Key Verses: John 11:41b-42
So in this passage we have a continuation of the passage that Moses discussed in his message yesterday. Yesterday, we saw that Jesus made the decision to wait several days before visiting Lazarus, because Lazarus’ sickness was, in Jesus’ words, “for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Today, we see Jesus finally visit a heartbroken Martha and Mary, but then demonstrate his own power by raising Lazarus from the dead. In some ways, this passage seems almost inapplicable to our own lives because us Christians don’t see God raising people from the dead today. However, there is actually a lot that we can unpack from this passage about faith, about God’s power and love for us, and about having a living hope in Jesus.
One of the biggest lessons we can take away from John 11:17-44 is that God often uses our most difficult, darkest moments to bring us closer to him. In this passage, we see that Martha and Mary are both deeply saddened by the death their brother Lazarus. Both had faith in Jesus, believing that if he had come, he could have saved Lazarus from dying. By waiting those four days before coming to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus demonstrated his amazing love and his power even over death. Jesus showed the sisters that he was in control even in this dark period in their lives, using Lazarus’ death to demonstrate God’s amazing love and power.
So let’s start with the first part of this passage, when Jesus arrives to comfort Martha and Mary. Verse seventeen states that when Jesus arrived, Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Many other Jews had already come to comfort the sisters, and so Jesus and his disciples were some of the last people to come and pay their respects. When Jesus finally does come and Martha goes out to meet him, she says in verses 21 and 22, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” Martha is clearly trying to hold on to her faith in Jesus, but it’s so difficult for her to do so because her brother has just died. She had faith that Jesus could have saved her brother while he was alive but did not believe Jesus could do anything once Lazarus was dead. She failed to see Jesus’ power, even over death. Martha had probably prayed while Lazarus was alive that Jesus would come and save him, but once Lazarus was gone, she lost all hope. Have you ever been in a situation where you lost all hope?
I think many people find themselves in the same situation that Martha does. As Christians, we pray and beg God to give us something we want or solve a problem we might have, and if God does not give us exactly what we want how we want it, we give up immediately. I will be honest with all of you, I have been very fortunate to not have experienced such a hopeless situation like that of Martha and Mary, or even that of others in HBF, but for me, this issue definitely did show itself during the college admissions process. This year, I was rejected by some of the top schools that I applied to, schools where I really hoped and prayed to get in. When I was rejected, it was difficult for me at first to accept that this was part of God’s plan for me. It was hard for me to believe that God had a great plan for me without those schools, because of my lack of faith in him, because I didn’t really believe that God could provide for me.
With Martha, the death of Lazarus so overwhelmed her that she thought everything was over, that there was nothing Jesus could do. Jesus did not give Martha exactly what she wanted, which was to save Lazarus from the dead while he was alive. Let’s take a look at what Martha says when Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again from the dead. Martha says in verse 24, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” While Martha seems to acknowledge Jesus’ power in a sense, she doesn’t seem to believe that Jesus has any power here on Earth at that very moment. She sees God as a sort of cosmic being, like Buddha or the force in Star Wars, who will raise up Lazarus at the end of time. She believes in him, but not really. Again, it is a lack of faith that really characterizes Martha’s interactions with Jesus.
It was with Jesus’ reassuring her in verses twenty five and twenty six of his power over death that she finally learned to believe in Jesus’ power and entrust the situation to him.
Let’s take a closer look at verses 25 and 26. Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” This is one of the most important verses in the Bible. Jesus came to the Earth to bring life and salvation, and is asking Martha to believe in him. By saying this, Jesus is not only revealing his divine power, but also saying that death has no power over him. He is revealing not only his spiritual power but his physical power as well. This is really the turning point in the passage, when Jesus truly reveals himself to us. We are not only reassured of Jesus’ power, but also realize that we have a living hope in him, the promise of eternal life. When he asks if Martha believes this, he’s not only posing this question to Martha, but to all of us as Christians. Do you believe that you have a living hope in Jesus? Do you believe that God’s power is limitless both here on Earth and in heaven? Not only did Martha have to consider this, but all of us must consider this as well. It is those who believe in God who will experience his power over death, his promise of eternal life, and his spiritual and physical guidance.
Yet Jesus’s power over death is not only a spiritual power, but a physical one as well, as we see later in this passage. So later, we see Jesus talking to Mary after Martha tells her that he is there. The scene we get with Mary is quite different than what we saw with Martha. Mary does say the exact same thing that Martha did when she first met Jesus - “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Like Martha, Mary does not have faith in Jesus’ divine power, his power over death. However, unlike Martha, Mary comes letting out all of her grief before Jesus, weeping at his feet. She was sad and grieving broken-hearted, and she let Jesus know. And when Jesus saw her, he didn’t tell her to get up and stop crying, he didn’t tell her to stop worrying, he wept with her. (PAUSE) Jesus knew that Lazarus wasn’t going to stay dead, but he comforted Mary in the moment by empathizing with her and showing her that he cared. We can see how Jesus comforted both Martha and Mary when they had different ways of showing and expressing their grief, Martha by reassuring her of great power and Mary by simply weeping with her. In the same way, we all have different ways of dealing with our grief and bringing our problems to God. God feels your pain and will comfort you in the way he knows is best for you because he cares about you.
So from the first part of the passage, we see that the two main themes are that Jesus is the resurrection and the life and is all-powerful, but also that he loves and cares deeply enough for his children to comfort them and empathize with them in their suffering.
