Jesus Waits.

John 11:1-16   (September 13, 2015)

I.

The Lord has gone across the Jordan River to the spot where the gospel began, where John was baptizing and where Jesus was himself baptized.  It is apparently out of the jurisdiction of the authorities who were harassing him and trying to arrest or even stone him in Jerusalem.

He and his disciples are camped in this rugged desert area; the topography is like Utah.  It is to just these kinds of places that the prophets of Israel retreat.  They go to the margins, the uncivilized places, the difficult and stressful environments.  They get away from both the distractions and the comforts of urban life, and they go to these areas where you have to be present in your body because things like food and water are daily if not hourly concerns.  It is not a vacation.  Most likely it is a period of intensive prayer and teaching.  At the end of chapter 10 we hear that many people make the trek out to be with him.  Jesus and his disciples stay out there for around three months.  

While there, they receive a message.  It is from two women who are close friends of Jesus.  They live in Bethany, which is about 2 miles east of Jerusalem, and their names are Martha and Mary.  They show up in all the gospels.  And, in case you don’t know which Mary she is, we are told that Mary will be the one who will anoint Jesus with perfume and wipe his feet with her hair, a particularly intimate act that happens in the next chapter.  By doing this she will prefigure both his death and his kingship, because it is like the anointing that would be done to a dead body or even to a king.  At the same time this act precipitates Judas’ decision to betray him. 

And the message they receive is, “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.”  The sisters are referring to their brother, Lazarus.  Lazarus is very sick.  He is in fact dying.

This is one of those places where we might put ourselves into the story.  The sisters don’t explicitly name their brother.  They simply refer to him as “the one whom you love,” and they assume Jesus will know who they are talking about.  That creates an opening in the text for us to understand that it could be about us as well.  For we also, each one of us, is “one whom Jesus loves,” and each of us is also “ill” in the sense of being in the state of spiritual sleep, living death, or blindness which constitutes normal human existence.  

We are supposed to identify with the sick people Jesus encounters and realize in our own souls the healing he brings into these lives.  We are supposed to learn from their responses both positively and negatively, how we might also respond to the Lord’s work in and among us.  Here we are to realize that the sick man, the one whom Jesus loves, is each one of us.  Because we have each contracted a “sickness unto death,” which is our addiction to an ego-centric, personality-driven way of existence characterized by fear, shame, and anger, and manifested in violence.

II.

Jesus’ words of hope are that “this illness isn’t fatal.  It’s for the glory of God so that God’s Son can be glorified through it.”  Neither is our “illness” ultimately fatal, or it doesn’t have to be anyway.  We have hope if we trust in Jesus Christ, which is what this gospel is about.

And we are reminded that “Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus,” which is good to know because Jesus then does something very disturbing.  He stays where he is for two more days.  He does not drop everything and rush to Lazarus’ side.  He lets the illness take its course.  He lets Lazarus, as we say, “hit bottom.”  

This is a very difficult, or irresponsible, thing to do.  If you’ve ever had a family member which serious difficulties that they refuse to acknowledge, you know how hard it is to let them hit bottom.  That is often what has to happen before a person wakes up to the nature and seriousness of their own situation and can therefore change.  And hitting bottom is usually very, very traumatic and frightening.  Frankly, it can be fatal.

It feels irresponsible and unloving, and we have to use much discernment to tell the difference between allowing someone to reach the place where they can finally get some help, and just callously refusing to assist someone who could use it.  We need the advice and encouragement of our community for this.  It depends on the context, the history, and the circumstances, of course.  But this is a decision we can never make by ourselves.

When we’re talking about spiritual change, as in the change from addiction to the habits of our old self to the emergence and awakening of our deeper and higher true self, hitting bottom is in some sense necessary.  The symbol for it is baptism, which represents a dying and a rising.  When Jesus talks about taking up our cross and following him, he means letting go of our old self, letting our old self hit bottom, so we can be reborn “from above,” as Jesus put it back in chapter 3.

But if you’re the one going through this, like the child being lowered into a cool bath to reduce a dangerously high fever, it feels like you’re the victim of gratuitous violence, and you fight against it with all your might.  No one wants to hit bottom.  No one desires for their old self to die because it feels like your only self.  

One of the reasons they are out in the desert in the first place is because the wilderness is where we are closer to the bottom and therefore these questions of spiritual identity and life are more immediate.  That’s why people fast; that’s why Irish monks used to pray outdoors in all weather; that’s why we submit to strenuous spiritual disciples.  It is to get to the bottom of things, which in the end, is our physical, embodied nature.  Hitting bottom is not a matter of thinking or feeling something.  It is something that happens to and in your mortal body.

III.

So Jesus delays for two days.  The disciples apparently assume it is because he’s afraid of arrest.  But that’s not it.  It is because he has something bigger planned for Lazarus than merely healing his physical body.  He is waiting for Lazarus to hit the real bottom; he is waiting for Lazarus to die.  

When he is sure that this has happened, Jesus calls the disciples together and announces that they are going back to Judea.  The disciples remind Jesus that there is still a warrant out for his arrest in Judea.

