Come and See.

John 11.17-37   (September 20, 2015)

I.

After waiting a couple of days before setting out, so that he knows his sick friend Lazarus will be dead, Jesus and his disciples hike back into Judea, where there is a warrant out for his arrest.  He goes straight for Bethany and the house where Lazarus had lived with his sisters, Martha and Mary.  He will find many people there consoling the family, even some of the Jewish authorities, which tells us that they were pretty well-connected in society.  Lazarus’ body has been in the tomb for four days.

When they hear that Jesus is on his way, Mary stays home while Martha goes out to meet him.  She is not pleased.  The first thing she does is scold him.  “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”  Where were you?  What took you so long?  You could have made it in time had you hurried.

Then she adds, “Even now, I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.”  As if to say, I hope you have something left in your bag of tricks for this because you owe me.  It sounds similar to what Jesus’ mother said way back in chapter two in Cana at the wedding where they ran out of wine and she looks at Jesus and says pointedly, “They have no wine….”  Hint, hint.

Jesus replies to Martha with the kind of thing that ministers say to grieving families.  “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha thinks he is just spouting doctrinal platitudes as a way of comforting her and putting her off.  She has none of it.  She says, in effect, yeah, yeah, yeah I went to Sunday School, I can quote doctrine too.  “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.”  Big deal.  Who cares about that?  That is so far off in the future as to be meaningless.  She is not satisfied.  She doesn’t care about the end of time.  She cares about today, and her dead brother, and her grieving family.

And she’s right.  Jesus has come into the world to short-circuit these ideas that salvation and even resurrection are things we have to wait for until we die or the world ends, whatever comes first.  Jesus keeps saying “I am,” “I am;” he doesn’t put them off by talking about “someday,” or “in the future,” or “at the end of time.”  I am, is present tense.  It means now.

In Mark the first thing Jesus says is, “Now is the time.”  The gospel is not about yesterday or tomorrow, it is about today.  So Martha is fully justified in replying to Jesus, If you’re talking about the last day I don’t want to hear it.  After all, he’s the one from who she learned not to be content with vague promises about the future!

II.

So the Lord looks at Martha and says, that he doesn’t mean that Lazarus will rise on some far-off future and final day.  He means that he will rise now, today.  For, he states, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.  Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?”

Now, he is saying this to someone in deep grief for her dead brother.  As far as she sees, her brother is dead.  He is as dead as a person can get.  His body is starting to rot, for heaven’s sake!   So when Jesus says, “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die,” either he is being incredibly callous and cruel, saying in effect, And Lazarus, since he died, obviously didn’t make the cut; sorry… or he means something else.  It sounds contradictory and illogical: you will live even though you die, like you can be alive and dead at the same time, which is biologically impossible, at least for a human.

It reminds me of that slogan adorning the gate of a monastery on Mt. Athos: “If you die before you die then you won’t die when you die.”  Think about it.  There is more than one kind of death, and more than one kind of life.  Because we each have more than one self.  It is our shallow, blind-from-birth, lame, asleep, fearful, limited, ego-centric self, the self we grow up thinking is our only self, our total identity, that has to die so that our deep, true, original, awake, free, and real Self, our essence, the Self that shares humanity with Jesus Christ and participates in his I am, may be revealed and emerge.

Then there is the word “believe” which shows up three times in this exchange.  Belief is more than having a cognitive opinion about something.  I like to translate it as “trust,” which gets more to the idea of a wholehearted giving of yourself which is necessarily expressed in your actions.  So Jesus is not asking if she thinks it is a fact that everyone who lives and believes in him will never die; he is asking if she relies on this truth as the very foundation of her life.  Do you trust me so fully that you are convinced that even if your body gives out you have another, deeper Self that will live on?  Do you live your life with such freedom and grace, without the fear, anger, or shame that come from the assumption that you are bound for extinction?  Do you trust that I am in you, and I am in Lazarus, and that I am the resurrection — the uprising — and the life?

At this, Martha, who has just exhibited her own anger and fear, her own lack of faith or trust, her own failure to live in the present, the living now, snaps out of her snarky attitude and humbly lets that go, and proclaims who Jesus really is.  “Yes, Lord,” she states.  “I believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, the one who is coming into the world.”

III.

It is interesting that she says he is the one who “is coming” into the world.  I mean, he’s standing right there.  Surely she could say that he “has come” into the world.  But no.  Even that would place Jesus and his coming in the past.  Jesus Christ is radically present.  He is always happening now.  He is always coming.  He is always on the way and emerging.

If we treat him like he is just a historical figure, someone from the past, even our past, concerning which we may analyze the data and make determinations and come to conclusions, or even cherish the memories, then we are not with him.  If we treat him like he is only someone we will meet in the future, we are not with him.  

Jesus demands responses now, and he delivers now.  Jesus is about what is happening now.  Jesus is happening now or he is not happening at all.  Your thinking about who Jesus was in the past, or who he will be in the future is immaterial and irrelevant.  It is a waste of time.

