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Good morning, or I suppose good afternoon or even good evening. Welcome to The Comfortable Words.
If you happen to be listening to this on Sunday morning and it’s before ten, say a prayer for me, because God willing I’ll be finishing up my first half marathon ever. I’m a new runner and a slow one, but as I’ve always said: slow and steady finishes the race. And since I believe that winning is highly overrated, I’ll be pleased just to cross the finish line well enough.
The comfortable words today are from a familiar story in the New Testament, but honestly, we won’t get to them until the end today. The cast of characters in the story are two sisters named Mary and Martha, their brother Lazarus, who has the easiest part to play in this drama because he’s dead. Jesus, who was very, very late to the party. And an assortment of what one might call extras, or what one might call the witnesses to this entire event.
Now Mary and Martha and Lazarus and Jesus were all dear friends with one another, and when Lazarus fell ill, his sisters sent for Jesus and asked him to come straight away because they believed that Jesus could heal him.
Instead, Jesus took a couple of days to make his way to their home, and when he arrived Lazarus had been gone for four full days.
We’ll pick up the text in John chapter eleven:
Mary came to where Jesus was waiting and fell at his feet saying, “Master, if only you had been here my brother would not have died.”
Now, before I go further, let’s stop and consider the depth of grief and disappointment she must have been feeling. It’s terrible enough that a good friend didn’t show up on time, and even worse if there’s a chance that that good friend could have made a miracle.
“If only you had been here,” Mary said…
Rather than going on straight away, perhaps we can start your own prayer today with that phrase. If only you had been here… then what? Can you fill that blank in? Do you have any expectations or wishes or desperate hopes that are unmet? Do you have any fear about what might happen if God doesn’t show up on your timetable?
I do. I’m asking big questions about life and wondering what happens if God doesn’t answer them. I’m thinking about a new job and wondering will God provide in time? And always being one to think that catastrophe is right around the corner, I’m surveying the landscape and feeling admittedly vulnerable to the way that the strange cultural, technological, and political winds are blowing.
So I’ve prayed that prayer before. If only you had been here. But as I reflect back, I recognize that God has been near all the time and everywhere, and that my trust in him, though sometimes confusing, has never been misguided.
Take a moment and bring to the Lord all the kinds of prayers and worries and wonderings that Mary’s lament brings up in your own heart… if only you had been here…
Now let’s take a breath and read further.
When Jesus saw her sobbing and the Jews with her sobbing, a deep anger welled up within him.
This is interesting, isn’t it? That Jesus, who himself was late for this whole shindig, he became angry. So let’s think for a moment, what’s he angry at? The text tells us that when he saw his friends sobbing, a deep anger grew up in him. In other words, his emotional response was raised because of the profound depth of grief he was witnessing in his friends.
And the original word for this word angry is embrimaomai. It’s from a word that means strength, or anger, or fury, or a kind of deep indignation. The picture that the word should call to mind is that of a war horse getting ready for action.
For most of us, that means we need to dial up a scene from a movie like Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey, where we see an angry stallion about to be let loose on that which it is chasing down. And I think that’s an amazing word.
And I think that picture is a picture of Jesus as he comes into this community, and he sees the depth of grief that his friends have over death itself. And as God and as man, he becomes righteously indignant, and this is his moment to display the reversal of entropy and the breakdown of all things, and to call into being the kingdom of God itself.
“Where did you put him?” Jesus asked.
“Master, come and see,” they said. Now Jesus wept.
So here’s another emotional experience. Jesus has moved from anger, but he’s not sobbing like everyone around him. He’s crying quietly, tears probably running down his face. The God of the universe, taking a look around the landscape and all the desolation and devastation and the reality of death, and he cries. Just like you would, and just like I would.
Do you find it strange, or perhaps beautiful, to worship a God who feels so deeply? You ever wonder why God doesn’t rain down desolation and devastation and death on those who you perceive to be your enemies? It’s because somewhere there would always be someone sobbing.
And Jesus knows that death itself is the enemy. Again, it’s this entropy, that devastation, it’s this destruction, the existential risk, it’s the proclivity of everything to breaking bad. That’s the real enemy.
The real enemy is sin itself. And when I say sin, I don’t mean sin like “I cheated on my boyfriend” or “I lied about why I was late.” Those things matter. But what I mean is something else. I mean sin more like everything has missed the mark.
Everything is off-center. There is no aligned algorithm. There is no level foundation. There is no medicine without side effects.
Jesus looked at the brokenness of the world and he got angry and he felt sad, and those feelings moved him to a particular kind of action.
The Jews looked at Jesus weeping and said, “Look how deeply he loved Lazarus.” But others among them said, well, if he loved him so much, why didn’t he do something to keep him from dying? After all, he opened the eyes of a blind man.
There’s a great picture of reality, isn’t it? You’ve got the haters on the one side and the fans on the other, but to be honest, neither of them matter very much. The whole point is that both ends of the spectrum completely missed what Jesus was up to. I can just imagine the early observers of Jesus writing their Substacks and creating their reels, full of hot takes about what he was missing or how he was winning.
