The musings of Peter

This week we come to John 11, the raising of Lazarus, a story nearly everyone knows. Yet we should not allow our familiarity with it to make us pass too quickly over what John is revealing. Everything in the Gospel has been building toward the question of who Jesus is and from where His power and authority come. He has changed water into wine, healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, forgiven sins, taught with an authority that astonished the crowds, and declared that He and the Father are one.

Now He stands before a tomb. Lazarus has been dead for four days. His body has begun to decay. There can be no suggestion that Lazarus was merely unconscious or that the mourners were mistaken. Jesus is not healing a living man. He is commanding a dead man to live. If there were still any uncertainty about who Jesus is, this act should have settled the question forever. And yet, for some, it did not. Some saw Lazarus emerge from the tomb and believed. Others saw the same miracle and immediately went to report Jesus to those who wanted Him dead.

The miracle was definitive, but the human heart was still free to reject what stood plainly before it.There are many parts of this chapter that deserve our attention, but perhaps we should begin with the shortest and one of the most mysterious verses in Scripture: “Jesus wept.” John placed those words there for a reason. They reveal the true humanity of Christ, but they reveal more than that. Jesus knew that He was about to raise Lazarus.

He had already told His disciples that Lazarus’s death would be used for the glory of God. He had no doubt about what He was going to do, and there is no reason to imagine that He wept because Lazarus had been condemned or lost. The passage gives us no basis for such a conclusion. Jesus knew that Lazarus would soon walk out of the tomb, and still He wept.Why, then, did Jesus weep?

That is a question worth discussing because our answers may reveal something about our own understanding of Christ, suffering, death, and love. We naturally place ourselves in the scene. We try to stand in Jesus’ sandals and see what He saw, but often what we see comes from within ourselves. We bring our own losses, fears, disappointments, and experiences of grief to the passage. John may not have consciously imagined every personal interpretation that would arise from these two words, but the Holy Spirit who inspired the Gospel knew every grieving heart that would one day read them. Perhaps the verse is deliberately brief because it leaves room for each of us to approach Christ through the wounds and separations that we ourselves have known.Jesus may have wept because He loved Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. He saw Mary crying and the mourners crying with her, and He entered fully into their sorrow. He did not stand apart from them and dismiss their grief by saying that everything would soon be all right. He did not rebuke them for mourning or tell them that stronger faith would have prevented their tears. He allowed Himself to be moved. The Son of God stood before the reality of death, the great wound that sin had brought into the world, and He wept.

Grief is a healthy and deeply human response to separation. Our minds may tell us that a loved one who dies in friendship with God is now free from pain, sickness, fear, and discomfort. We may believe that the person has lived a faithful life and has now entered into something better. We may firmly believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Yet our hearts still ache because the person is no longer physically present to us. We cannot hear the familiar voice, sit at the same table, share an ordinary conversation, or reach out and touch the person we love. The promise of reunion gives us hope, but hope does not make the present separation unreal. Even when we know that separation will not last forever, a single day without someone we love can feel unbearably long.Perhaps Jesus’ tears allow us to understand that grief is not opposed to faith. We do not mourn because we have no hope, but neither do we pretend that death is harmless. Death is an enemy. Saint Paul calls it “the last enemy to be destroyed.” Jesus came to conquer death, but before He conquered it through His own death and Resurrection, He stood before the tomb of His friend and wept. The Christian response to death is not to deny sorrow. It is to allow sorrow to be joined to hope. Jesus does not tell us that we must choose between believing in eternal life and grieving the person who is gone. At the tomb of Lazarus, He shows us that perfect faith and genuine grief can exist in the same heart.

The tears of Jesus may also reveal something about the way He loves each one of us. His love is not distant, abstract, or impersonal. He does not merely love humanity as a collective idea. He loves particular people. He loved Lazarus. He loved Martha. He loved Mary. He loves each of us personally. When we close our hearts to Him, He does not become indifferent. When we wander away, He does not simply erase our name and move on. His love grieves over the distance we place between ourselves and Him. Christ sees the suffering caused by sin, the damage we inflict upon ourselves and one another, and the ways we resist the grace He offers. His Sacred Heart is not cold before our pain. It is a heart that sees suffering, enters into it, and ultimately bears it upon the Cross.

This does not mean that every instance of suffering is a punishment sent directly by God because we have refused to listen. My own Catholic teaching requires greater care than that. Suffering entered the world through the Fall, and much of it comes through natural weakness, human freedom, disease, accident, injustice, or the evil choices of others. God may permit suffering, but He is never the author of moral evil. He may use suffering to awaken us, purify us, redirect us, or draw us closer to Himself, but we should be cautious about claiming to know precisely why a particular person is suffering. Jesus Himself rejects the simplistic assumption that every affliction is caused by the personal sin of the one who suffers. What we can say with confidence is that God never abandons us within suffering and that no suffering offered to Him is wasted.

