John 11 reflection: Lasarus – ASUC 2026
Main point: ‘so that you will really believe’: How does our belief/hope in life after death affect how we live in the here-and-now?
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you, O God. Amen.
‘Only 2 things in life are certain, the saying goes: death and taxes’. Interestingly, Jesus didn’t overthrow taxes, but he did overthrow death. We’ll have to wait a couple more weeks to Easter to see the extent to which Jesus overthrew death, but in today’s passage we get a good preview.
The writer of the Gospel of John goes to great lengths to ensure that we know that Lazarus was certified, bona fide dead before Jesus arrived. His sisters and the mourners are sure he is dead. Whoever wrapped him up from head to toe in graveclothes and put him in a sealed tomb was sure he was dead. Jesus was sure he was dead.
There was a Jewish belief back then that a person’s spirit would hang around for 3 days after a person died, looking for a chance to go back into the body. But by the 4th day the spirit left, because by then the body had started to decay and the spirit knew it was no use waiting around anymore.
So here they were, on the 4th day. Martha warns Jesus about the bad smell. She’s certain he’s been dead for 4 days. But Jesus has a plan. [by the way, his plan wasn’t to stay away until Lazarus died just so that he could raise him back to life again. Jesus was a days’ journey away when he heard the news. So if you do the maths, 1 day for the messenger to get to Jesus, Jesus stayed an extra 2 days, 1 day for them to journey back to Lazarus’ house, and the story says they arrive on the 4th day after Lazarus died. So if you count back 4 days you see that Lazarus must have died sometime between when the messenger was sent, and when the messenger arrived to Jesus] But Jesus had a plan. His plan is to show how good God is. His plan is for people to believe that God sent him. His plan is to give his disciples concrete evidence so they will ‘REALLY’ believe. And what better evidence than to raise someone back to life who has been dead for 4 days! Pretty impressive, by anyone’s standards. Arguably more impressive than Moses’ 10 plagues!
If you remember, back at the Exodus, Moses goes to Pharaoh and tells him, “the Lord says, let my people go!” But Pharaoh responds, “Who is the Lord? Why should I listen to him and let Israel go?” (Ex. 5:2) Then God, through Moses, shows great signs to confirm who God is and how powerful God is. At first Pharaoh’s magicians are able to replicate the signs Moses shows. They make their staffs become snakes. They were able to turn some water to blood. They even caused frogs to appear. But eventually God showed signs that the magicians weren’t able to do.
Some theologians see the 10 plagues of Egypt as an undoing of the good creation order. Life-giving water turns to blood. Insects and animals cause chaos. Light turns to darkness. The angel of death appears.
But in John’s gospel, God is revealing himself differently in Jesus. Instead of undoing the created order, Jesus is revealing a God who is putting things back together again, repairing things. For example, last week we saw Jesus healing a man born blind. The man who was healed said to the Pharisees, ‘Ever since the world began, no one has been able to open the eyes of someone born blind. If this man were not from God, he couldn’t have done it.’ (Jn 9:32f, NLT)
In the miracles and actions John records for us, Jesus is undoing evil, undoing injustice, undoing the corruption of this world. And this week we see Jesus undo even death itself – perhaps the most malicious corruption of God’s good creation. For John, the gospel writer, these signs serve as irrefutable proof that Jesus is who he says he is, much like the 10 plagues served to prove that Yahweh, the Great I Am, was who Moses said he was – far higher than Pharaoh’s magicians, the Egyptian gods and even Pharaoh himself. This time, as the Jesus storybook Bible puts it, because of Jesus everything sad is coming untrue.
So, what do we do with this knowledge? What is the point John wants us to come away with? What action is John calling us to?
Certainly the point is not that we shouldn’t be sad. As we see in this passage, even though Jesus knows the end of the story, he still enters into deep grief and anger at the injustice of death. So, what then? What is it that John wants us to come away with?
Is it just that we don’t have to be scared of death? That we can look forward to life after death? Again, I don’t think that’s what John has in mind. You see, John tells us what he wants us to do at the end of his gospel: ‘these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life by the power of his name.’ (Jn 20:31). And for John, life isn’t something that starts in the future, after death. It’s something that we can take part in already, now! With this knowledge of Jesus and his power over death, we are empowered to live life to the full, (Jn 10:10) to live with reckless abandon, making the most out of life because we have nothing to lose. So if we are to take John’s message seriously, what difference does that make to how we live in the present?
I had an interesting conversation with my kids the other day at dinner: It started out ‘what if you woke up and you were living the same day all over again, every day?’ You know, the classic Groundhog Day scenario. What day would you pick, and what would you do? They talked about the experiments they would try. Then it went to ‘what if one day you were going to break out of the cycle, but you didn’t know when, and when you did, you would have to deal with the consequences of what you had done the previous day?’ How would that temper your desire to just do something outrageous? Then it went to ‘What if you could either A) Live to 1000, or B) go back to the age of 10, but knowing all the things you know now’.
All these scenarios had something in common: If you knew something of the future, how would it change the way you live today? How would it cause you to break out of the mundane of life? What risks would you be willing to take? Well guess what! We have been given a glimpse of the future! And it’s a future of life and light and ultimate fulfillment. How will we let that knowledge affect our experience of today? What risks might we be willing to take, knowing that our future is secure? What could we be doing differently, if we truly lived in the light of eternity? This is certainly something I need to be preaching to myself as well.
Getting back to the biblical story, we see the disciples of Jesus set on fire by their peek behind the curtain. They had a glimpse of eternity through everything Jesus did. And that empowered and emboldened them to do amazing things. They witnessed to what they had seen and experienced – at great personal cost to themselves. They were persecuted; many were martyred. But because of their firm belief that death was not the end, they took those risks.
What about us? Do we really believe that death is not the end? If so, how can that belief help us to reassess the balance of risk we’re willing to take?
What can we expect from this abundant life that Jesus has unlocked for us? We don’t have Jesus walking beside us in the flesh right now. So maybe we can’t expect too many physical resurrections like Jesus was asking Martha to expect. But what can we expect?
What if we took more risks for the upside-down kingdom of God? What can we expect if we take more risks in this life Jesus has given us? You know what? This is the very reason John recorded this story of Lazarus being raised back to life. So that we might truly believe. And so that our belief would motivate us, and enable us, to live life to the fullest we possibly can. To expect the improbable and the impossible in life. Forget about eternity, that’ll sort itself out. Jesus is undoing all things bad, even death itself. The question for us today, though, is, how will this knowledge motivate us? How will it help us to lean fully into the life Jesus unlocks for us?
Is there something you feel God is calling you to? Is it something that feels too scary to seriously consider? What can we do, individually and collectively, to be witnesses of Jesus and to help spread God’s kingdom further in our town?
CS Lewis: ‘Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth and you will get neither.’
Pray: Dear Jesus, thank you for the abundant life you have unlocked for us. Help us to tap into that life in the here and now, and not just wait for eternity. Amen.
Paul Turley suggests, ‘We might live, not haunted by the end, but hallowed in the moment. We might live delighted, not despairing, contented, not counting. …because the true reality of the human condition is not meaningless annihilation, we can live in joy in the present, in the place where we are.’