So, to the criticism from Martha that he delayed and took his sweet time showing up, Jesus responds basically, There is no time.  There is no delay.  There is no past and no future.  There is only now, the living present, and now is wherever I am.  I am now.  Therefore, the resurrection is now.  The life is now.  If you trust in me and live now, Jesus promises, I am with you.  

Christians have misunderstood and misused this passage a lot.  We think it means if you’re a Christian you’ll go to heaven when you die.  We think that all Jesus wants is that we have a certain opinion about him, or that we affirm certain doctrines about him.  Worse, we then infer that if we don’t give ourselves the label “Christian,” or if we don’t recite the right opinions and affirm the right doctrines, then we don’t have his life and therefore we’re going to hell.

All that is self-serving nonsense designed to cause us to miss the point.  All that is intended to turn what Jesus is talking about and doing into an institutional religion.  Institutional religions have no purpose other than to serve and prop up our blind, sleepwalking, lame, dead existence.  Institutional religions have leaders and connections and agendas that are heavily invested in the status quo and keeping people unaware of the truth of God’s love at work in the world.  Jesus is not about setting up an institutional religion, even though that is largely what we got.

No.  Jesus’ teaching and insight, exemplified here in his encounter with Martha, is that if you let go of the past, with all its anger, shame, remorse, pain, and interpreted memories, and if you let go of the future, with all its desire, fear, anxiety, and projection, and just focus on where you are now… that is, if you become present, and sense your body now, and realize your own I am, you will meet the one who is always coming into the world, with whom we share true being, humanity, and life.  You will meet Jesus Christ, who is God, within you.

IV.

So Martha goes home and tells her sister Mary that Jesus has arrived.  And Mary runs out to meet him so she can make the same accusation her sister made, which is that had he showed up sooner Lazarus might not have died.  Only she says it while on her knees before him.

Thinking that she is going to weep at Lazarus’ tomb, the mourners follow her to Jesus.  Jesus sees the outpouring of grief on the part of all these many people, and simply asks to be taken directly to the tomb.  Interestingly, the ones guiding him to the tomb use the same words that were used by disciples way back in chapter 1 when introducing people to Jesus.  “Come and see,” they say.

And we receive now the same invitation.  What we are to come and see is a tomb with a dead body in it.  We are among the witnesses to what is to happen.

As they are walking to the tomb, Jesus is overwhelmed to the point of tears himself.  These are tears of empathy with all these brokenhearted, grieving people.  The Lord is identifying with them as he identifies with all suffering and loss; he feels our pain and sorrow and he stands with us.

At the same time, his grief is not really for the loss of his friend (since he knows what he is about to do).  It is more for the fact that in our shallow existence we leave ourselves open to such anxiety and hurt.  We are like acorns in profound anguish because one of their own has been buried in the ground, and look!, their shell is cracking, to their horror.  Or we are like a gathering of caterpillars in terrible mourning because one of their own has committed suicide by wrapping herself up in a tight, hard chrysalis.  It is like when you take your dog in the car through the carwash and they clearly think it is the end of the world and they are passing into the belly of a giant monster.

Jesus is crying because we’re so pathetic and clueless, we don’t and can’t see the bigger picture, we don’t know who we really are, and we don’t have any idea about our true destiny.  All we see are people we love disappearing and their bodies decomposing into dust, not realizing at all that they have gone on to another kind of life.

But the bystanders merely think Jesus is crying because he will miss his friend Lazarus.  And, like the sisters, they wonder if he couldn’t have saved him had he arrived on time.  They think that keeping Lazarus from dying is the point, not imagining that Lazarus’ death is actually something bigger.

V.

Walking crying to a tomb is a fairly apt, if somewhat sad, summary of human existence.  I suspect that we do not let our old self go with glee or triumph.  There is a sense in which we grieve, even as we may know we are moving to something better and fuller.  I mean, what parent doesn’t miss their child, even if we know they have to grow up?  Our old selves are like booster rockets that have to be jettisoned; but we thank them and cherish them for serving their purpose.

I’ve been reading this book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I kid you not.  It’s a bestseller.  The author talks at once about being somewhat ruthless in getting rid of your old stuff.  She famously asks that we evaluate everything in our lives by whether it gives us joy when we touch it.  But the remarkable thing she does has to do with what we are letting go of.  She talks about expressing — and I mean verbally and out loud — appreciation and thanksgiving for each object that was a part of your life but is now being moved out.

I talk a lot about how the old self has to die and so forth.  But there is also a sense of gratitude for this identity that got you so far, and that even led you to know you had to lose it.  Just because we are crying doesn’t mean it should happen some other way.  You know that if you’ve ever been to a wedding.

Waking up is not easy.  It is not simple.  It does not reject the old so much as include and move beyond it.  It embraces the old, and then more.  The Lord does not take any short-cuts here.  He lets Lazarus go through the dark valley, even into the jaws of death.  Yet he knows this is not the end, but a passage opening into something new.

And in him, so do we.  So it’s okay to weep with him on the way.  For we trust in him, that he is the uprising, the resurrection, and the life, and that to die in him is to live forever.

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