Then there are Martha and Mary, two sisters who approach Jesus in different ways. Martha goes out to meet Him while Mary remains at home. Martha says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” There is sorrow in her words, and perhaps even disappointment, but there is also faith. She continues, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus tells her, “Your brother will rise,” and Martha answers according to the faith of Israel: “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus then draws from Martha one of the greatest professions of faith in the Gospel. He tells her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live.” He does not merely say that He can cause resurrection. He says that He is the Resurrection. Eternal life is not simply a gift detached from Him. Life is found in communion with Him. Jesus then asks Martha, “Do you believe this?” She answers, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.”

Martha sees Jesus more clearly than many of the religious authorities who have questioned Him. There is no bargaining in her confession. She does not claim special treatment because Jesus loved her family. She does not demand that He prove Himself. She acknowledges who He is even before Lazarus walks out of the tomb. Her faith does not depend upon receiving the miracle she desires. She believes while her brother is still dead.Mary approaches Jesus differently. When she hears that He is calling for her, she rises quickly and goes to Him. She falls at His feet and says the same words Martha had spoken: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Mary does not offer a theological statement as Martha does. She gives Jesus her grief. She falls before Him with her sorrow, her confusion, and perhaps her unanswered questions. The people around her may have seen only an emotional woman unable to accept the death of her brother. Jesus sees something more. He sees love, faith, and a heart that knows where to go when every human hope has failed.Martha confesses with words. Mary confesses with tears at the feet of Christ. Both responses are acts of faith. Some of us approach Jesus through understanding, doctrine, and conviction. Others come to Him overwhelmed, barely able to speak. John 11 shows that Christ receives both. He enters Martha’s theological conversation, and He enters Mary’s grief. He speaks truth to one and weeps with the other.

We become like Martha and Mary whenever we pray for someone who is sick or dying. We send word to Jesus: “Lord, the one you love is ill.” We ask for healing. We plead for a miracle. We proclaim the goodness of God, and sometimes the healing we desire is given. When that happens, we rejoice and tell the story. But sometimes the person dies, and we are left standing before a tomb, wondering why Jesus did not come sooner.At those moments we often say, “God must have had another plan.” That statement can contain real faith, but it can also make God sound arbitrary, as though He distributes miracles according to an unknowable mood. The God revealed by Jesus Christ is not a capricious deity who must be persuaded to care. He is not moved from indifference to concern by the intensity of our prayers. He already loves the person for whom we are praying more perfectly than we ever could.God always hears our prayers, but He does not always answer them in the form we request. Prayer is not a method for forcing God’s will to conform to ours. It is a way of bringing our desires into communion with His perfect wisdom and love. We may pray for bodily healing, while God knows that the person’s final healing will come through entrance into eternal life. We may pray for someone’s conversion, and God may place people, circumstances, memories, warnings, and moments of grace along that person’s path. Yet He will not destroy the freedom He Himself has given. We may ask God to remove every trial, while He may instead give us the strength to endure, the grace to remain faithful, and the charity to become more like Christ through the trial.

We should not say that God always gives us the hidden desire of our hearts if by that we mean that every outcome is what we secretly wanted. Often we truly wanted the person to live. We truly wanted the marriage to be restored, the child to return, the sickness to disappear, or the disaster to be prevented. God does not ask us to pretend otherwise. Rather, beneath all our particular desires lies a deeper longing: the desire for life, love, wholeness, justice, communion, and a happiness that cannot be taken away. Those desires find their final fulfillment only in God.

The raising of Lazarus is a miracle, but it is also a sign. Lazarus is restored to ordinary earthly life, and one day he will have to die again. Jesus has not yet given him the glorified and incorruptible body promised in the final resurrection. The greater victory will come when Jesus Himself enters death and rises never to die again. Lazarus comes from the tomb still wrapped in burial cloths and must be untied by others. Jesus will leave His burial cloths behind. Lazarus receives his mortal life back. Jesus rises into a life over which death has no power.Christ does not promise that no one we love will die. He promises that death will not have the final word. He does not promise that every tomb will be opened immediately. He promises that a day is coming when every tomb will be opened and those who belong to Him will be raised. At Bethany, Jesus gives us a glimpse of that final victory.The command Jesus gives is simple and absolute: “Lazarus, come out.” The dead man hears the voice of the Son of God and obeys. That same voice calls each of us. Some of us are bound by sin, resentment, fear, grief, pride, addiction, disappointment, or despair. We may still be breathing, but parts of our hearts have been sealed inside tombs. Christ stands before those places and calls us by name. He does not merely offer advice from outside the tomb. He commands death to release what belongs to Him.

The question Jesus asks Martha is therefore also addressed to us: “Do you believe this?” Do we believe only that Jesus can occasionally perform miracles, or do we believe that He is the Resurrection and the Life? Do we trust Him only when He arrives according to our schedule, or can we trust Him when He appears to be late? Can we believe while the stone is still in place, while the prayer seems unanswered, and while the person we love remains in the tomb?John 11 does not give us an easy explanation for every suffering. It gives us something greater. It gives us Jesus. It gives us a Savior who weeps, a Savior who loves personally, a Savior who receives both our confession and our grief, a Savior who stands before death without fear, and a Savior whose voice the dead themselves must obey.

Our hope is not that we will never stand before a tomb. Our hope is that when we do, we will not stand there alone. Christ stands beside us. He weeps with us. He calls us to believe. And He promises that the tomb, however final it may appear, is not the end of the story.