospel of John, and he was there, it says, for 38 years waiting
for somebody to help him and everybody just kept walking by and nobody did
anything. They assumed he’s lame and you can’t do anything. There’s the
story of the 10 lepers that Jesus healed that everybody else just ignored and
let them be and thought, “Well, you can’t do anything.” There’s the
story of Peter’s mother-in-law, where everybody ran to Jesus but nobody else
tried to do anything. And Mary and Martha in this story and the others around
them just put Lazarus in the tomb and let him be there and didn’t try to do
anything. Nobody thought, “Well, could we do something that would prevent him
from dying, could we do something that would make him well?” They just let
nature take its course and let it be and did nothing.
Jesus,
in each of those instances of healing and in this instance here, tries to do
something – and in fact does do something through his powers through
healing and through his raising of Lazarus. It made me think that maybe this had
something to do with the progression towards our modern medicine today. Modern
medicine is people trying to do something to keep people healthy or to make them
well again when they haven’t been well. It’s not just letting nature take
its course and letting things be as they are. So we develop surgeries,
therapies, pharmacology, all kinds of things to try and make somebody well. We
all know in our families, when somebody is really ill, we don’t just let it
be, we get all the doctors we can, all the experts we can, all the medicine and
help we can to try and make that person well again. Jesus in this passage shows
us that we shouldn’t just let nature take its course with something physical.
We should do something: try to heal, try to resurrect, try to raise up again. So
this is one place where Jesus bridges the gap between just letting death and
sickness be death and sickness and saying no, the other alternative is life and
healing and new life and if we do something we can sometimes make a difference.
The
second place where Jesus makes a difference here is in terms of spiritual
death and spiritual life for us.
When Jesus encounters this situation, people are distraught, sorrowful,
bereft, crying. Mary and Martha are just terribly upset. Their brother has died
and it has consumed them and others around them, too. Jesus comes along and says
you don’t have to remain spiritually mournful; you don’t have to remain
spiritually dejected. You are not alone in this. I am here to show you that God
is with you, that God will help you through this, that God will carry you to a
new life and a better time. Jesus came to show us that bad news doesn’t have
to stay bad news—it can become good news through God’s power and God’s
love. That sickness can turn to health, or even if there is death, God will
carry each person through the time of mourning to new life again.
Jesus
also shows people in this story that faith is not just a matter of following
rituals and observing certain holy days and holy events, but faith is something
to be alive, and to be joyful in every day of life and so he takes Mary and
Martha and others around them – and then ultimately Lazarus, too, and changes
their whole mood and their whole spirit from being pessimistic and empty
sometimes to being alive again. Jesus shows us how to change to make a
difference from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive knowing that God’s
power and God’s love are with us through all things and in all things.
And
lastly Jesus shows us how to make a difference between eternal life and death.
When he says, “I am the resurrection and the life” he is saying that
death is not the end: “I come with a promise that there is a life beyond this
life.” And this was good news. Remember when he was talking with one of the
sisters earlier in the passage and she says, “Oh yes, I know that there is
going to be a resurrection at the end, at the end of time”. There was a belief
in Judaism that when you died, you weren’t dead and in kind of in a suspended
state for a while and one day there would be a general resurrection of all of
Israel and all who had died would rise up again all together at the same time,
at the Judgment Day.
Jesus came with the good news
that he brought a new message about resurrection and that when you die, it’s
not you’re just there, when you’re dead you’re dead –
but that there is another life waiting for us in God’s presence, in
God’s loving arms; an eternal life where there are no tears anymore, no
sorrow, no pain, no suffering anymore, with God for all time, for all eternity.
So Jesus changes from the hopelessness of a death that just waits for a general
resurrection sometime way off in the future – to a belief that when this life
ends, we enter another life that’s full of light, full of peace. And it
doesn’t matter if you’ve been part of the right group or not. It’s not
just restricted to one nation or one group of people. You don’t have to have
been perfect or sinless. In fact, it’s expected that you haven’t been.
You’re forgiven. And what matters is, Jesus says, that you believe. Not your
works, not your actions, you don’t have to have done a certain number of good
deeds, you should have hopefully lived a good life, a Christ-like life, but what
matters is that in your heart you believe, and you will have eternal life.
The
good news today is that this passage is not just about one man, Lazarus, being
raised from the dead. It’s a message that extended to Mary and Martha, to the
Jews who were around and with them, to the people they went and told and all
down through the ages to us today.
There’s a message for all people in all times, in all places. Jesus bridges
the gap between physical, spiritual and eternal life and death and shows us that
the way is life. That we don’t let nature take its course, we choose life and
pursue it at all costs and with all our heart and soul and we don’t give up
when things go bad, we find spiritual joy within knowing that God is with us and
that eternal life awaits us at the end of this earthly life. And the key, the
key, is to believe.