But here’s Jesus, walking to his friend’s grave, tears in his eyes, with a whole plan going on in his mind that no one can imagine. He is inscrutable, unpredictable, all-powerful.
Then Jesus, the anger again welling up within him, arrived at the tomb. It was a simple cave in the hillside with a slab of stone laid against it. Jesus said, “Remove the stone.”
I love this scene, because I recognize this experience of repeated recollections of anger. Jesus was angry at first when he heard what was going on, and now he’s angry again. And we don’t know if it’s because of what everyone around him is whispering, or simply because he’s feeling out of sorts in a way that only God in the flesh could ever feel. Or maybe it’s because when he sees that hillside with a slab of stone laid against it, he has a premonition about his own death, and it makes him feel itchy and slightly anxious in a very human way.
“Move the stone,” he says.
And can you hear a whisper of foreshadowing in the tone of his voice?
The sister of the dead man, Martha, said, “Master, by this time there’s a stench. He’s been dead four days.” Jesus looked at her. “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” Then to the others, “Go ahead, take away the stone.” They removed the stone. Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and prayed, “Father, I’m grateful that you’ve listened to me. I know you always listen, but on account of this crowd standing here, I have said it out loud so that they might believe that you sent me.”
And then he shouted, “Lazarus, come out.” And he did. A cadaver wrapped from head to toe with a scarf over his face. Jesus told them, “Unwrap him and let him loose.”
And here, here is where we finally get to the comfortable words. “Lazarus, come out,” Jesus says to his dead friend. And then, “unbind him and allow him to go.”
I had the strangest wondering about this text. I find myself wondering when Lazarus actually came to life again. Now in order to wonder this with me, you have to believe in the supernatural miraculous work of Jesus of Nazareth, which I do. Because in my mind, once I believe in God, and honestly, once I believe in things like quantum entanglement, believing in Lazarus being raised from the dead is not a far stretch.
So work with me on this one. When did Lazarus come to life? Was it a Schrödinger’s cat type situation before the stone was moved?
Let me take this in a different direction altogether. Are there places in you, or in your life, or in the world around you that make you feel indignant? Are there things that you see or experience that make you angry? Are there things that you see or experience that make you cry?
Are there places where you are experiencing deep desolation or disappointment? Places where maybe you feel buried?
Some people, when they feel that way, go faster, and some people go slower. Some people run a marathon or start a new business to try to outrun their fear or angst, and others pull up the covers and try to sleep it away. Whether you go fast or slow in order to regulate your own emotional volatility, you’re stuck in a cave of sorts. Just like Lazarus. Just like me.
We can’t see the way out, and we certainly can’t move the stone by ourselves. Very often we’re disoriented and there’s not a lot of light. Sometimes the air smells stale. It’s a little bit claustrophobic.
Would you take a deep breath with me? And would you pray, come Holy Spirit.
And from the back of the cave, can you listen for Jesus calling your name? Can you hear him calling you: come outside? Can you for a moment imagine that he’s rolled away whatever stone is in your way? Can you feel his indignance alongside yours, and his holy anger and sadness, and that he knows what those feelings feel like because he was fully man?
And can you recognize in this his closeness to you?
What I find to be the comfortable words in this text are the words where Jesus says to all those in the crowd, who we might just call extras, those we don’t even notice, and it’s them that he gives a very important job. They get to help untangle Lazarus from his grave clothes and help him move from death back to life.
I once read about Pope Francis, may he rest in peace, that his favorite painting was one called Mary, Untangler of Knots. When I saw it for myself I noticed she’s simply holding a ribbon, which didn’t look particularly knotted. So in my mind’s eye, in the painting, she’s holding handfuls of incredibly tangled chains and ribbons and threads, things that look like they could never, ever be untangled. But there she is, the mother of God. Slowly and patiently and painstakingly threading things in and out, and taking all that was twisted and braided and making it straight again.
So the extras in St. John’s story get to untangle Lazarus from his death clothes, and Mary, Mother of God, untangles knots as any mother does, which I imagine for her is some sort of rosary. Although she’s not praying to herself, of course. But she’s praying for us, and she’s praying for you.
And today, the comfortable words of Christ are the words that we won’t hear again until our resurrection day, which are, “Unbind him. And let him go.” “Unbind her and let her go.”
And I think about who Jesus is saying those words to. To anyone who’s ever lost someone, to every person you miss with your whole heart, every husband or wife or parent or child or sibling or friend who’s passed away. That what Jesus is saying to death itself is, “Unbind them and let them go.”
As we end our time today, can you name what feels bound up inside of you?
Can you imagine all of that tangle being pulled out of you and presented to God, where he sits close to his mother Mary… begins to sort things out… move things straight… bring order to the disorder… can you invite the peace of Christ to be near to you?
And can you listen for his words, which sometimes seem late? But never fail nonetheless.
I pray for you today that you would know the gaze of your loving God. That you would feel his presence. That you would hear his words of care and compassion. And that his accompaniment would be near to you and bring you peace.
And I pray these things in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.