Part III of “I Am a Follower: The Way, Truth, and Life of Following Jesus”
Luke 11
Last Thursday I was doing some work in my study at home, preparing for this week’s sermon, actually, when my cell phone rang with a call from one of our sister churches saying that one of their members had just died suddenly—an elderly lady who was supposed to be picked up by some church members for an appointment today. They knocked on the door, got no answer, got suspicious and called the police. When they went in they found her in her bed. She had died unexpectedly during the night. The church’s pastor was out of town and not immediately available, so the church called to see if I could go be with the family. I dropped what I was doing and headed out.
I actually beat the coroner to the house, introduced myself to the family, and provided the pastoral presence that I’m trained and able to do. I’ve done this many times over the years, and working with families in the midst of deep, immediate crisis is always a mix of challenge and blessing. As the deputy coroner showed up to do her work, I listened to the family talk about their mom—a lady who was so faithful to God that, as Pastor Dave told me later, she prayed for her pastor every day. But one of the hard things you often hear in those moments of grief is regret: “I just talked to her last night,” said one. “I wish I had been here,” said another. “If only we could have gotten here in time.” I sat by as they began to call family—the shock of hearing about a sudden death, the expressions that there just wasn’t enough time.
We humans live in that sense of time. We know we have a beginning and an end, and in between there’s almost never enough time, especially in hindsight. Time is always running out for us—life ends when we least expect it. We always wish there was more time; that the clock would stop just for a few moments—our kids grow up and move away before we know it; the wrinkles, aches, and pains appear; friends come and go. Just a little more time…it’s perhaps the thing we desire most in life. Tick, tick, tick…
I was at a preaching workshop a couple of weeks ago with Dr. Tom Long, who teaches at Candler School of Theology, and he said that when we read John’s Gospel, like we’re doing in this series, we have to do it while wearing two watches. One is for chronological time—the ticking of the clock. The other, however, is what the Bible calls “kairos” time—which we might understand as God’s time—the right time, the time that God has made ready. We live so much in that chronos time that we often miss the kairos, but the story we are reading this morning is all about seeing life not through the ticking watch but through the eyes of one who is the Lord of time itself.
Jesus’ good friend Lazarus was sick. Pretty gravely so—so much that Martha, his sister, began to call in the family, which included leaving a voicemail for Jesus asking him to come quickly before the end.
Now, you’d expect Jesus to drop everything and go to his friend’s side. This is what Martha and Mary expected, just like people rightly expect a pastor to drop everything and make it there in time. But John tells us something very curious—“Though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” Every pastor reads that text and thinks, “Well, Jesus, that’s not gonna look good on your annual evaluation!” I mean, it’s not like Jesus had a good excuse. He wasn’t indisposed, wasn’t even still in his jammies, without a shower and a shave like I was last Thursday! He just never intended to go. He stayed put until his friends had run out of time.
Oh, sure, he made some comment that the illness wasn’t going to lead to death. Something about the Son of Man being glorified through it. But by the time Jesus got his act together and finally and made it to Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days. An old Jewish custom said that the soul usually hung around for three days after death just to see if the body had really petered out and then it left—after which the dead were really dead. Lazarus was dead. Too late, Jesus.
Martha went out to meet Jesus before he even made it to Bethany, to tell him they were out of time. “Hey, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” You can hear the regret in her voice—the same regret I hear from many families in the first moments of grief—“If only I had called mom yesterday; if only I had been here, I could’ve called the ambulance; if only I had one more chance to tell him that I love him.” When we’re governed by the ticking clock, we tend to look back to what could have been.
You can certainly see that Martha has a point here, however. If Jesus had been there, he could have fixed things—everyone else seemed to be thinking it, too. Standing around the tomb, some of the mourners grumbled, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” (v. 37). Martha clearly believed that Jesus was the Son of God, but she was still hacked that Jesus had taken his time getting there.
But John makes it clear that Jesus is always looking at a different watch. He waited until the right time—the time when his friends were out of time.—to finally show up. He waited until the optimal moment that would reveal God’s glory, rather than giving into the timetable of people who always believe that they’re out of time.
In the workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago, Tom Long said that our obsession with time is actually a form of practical atheism. If we’re always focused on time running out, we’ll tend to spend our time on things that we think will stave off the inevitable or at least delay it. Heck, you can even download a “death clock” app these days that will supposedly tell you when you’re going to die. The idea? Better get busy milking this life for all its worth!
As I’ve said before (and this is a Bob Kaylor theory, mind you), I think a lot of our sin is actually the result of knowing we’re going to die some day. Sure, theologically speaking, sin is the cause of death—we see that in Genesis 3, for example—but I think the reverse is also true. If we think that death is it, then we’ll do just about anything to stave it off and try to forget about it. Think of the “seven deadly sins,” for example, and how each one is really a way of trying to get as much as we can before we die: Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Pride, Envy, Wrath—these are all means using up things and people to get what we want before we die. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is the way of life for people without hope. When someone has it all, we say they are “livin’ the life.” But some point, however, time runs out, the watch stops ticking. The end. Period. Many people in our time seem to have the same philosophy as many pagans in Jesus’ day, whose tombstones read, in Latin: “Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo:” I was not, I was, I am not, I don’t care.
