This morning, we looked at John 11, the famous passage dealing with the resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. As we worked through the story, looking at the different characters and their responses, we saw that there are times when Jesus does not appear to do what we would expect Him to do and when He does not appear to answer all our questions. When informed of Lazarus’s illness, He did not come immediately to help him. By the time He did arrive, Lazarus had been dead for four days. There must have been tremendous confusion, regret, pain and bewilderment in that household.
Both Martha and Mary express the view “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They cannot see beyond the fact that Jesus could have prevented Lazarus’s death. They are still looking at hypothetical situations – what would have happened if Jesus had been there – rather than at what will happen now that Jesus is here.
We are like that so often. We spend our time looking back. We can live in a world of regrets. We may lament opportunities missed in the past. We may be sad at things we have done wrong. But we need to move on from hypothetical situations to where we are right now and understand that right now, Jesus is with us and that can make a difference and does make a difference.
The fact that Jesus is moved by the grief of others reminds us that we have a high priest who is able to empathise with us in every situation we face. (Hebrews 4:15-16) When we go through sorrow, the Man of Sorrows will never drive us away. But for some with Martha and Mary, His compassion and grief did not help the situation. The Message version translates John 11:37 as “Well, if he loved him so much, why didn’t he do something to keep him from dying? After all, he opened the eyes of a blind man.”
That can be our position so often. We can be very demanding in our attitude to God. We say He is Lord, but we think that means He must do everything we want Him to. We say we believe He answers prayer, but we usually mean by that that He has done what we wanted Him to do in a specific situation. It is difficult for us to admit that we walk a narrow path and that the way to life is actually through death. We don’t like this truth.
At this point in the story, we can go in different directions. We can decide that God doesn’t really love us that much, or He would spare us this suffering. We can decide that God does love us, but we don’t want to go any further if this is the path we have to tread because it’s too painful. Or we can decide that God loves us and even though we don’t understand, we will continue to trust and believe.
By trusting and believing, Martha and Mary witness a miracle that is greater than the miracle of ‘ordinary’ healing, if there is such a thing. They see that Jesus really is the Master. Not even death can get in the way of what He does. He will prove that in even more dramatic ways later on in the story John tells, when even His own death cannot be the end of the story, when the fact that He is the Resurrection and the Life means He will rise from the dead and break the devil’s hold on death.
But before we reach the climax of the raising of Lazarus, we learn the difficult lesson that belief has to precede understanding: as Anselm said, ‘credo ut intelligam’ (I believe in order that I may understand). Belief, faith, actually facilitate understanding, rather than understanding actually leading to faith. There is a bigger question than not having all the answers. Perhaps the bigger question is what do we do with all our unanswered questions? Do we weep uncontrollably like Mary? Does grief paralyse us, rendering us incapable of doing anything? Do we attempt to carry on like Martha, with an unassuaged ache in our hearts? Do we allow cynicism to make us bitter towards God, saying, in effect, ‘If You love us so much, why don’t You do something then?’ – or, as the sons of Korah put it in Psalm 44:
“Get up, GOD! Are you going to sleep all day?
Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us?
Why do you bury your face in the pillow?
Why pretend things are just fine with us?
And here we are—flat on our faces in the dirt,
held down with a boot on our necks.
Get up and come to our rescue.
If you love us so much, help us!” (Ps 44: 23-26)
There is a way forward in God that rests in Him even when we don’t understand, that trusts in who God is even when all evidence seems to point in the opposite direction. As Tim Hughes says, in his song ‘When the Tears Fall’, ‘I’ve had questions, without answers’. We all have. But as the song goes on to say,
“When hope is lost, I’ll call You Saviour
When pain surrounds, I’ll call You healer
When silence falls, You’ll be the song within my heart
I will praise You, I will praise You
When the tears fall, still I will sing to You
I will praise You, Jesus, praise You
Through the suffering, still I will sing”
(Tim Hughes, ‘When the Tears Fall’)
The song says it far better than I can. Listen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWUimGv_xrU