The Lord then reflects about the difference between walking in the day and in the night.  In the daytime we can see where we are going.  He is the light of the world, and he is able to navigate the challenges and complexities of his environment.  This is in contract with those who walks at night, who can’t see where he is going, and therefore stumbles and crashes into things.  Interestingly, he refers to the light as something that is “in” people or not, like we bring with us our light and we create our own daytime or nighttime.  

On one level, Jesus is simply saying, “Trust me, I got this.  The clueless Temple police are in the dark.  They will not expect me to show up in Bethany.  Anyway, it’s not quite time yet.”  

On a deeper level he means that anyone who does trust in him does have that light within them enabling them to see clearly what is going in in their world.  

Jesus tells them that he wants to go back to Judea because, he says, “Our friend Lazarus is sleeping, but I am going in order to wake him up.”  The disciples make the mistake of taking him literally; they think he means Lazarus is having a nap.  So they don’t get it.  It is one of the many places in this gospel where I imagine Jesus sighing or rolling his eyes in frustration.  So he has to spell it out for them.  “Lazarus has died,” he bluntly states, and he could add, “You clueless numbskulls.”  

“For your sakes I am glad I wasn’t there so that you can believe.”  Which they apparently don’t because they keep interpreting his words literally, which is to say, nonsensically.  They do this as a defense mechanism to avoid doing what he says.  This is what most literal interpretations of Jesus are about.  Especially when taking him literally means doing something impossible, like being born again, or eating his body.

IV. 

While it is necessary for us to hit bottom in some actual way, hitting bottom is not the end.  We do not hit bottom and then stay there to rot in defeat and failure.  What we think of as hitting bottom is in fact the condition required for Jesus to show up and for new life to start happening. 

 

Jesus says that a grain of wheat has to “die” before it can sprout and become a plant that bears much fruit.  I like the image of an acorn that has to hit bottom by being buried in the soil, at which point it begins to become something new that was always encoded within it, that was always its true nature and destiny.  

Your little, limited, narrow, closed old self has to die as a condition of your larger, expansive, wide, and open new self to emerge.  You have to realize that your normal existence is actually killing you, that as long as you hang on to it you’re doomed, and that you have to use the experience of hitting bottom as an opportunity to get out of it.  You have to let it go.  Because there is life beyond the bottom.

The disciple Thomas gets it.  He hears Jesus announce that they are headed back to the dangerous territory of Judea, and all this talk of Lazarus dying, and he assumes that the time has come for Jesus to be lifted up for the salvation of the world.  And he’s right!  This is just before Passover.  And though we may have nine chapters to go, very little time will pass.  Jesus is in fact only a few weeks away from being crucified.

Thomas may be the only one who actually understands and reflects what Jesus has been talking about.  “If we have died with him in a death like his we shall surely be united with him in a resurrection like his,” is the way the Apostle Paul will put it.  Thomas is ready to die with Jesus.  He understands and embraces the true cost of discipleship.  Even if he may not quite yet understand what resurrection is about.

Following Jesus means, as Thomas points out, being ready to die with him.  Thomas is a disciple.  He has already presumably been baptized, which is that symbolic rebirth.  Which means that, unlike the grain of wheat or the acorn, our hitting bottom and letting go of our old selves is not usually something that is a one-time-only experience.  Yes we are only baptized once; but it is something we have to remember all the time, as we do every Sunday.  And we do that both at the beginning when we refill the font, but also at the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as we are continually refed and renourished by the Body and Blood of Christ. 

I mean, Paul says we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, because the fact is that we are constantly forgetting our new selves and sliding back into our old ego-centric habits.  Even the greatest saints of the church experienced moments of doubt and weakness, so hard is it for us to maintain our connection to who we truly are.  Luther said Christians are always at the same time saved and sinners.

V.

Which leaves us with the choice.  Shall we stay in the safe yet challenging place of retreat, where we can work out our souls and prepare for some future time when we engage in mission?  Shall we continue our community-building and listening to Jesus?  Shall we stay, in other words, in church?  Obviously, this is a necessary and good place; Jesus calls us to it… but he doesn’t call us to stay here forever.

Sooner or later we have to leave the classroom, or the circle of supporting friends, or the practice field, or the laboratory.  If we stay too long it becomes hiding, procrastinating, excuse-making.  If we are staying here out of fear or shame or a desire for predictability and comfort, we are here for the wrong reason.  Remember that Jesus begins his ministry in Mark with the words, “Now is the time!”

Or shall we go with Jesus back into hostile and dangerous territory, for the sake of bringing light to those who dwell in a land of deep darkness and even bringing life to the dead?  Shall we actually do Jesus’ mission of love, healing, welcoming, and forgivness, putting ourselves at risk?  Shall we be active witnesses to the new life that God has poured into our hearts?  Shall we, in effect, die with him, thereby becoming new people, the people we were originally created to be?

We have always to be doing both, I think.  Acting and reflecting; learning and implementing; listening and speaking.  For now, we are left with Jesus’ words of instruction to the disciples as they leave the zone of relative safety and embark for Judea.  “Let’s go.”

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