The Jews, or at least many Jews in Jesus’ day, lived with a different sort of hope than their pagan neighbors. It was the hope of resurrection—that God would complete what God had done and reverse the curse of death, raising his people from the dead much like the dry bones coming together in Ezekiel 37 or Daniel’s vision that “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). But that was a someday hope—somewhere down the line, many ticks of the clock away. Jesus tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again” and she interprets this as a future hope: “Yes, of course, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
But then Jesus changes watches on her. “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Note that Jesus is speaking in the present tense—“I am the resurrection and the life.” He announces that the promise of resurrection—the thing Martha and her fellow faithful Jews are hoping for—is not just about the promised future event; it’s available now in Jesus. God’s resurrection power is found in his Son, and as the resurrection and the life, Jesus can defeat the power of death in the future and in the present. Life—real, abundant, eternal, resurrection life—is available to all who live and believe in Jesus right now.
Jesus says later in John 14:6, our theme verse for this series, that he is “the way, the truth, and the life.” Here we get an idea of the life he is talking about. John uses the word “life” throughout his Gospel to describe something beyond mere physical existence—it’s real life. “In him was life,” says John in chapter 1, “and that life was the light of all people.” “I came that they might have life,” says Jesus in John 10, “and have it abundantly.” “I am the bread of life” he says in John 6. When we put our trust in Jesus, we no longer put our fear in death. And if we no longer fear death, then sin cannot bind us like a bunch of stinking graveclothes. When we believe in resurrection and orient our lives around eternal life instead of death, then we begin to realize that we’re never out of time.
The weeping crowd at the tomb didn’t know this—not yet. Jesus sees them and weeps himself—not over Lazarus, but over a people who believe they’re out of time.
“Take away the stone,” Jesus says to the crying crowd. Martha, who was always reticent to deal with a mess, said, “Lord, he’s been there for four days. There’s a stench.” Actually, I like the way the King James puts it, “But Lord, he stinketh!” We know that where’s there’s death there’s a stink. When someone says, “Life stinks,” we can be pretty sure that it’s not actually life—it’s the specter of death that gives life a stench—a stench that tells us we’re out of time.
But Jesus knows he’s not of out time. This is actually the perfect time. “Lazarus, come out!” he cries in a loud voice. And Lazarus, incredibly, staggers out of the tomb, the grave clothes still wrapped around him. Jesus says, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
The story of Lazarus foreshadows Jesus’ own resurrection, but it’s different.. Lazarus will die again, in need of another resurrection, but Jesus will live eternally. It’s Jesus’ resurrection that actually enables our own—the resurrection of one man in the middle of history guaranteeing the resurrection of his people at the end. What we have here is just a taste of what is to come for us—a sign and a promise that when we believe in him, though we die, yet shall we live! In his resurrection, Jesus defeated the power of death—teaching us that in the end it’s not life that’s out of time, it’s death that’s out of time!
But before we can really live this resurrection life in the present, however, we’ve got to let Jesus cut the grave clothes off us—the ways we live now that make life stink. In Colossians 3, Paul says that we’ve been raised with Christ (note, again, in the present tense!). When we believe in Jesus and live in him, our old sinful lives die and new, resurrection life is made possible. We put to death what is earthly in us– cast off the grave clothes that bind us and are clothed with “the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” (v. 10). We no longer spend our lives watching the clock, but rather watching what God is doing in us and through us in his time.
I always wonder what Lazarus thought after he came out of that tomb—given a second chance at life and the first-hand knowledge that death is out of time. Christian tradition goes a couple of different directions when it comes to the rest of the story. One tradition says that Lazarus, learning of the plot against him by the religious leaders who, ironically, wanted him dead after he was raised from the dead, fled to France where he became bishop of Marseilles and was later martyred.
Another tradition says that he and his sisters fled to Kition (Larnaca) on the island of Cyprus, where he was later ordained by Paul and Barnabas and served for years as bishop and an example of the Christian life and hope of resurrection to the people there. He died (again) at age 60 and was buried in a sarcophagus with the inscription “The four-day Lazarus — friend of Christ.” His remains were removed to Constantinople in the year 890 by the Byzantine emperor who, in return, built a church in Larnaca that survives to this day.
Whatever happened, I imagine that Lazarus spent the rest of his second life devoted to telling others about the Christ who had given him life — not just raising him physically from the dead, but giving him a new life of purpose as well. He awoke to a new reality in Christ.
Those who live and believe in Christ know that they’re never going to be out of time. We have a second life—an eternal life—available to us right now. Sitting with a grieving Christian family on a rainy Thursday, with the quiet sound of the kitchen clock ticking on the wall, I knew I could tell them some good news. “Your mom isn’t out of time,” I said, “and neither are we.”
I saw an article recently about an old tombstone in Maryland that was prepared for an atheist. The epitaph on it read, “Here lies an atheist. All dressed up and no place to go.” C.S. Lewis, when told about the epitaph replied, “I bet he wishes that were so.”
When we follow Jesus, there’s always some place to go. Lazarus’ second tombstone, on read “Friend of Christ.” Can you imagine a better epitaph? A friend of Christ for eternity. I read recently about the tombstone of Ruth Bell Graham, Billy Graham’s wife, who passed away in 2007. Her tombstone reads, “End of construction—thank you for your patience.” Even though we die, those in Christ can point to hope. We’re never out of time!
Source:
Long, Tom. Sermon preached at First United Methodist Church, Colorado Springs, CO. October 3, 2014.
