The Last Sign

Scripture: Fifth Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.

This is the day of the last sign.

When the Apostle John wrote his Gospel account, he claimed that Jesus had worked so many miracles and wonders and healings that, were they all written down, the world itself could not contain the volumes necessary to record them. Yet in his Gospel, John selects seven miracles—just seven—to serve as signs pointing to the mission and identity of Jesus Christ. These signs tell us Who Jesus is and what He has come to do. Today, brothers and sisters, we have read the story of the seventh and final sign.

Lazarus was an old friend of Jesus. He lived in Bethany, which was a little town just to the east of Jerusalem, where Jesus would stay whenever He came to visit the Holy City. It seems He did this several times a year, at least. Between Bethany and Jerusalem lay the Mount of Olives, where Jesus did much of His teaching, and from which, according to prophecy, the Messiah would enter Jerusalem to inaugurate His Kingdom. More on that in a bit.

Bethany was founded by folk from the Galilee, Jesus’ home region, where He grew up in Nazareth and attended a wedding at Cana. Lazarus had two sisters, Mary and Martha, and while Mary was an enormously popular name amongst women of the day, this Mary is held to have been Mary of Magdala, or Mary Magdalene. Magdala is a town up north, on the Sea of Galilee, right next to the spot where Jesus preached His first public sermon. That may well be where Lazarus and his sisters were born and raised; we don’t know how far back Jesus and this family go. Far enough back, it seems, for Lazarus to be called “he whom You love,” and for him to call to for Jesus upon his deathbed.

News comes to Jesus in the north that Lazarus is ill down in Bethany, and that entire southern region of Israel, known as Judea, has become a dangerous place for Jesus. He has grown a little too famous, worked a few too many wonders, and so has caught the attention of the Powers That Be. “This illness does not lead to death,” Jesus replies to the message. “Rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Two days later, He comes back to the disciples and announces, “Let us go to Judea again. Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, and I must awaken him.”

This understandably upsets the disciples, who fear for Jesus’ life should He return to Bethany, so close to the hostile volatility of Jerusalem. “Lazarus will be fine,” they insist. “You don’t need to risk Your neck traveling down there.” So Jesus speaks plainly: “Lazarus is dead,” He says. “Let us go to him.” And to his everlasting credit, the Apostle Thomas states with obvious resignation: “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.” If Jesus insists on getting Himself killed, they’ll be right beside Him.

By the time they arrive, Lazarus has been dead in the tomb four days. Ancient belief held that the soul might linger for up to three days, so by any measure, four days is good and dead. Mourners have gathered—Mary and Martha and folks from Jerusalem. And Mary and Martha both say a remarkable thing to Jesus. Both of them, weeping and perhaps accusing, state, “Lord, if You had been here, our brother would not have died.” Jesus could’ve saved him, they believe, yet now it is too late. Even so, Martha seems still to hold out some strange hope. “Even now,” she says to Jesus, “even after all this, I know that God will give to You whatever You ask of Him.” Now what is it, do you suppose, that she thinks He can do here? Does she think He can raise the dead?

“Your brother will rise again,” He assures her. And she responds, like any good Christian mourner at any modern funeral, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” And here Jesus pronounces, with the voice and authority of God Himself: “I AM the Resurrection, and the life. Whosoever believes in Me, even though he dies, shall live. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.”

Whew, I gotta tell you—every time I hear that, it still gives me goose bumps…

A little background might be in order. You see, the resurrection is a curiously Jewish idea. It wasn’t a fully-fledged notion early on in the Bible, though hints of it are there from the very beginning. When things start out, there is no death. God is the Life, and death only comes from separating ourselves from God. That’s Genesis 3. When God then launches His ultimate plan to save our now-broken world, He enlists an old man named Abraham, whose only explicit hope for life after death rests in his offspring. Abraham wants family to carry on his memory and name and blood after he dies.

God promises all this and more. “I will make of your family a great nation,” God proclaims, “and through that nation I will bless all the peoples of the earth.” That’s good enough for Abraham, who dies at peace. Pretty soon, though—by the time of Abraham’s grandson—folks are talking about a place where our spirits go after we die. The Old Testament calls it Sheol, the land of the dead. In Greek it’s Hades, which isn’t really the same thing as Hell. Most of the peoples who believe in the land of the dead think of it as a rather dreary place, but hey, heroes or holy men might get a nicer spot there. Jews believe in Heaven, of course, but that’s the domain of God and His angels, no place for human beings. The idea that we might rise to Heaven must wait for Jesus.

It’s not until much later, when the people of God are in Exile, that God starts talking about two shockingly new promises. The first promise is that He will send a new King, an Anointed One, a Messiah, to save God’s people and fix the world. This King will not be like the earlier human kings, but will come from Heaven and appear like a Son of Man. That is, He’s going to look human, but He’ll be more than that. The Greek term for Messiah is Christ, and so God’s people start looking for the Christ to show up. He’s due to appear right around the time of Jesus.

The other new idea is this thing called Resurrection. You heard about it a bit when we read from the prophet Ezekiel this morning. Resurrection doesn’t mean that we live on through our children. It doesn’t mean that our spirits linger on as ghosts. Resurrection means that God is going to fix what we broke—He’s going to get rid of death, destroy it, utterly abolish it! And so every human being who has ever lived will arise from the dust, just as Adam once arose, to be made whole and alive in both body and soul. The body comes up, the spirit comes up, and we live again. That’s the idea of Resurrection: that God does not give up on the physical world, that death does not have the final say, that nothing is beyond God’s ability to heal!

Once the prophets tell us this clearly, we can see it everywhere in the Bible. We can see it in Noah’s flood, when waters of death become waters of rebirth. We can see it in the hope of Abraham, that even his sacrificed son might live. We can see it in the life of Israel, the nation that, impossibly, keeps rising from its own grave! God will send a Messiah, the Anointed King, to be for us a New Adam and to repair the breach that we in rebellion have caused. By the time of Jesus, everyone is looking for the Christ. And everyone is looking for the Resurrection on the last day.

And then Jesus shows up: Jesus, Who fits every prophetic criteria; Jesus, Who in word and deed fulfills the Scriptures and promises of God; Jesus, of Whom people ask not simply, “Who are You?” but “What are You?” And Jesus says, “I AM the Resurrection and the life!  Those who believe in Me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die!” And then, to prove that He’s not some psychopath, to prove that He’s not an egomaniac claiming to be God in the flesh, Jesus commands the dead man: “Lazarus! Come forth!” And the dead man gets up.

His body is dead four days in the tomb! His soul has descended to deepest Sheol! And when Jesus calls to him, by God, the laws of time and nature crack apart, and he rises from his grave, because when Jesus calls you, brother—it doesn’t matter one lick how broken and messed up and dead you may be—you get up. The King has come. The Son of Man is here. And He has arrived to break the grave and harrow Hell and raise souls into Heaven and breathe life back into the world! And the final sign of Who He is and what He does, the seventh sign in John’s Gospel revealing the identity and mission of Jesus Christ, is that by His Word the dead shall walk and life shall rise from out of the grave!

This is the sign that terrifies Judea. John says that the fear produced by the raising of Lazarus leads directly to the arrest and murder of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. Here is a Man Who commands the dead to live—and you want to kill Him? Good luck with that, brother. We’ll see how well that goes for you. When you put the embodiment of Life Himself into the ground, that, in my experience, just leads to more life than you can handle. But we’ll get to that story next Sunday—because next week, my friends, is Holy Week. And that’s when this tale really gets good.

Thanks be to Christ, Who has come to conquer death and Hell. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.