What Yet Lives
What Yet Lives
A frantic messenger arrives from Bethany — Jesus, your dear friend Lazarus is dying, you must go to him as soon as you can — And so Jesus … stays where he is for two days.
Now if you count the day it took for the messenger to get to Jesus by the Jordan river, plus the two days that Jesus stayed, plus the day it took Jesus to get to Bethany, you get four days. So, Lazarus would already be dead by the time the messenger got to Jesus. But then again, in chapter four of John’s Gospel, we see Jesus heal the son of a royal official from at least a day’s walk. One of my buddies in Education For Ministry compared Lazarus to a little ball that Jesus seems to play with. Similar to the man born blind, Jesus focuses more on the future purpose of Lazarus’s sickness —This sickness will not lead to death, but is for God’s glory so that through it the Son of God may be glorified. But I believe that there is another reason for Jesus’s seeming reluctance to go to Bethany.
Much has been speculated about why Jesus publicly broke down in weeping. But the eyewitness author of this Gospel drops a clue in the next chapter, when he reports that the religious authorities opposed to Jesus resolved to have him killed. And just a few verses later, we are also told that they decided to have Lazarus killed, to bury the evidence. We’re not told any more. But I see no reason that those who successfully plotted Jesus’s death would have been less successful in bringing about Lazarus’s death. Nor does it make sense for the author to even mention Lazarus unless it actually happened. This means that at the same time Jesus was killed, Lazarus was too, just weeks after having died and been raised, only to die again. Perhaps there are worse things than dying, like dying twice, the second time by premeditated murder.
In any case, Jesus reanimated Lazarus’s flesh. But sooner or later, Lazarus would die a second time. And Martha might have had reason to repeat her protest to Jesus — Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Down through the millennia, disciples of Jesus have no doubt repeated her in their prayers of protest. Officially, the established forms of prayer are adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation or offering, intercession for others, and petition for ourselves. Protest is in there too. God’s a big boy and can take it.
In response to Martha’s protest, Jesus responds with words often read at Episcopal funerals — 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. Do you believe this?
Jesus is the resurrection and the life, two distinct things. Because he is the resurrection, then we who believe him and trust in him, even though we must physically die, will remain alive in the Spirit he gives us. As the late Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, put it in his commentary on John’s Gospel—Yet shall his true self live. And because we true selves who believe in him will never die, but will live in him until the last day of resurrection, then we can live every day of this physical life as our true resurrected self.
Martha may not have fully understood this right then. But she trusted the source. And while Luke might have seemed to prefer the bookish Mary to the worker Martha; in this Gospel, Martha is the first to publicly declare Jesus to be the Messiah, the Christ, the Chosen King and Son of God. So, to rephrase Jesus’s question: Do you, like Martha, believe and trust that though you die, yet your true self shall live? Do you believe and trust that in your true self you can live today as your resurrected self?
March 22nd, 2026
The Fifth Sunday in Lent Year A
The Rev. David Kendrick