PaddlingPadre

 One may well sympathize with the suffering that Mary and Martha, to say nothing of Lazarus, are left to endure during this episode. You can imagine how things must have gone, how Lazarus must have fallen ill, how, in spite of the care of his sisters, his condition must have dangerously worsened, and of how with growing alarm their minds must have turned to their friend Jesus, who had worked so many healings and so many wonders. With what great anxiety, then, must they have sent word to Jesus, an anxiety that was, I am sure, tempered also with hope because of who they knew Jesus to be, but a hope that, with each passing hour, must have waned until that final disappointment and agony that was the death of their brother.

It is a great credit, then, to the faith and character of Mary and Martha that when Jesus does arrive, fully four days after Lazarus’s burial, that they do not receive him in anger and in bitterness, but rather they still believe in who Jesus is and in what he can do, even if, as Martha and Mary reveal by their questioning, they clearly do not understand why Jesus has allowed this to happen. For surely they had expected, and with good reason, that Jesus in his goodness and in his power would not have permitted this pain and suffering.

But Jesus had more in mind than Mary and Martha and their comforters had expected. For truly they were right to think that Jesus loved Lazarus, and that for love of him and his family that Jesus would will that Lazarus might live. But Jesus does not spare Lazarus the agony of death, nor does he spare Mary and Martha and even himself the pain of his passing, because by these sufferings something marvelous is being achieved. As Jesus says to his disciples, Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. This raising of Lazarus, even more powerfully than Jesus’s healings, testifies to his identity, as Jesus announces to Martha, I am the resurrection and the life, and as he prays before the crowd having opened the tomb, Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.

In other words, by this act of raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus is signaling in the most direct and astounding way yet his divine identity as the Son sent by the Father, who is himself life, and who is more powerful even than death. And so, for all the sufferings that she had had to endure over those past several days, how sweetly, in the aftermath of this miracle, must those words of Jesus have been to Martha as she saw their fruit in the raising of her brother: Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who believes in me will never die.

Prior to Lazarus’s death, Mary and Martha had surely been in great anticipation as they expected some kind of miraculous healing, but how great must their anticipation have become now! If we can, by work of our imaginations, put ourselves into their shoes at this point in the story, then who is to say where our minds might be swept off to in our excitement and our hope. Would we not, in the aftermath of these words and these deeds, be expecting at any day the opening of every grave and the transformation of the entire world?

What we would not have expected, I think, is that Jesus would soon be making his entrance into nearby Jerusalem, only to be turned on by the crowds and to be shamefully betrayed and executed. This, surely, would be an even greater shock to our expectations than had been the death of Lazarus. But observe how our Lord’s death follows the same logic as the death of Lazarus, and thereby reveals the truly prophetic character of today’s gospel. For just as Jesus did not spare himself and those he loved the pain of seeing one they loved suffer and die, so neither does he spare himself the agonies of the cross, nor the agonies that his followers and loved ones, most especially his mother, were to endure in witnessing such a horror. But then, just as death would not have the last word in the case of Lazarus, even less would it have the last word in the case of Christ. Because Jesus was, as he had revealed, Life itself, and if, by his death, Life had entered into death, what could this mean but the death of death and life to those who had died? His resurrection gives proof of this, as does, at the moment of his death, the appearance of the saints whose tombs were opened and who appeared in the holy city, as St. Matthew tells us. For Jesus, here as in the case of Lazarus, has done more than we could have anticipated, because he has not merely saved those who believe in him from death, in the way in which one might be saved from the hands of an enemy, but rather he has destroyed death itself, even as God in the days of Moses drowned Pharoah and his chariots in the sea.

These are things that we would do well to reflect on as we journey through this life, for just as with Mary and Martha, there is so much that we do not understand, so much that we do not see, and often enough it is the very same sort of troubles as they encountered that also afflict us – Mary and Martha were hardly the last Christians to watch a loved one die even as they prayed for his healing. But though there is so much that we do not see, and so much that we do not understand, we do see what Christ has done. We see how he raised Lazarus, we see how he conquered death, we see how he has time and time again exceeded what might have been expected in his love and power and wisdom. And so, knowing what Christ has promised, and knowing who he is who has promised it, we may, even in our own allotted darkness, be filled with confidence that he will do more for us and for ours than we can even dare or imagine or to hope.