This brings us into the second part of the passage. Having comforted the two sisters, Jesus goes down to the tomb. The first thing he does is to order the stone to be taken away. You may or may not know this, but in Jesus’ time, the dead, usually those who were wealthy, were not buried in graves. They were buried in tombs, holes cut into the side of a mountain or cliff with a giant slab or disc of stone several feet wide to close the hole opening. According to some archeologists, these stones probably weighed around two tons. So when Jesus ordered the stone to be taken away, this was no easy feat. It probably required at least several very strong men to carefully roll the stone so that the entrance to the tomb would be opened.
But the bigger issue was not that the stone was physically difficult to move. It required faith on the sisters’ part to obey Jesus and remove the stone, to entrust the situation to Jesus. Martha brings up the point in verse thirty nine that there would be a bad odor in the tomb, because a dead corpse had been rotting in there for four days. But really, what Martha was saying was that there was no point in removing the stone, that there was no reason to because Lazarus was already dead.
Rolling away the stone was a test of faith. Jesus wanted the people to entrust the situation to him, to believe that in this dark and depressing period, Jesus could help them. And that required the people to set aside their doubts and obey Jesus.
The stone itself represents an obstacle to faith. It was the thing holding Martha, Mary, and the rest of the Jews there from fully believing in Jesus. They were bounded by the practical concerns of rolling away the heavy stone. When Jesus said to take away the stone, again, he was communicating this to all Christians. As high school students, each of us probably has not only one, but many heavy stones in our way that prevent us from experience the power of the risen Jesus. Maybe you have questions about whether God can truly help you, maybe you have other struggles and hardships that make you forget about God, maybe you have a sin that prevents you from fully coming to God. Of course God will still love you and continue to call out to you no matter what obstacles you may have to your faith. But God needs you to believe in him, he needs you to read his word and pray and grow in your relationship with him, before he can fully intervene in your life and give you a living hope in heaven.
Once they remove the stone, Jesus is now prepared to do his work. This is what he says in verses 41b and 42. These are actually the key verses of my message, so I’d like us to read this altogether. “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” It is after he says this that he commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb, and he does. Jesus doesn’t do any black magic or perform some sort of ritual to resurrect Lazarus. He raised Lazarus from the dead by simply commanding him to come out, highlighting Jesus’ power and authority over death.
Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead that the people would believe in him, that they would accept him as the Messiah. After Lazarus was raised, well there was probably shock and disbelief at first, but afterward there were probably lots of celebrations, joyful reunions, and many people coming to honor and exalt Jesus. But get this: Lazarus was going to die again. He would get sick and pass away a second time, and his sisters would have to rebury him and everyone would be grieving all over again. So some people might ask, what was the point of resurrecting Lazarus if he was just going to die again? Well, the point of Jesus’ miracle was not to magically take away all of the sisters’ problems; it was to demonstrate God’s love and power, so that the people would learn to put their faith in him. A lot of people misunderstand the point of the passage. Some people think that perhaps if we come to God like Martha and Mary did, he will use his divine power to magically solve our problems and give us whatever we need, like he did by raising Lazarus from the dead. If you’ve heard ever heard of the prosperity gospel, this is what they preach. Prosperity theology holds that God’s main concern is your material well-being, and if you believe in God, he will make you rich and successful. It sounds ridiculous, and it is. Yes, God can work to solve our physical and practical issues if we come to him, but that’s not his main goal. He wants us to put our faith in him, that we may have hope for the much greater treasure in heaven. Lazarus’ death and resurrection can be thought of as a precursor to Jesus’ own death and resurrection, the Easter story, the reason we have a living hope for eternal life in heaven.
So Jesus used this desperate, dark situation that Martha and Mary were going through to encourage the sisters to have faith in him and come closer to him. This is really the key point of the second part of the passage. God often does the same thing with us, using our problems and struggles to demonstrate his love and power. Although we might not see anything as extreme as someone being raised from the dead, God will work in us in other ways. So I was rejected from MIT and the University of Chicago, my two top schools. By God’s grace, however, I was accepted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which has a great engineering program. All my life and especially throughout high school, I have always been anxious about what my future is going to be like, where I am going to end up. Those of you who know me probably know that I am very academically motivated, and part of this motivation comes from my sense of anxiety. I thought that getting admitted to a top school would serve as a validation of myself, the one way to ensure that I would be successful. As I reflected on this past year and the whole college admissions process, I realized that my anxiety was my stone, my obstacle to faith that has been preventing me from fully coming to God. Like Martha, I refused to entrust my situation to God and believed that I had to deal with everything by myself. I didn’t really realize until now, but God really has blessed me and been with me even though I didn’t really try to come to him. Especially as I head off to college next year, I hope to be able to grow in my faith and overcome my stone of anxiety. Although I don’t think I’ve fully overcome that stone quite yet, I pray that God will give me the strength and resolve to put my full faith in him so that I can share in the living hope.
So from this passage, there are several things we can take away. In the first part, we see that Jesus is the life and the resurrection, that he has both spiritual and physical power over death, but also that he cares and loves his children deeply, willing to share in our sorrows. In the second part, we see that Jesus used Mary and Martha’s desperate and seemingly hopeless situation to demonstrate his power and bring them to faith. It’s this faith that’s so important to Jesus, this faith that Jesus really is the resurrection and the life and the living hope, the theme of this Easter conference. To all my fellow HBF members, whether you are a fully committed Christian or you’re still a bit iffy about your faith, I encourage you to read the Bible and pray even just a few minutes a day, and learn to open yourself up to God at least a little bit. I hope that each of you, no matter what struggles or difficulties you might be going through, can experience the power of God in your own lives and learn to put your faith in him. Thank you.
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