A Confrontation Between Jesus and Death
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Introduction
Good morning Harmony! It’s good to be back with you this morning. I pray that your week has been a good one and if not, then you are refreshed with us as we worship God through his Word and are reminded of God’s continuing love for us through his Son, Jesus.
Please open your bibles to John 11:1-16. We are beginning the famous story of Jesus and Lazarus, a story that I suspect even nonbelievers are familiar with. I say that because the world’s understanding of resurrection often takes the form of zombie apocalypse’s and science fiction and the name Lazarus comes up sometimes, often in the form of a mysterious code word or idea for culture’s understanding of life after death. But within this same culture death is often portrayed as not only inevitable but somehow preferred. There is a scene in the Superman movie that was made over 10 years ago in which one of the characters plunges an aircraft into a blackhole in order to destroy the bad guys, Superman’s fellow aliens who are seeking to destroy earth. And just before he does, he looks up at one of the villains of the movie before he uses the joystick to angle the aircraft into the blackhole thus destroying the aircraft, himself, and the villains and states, “A good death is its own reward.”
Then the movie ends, we step out of the theater and into the blinding sunlight or the pitch darkness of the real world and death takes on a different tone, a somber and frightening tone. In the real world death becomes something we ignore or it is something that we despair of. But in this modern day of advanced medical science and endless entertainment we can ignore the greatest of enemies to the human race or we can completely despair. We can pretend we’re not going to die, or live like we’re going to die tomorrow. We either conceal the hopelessness through distraction or embrace the hopelessness through overt sin.
In Isaiah 22:12-13 the prophet speaks the words of God to a people whose view of death is tinged with a extreme hopelessness brought on by an unrepentant attitude that veers into a perverse form of joy.
On that day the Lord God of Armies called for weeping, for wailing, for shaven heads, and for the wearing of sackcloth.
But look: joy and gladness, butchering of cattle, slaughtering of sheep and goats, eating of meat, and drinking of wine— “Let’s eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
This is the world’s view of death in its most grotesque form.
The church’s view as you can imagine should be significantly different.
I think its interesting how some of the historic confessions and catechisms of the church written around 400 years ago begins.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism used by Presbyterians begins with its famous question, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.”
A Baptist Catechism published in 1752 begins its teaching by asking its students, “Who is the first and chiefest being?” The answer: “God is the first and chiefest being.”
Then we have the Heidelberg Catechism likely published in 1563 by a Lutheran theologian in the city-state of Heidelberg, in what is modern day Germany. The first question that this catechism asks is different. It asks its students, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”
The answer:
“That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has delivered me from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, also assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”
The Westminster and Baptist Catechisms and their corresponding confessional statements were written during times of civil war and persecution in England. Their beginnings I believe show a church in England that was grappling with theological differences and how to address the issue of unity and church practice and they had to remind themselves, and I think rightly, who and what their focus should be on, namely God himself.
The Heidelberg Catechism by contrast was written only 50 years after the Reformation began in central Europe. This was a place ravaged by war, famine, and death on massive scales as the kings, princes, and the Pope fought for power and control. When the prince in Heidelberg asked his local churchmen to publish a catechism for the people in the city the pastor who wrote it likely did so looking out on a congregation who experienced death on a persistent basis. They could not ignore death and death was anything but glorious. Children died young, their young men died in battle, and their people were subject to various diseases and attacks. They were bleary eyed, tired, and worn.
“What is your only comfort in life and in death?”
John 11 is going to be broken out into 4 parts as we follow the apostle John’s lead and look at the interactions of Jesus with death and the people who were around him. We’re doing this because this story within the gospel is huge, it’s 57 verses long. And if you add the first 9 verses in chapter 12 you end up with a complete story of Lazarus. This is John’s only account of Jesus raising someone from the dead, although we know this is not the only time Jesus does this. We can look to the other gospels to see other stories. But this story shows us the very human understanding of death beginning to buckle under the promise of eternal life and joy in Christ. We are at the very outer edges of the Christian faith. A faith that does not extend into the grave and then out again can not be properly called Christian. As Jesus declares in John 6:40:
For this is the will of my Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
First there is the confrontation of Jesus and Death, which we’re focused on today. Then we’ll see what it means to confess Christ in the face of death. We’ll see Jesus’ triumph and power over death. Finally, we’ll see the people’s reaction to this miracle on the eve of Jesus’ own death and resurrection, an epilogue so to speak.
Many of us likely know how this story ends, but before we can get to the good part we must endure the darkness for a little while, we do this by fixing our attention on the light of the world.
Main Point: The Lordship of Jesus Christ extends over the most formidable of enemies; death, bringing the confounding light of eternity to those who trust him.
If you are able please stand with me as we read John 11:1-16.
Now a man was sick—Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.
Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick.
So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.”
When Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus.
So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was.
Then after that, he said to the disciples, “Let’s go to Judea again.”
“Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?”
“Aren’t there twelve hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world.
But if anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him.”
He said this, and then he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up.”
Then the disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will get well.”
Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep.
So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died.
I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let’s go to him.”
Then Thomas (called “Twin”) said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him.”
PRAYER
In this story sickness visits the friends and family of Jesus. An invisible foe, one stronger, more implacable then Satan himself shows up. When you look at this story you need to do a quick assessment of the characters. We are setting the scene for the remainder of the chapter, bringing in the necessary people to tell the story correctly. There is Mary and Martha, and Lazarus. There are the disciples, with Thomas being specifically mentioned, and of course there is Jesus. We’ll run into other characters, the professional mourners and Pharisees, as we progress through this chapter, but for now this is who we are introduced to.
But I also said that there was another character, one more powerful still. Lazarus does not die of an accident, he does not die because he was murdered, he was not at war, he did not die a political martyr like so many Zealots in his day. His cause of death was simply sickness. The narrative doesn’t even specify the illness, its simply states that “a man was sick”. This is important because this form of death is one that no one can blame anyone else for, not really. We certainly might try to blame someone else or something else, but ultimately in this story an illness is not anyone’s fault. What this does is expose the real culprit, the intruder into this family’s life, into Jesus’ life; death.
Point 1: Death is an ordinary enemy.
Now I also said that this enemy is more dangerous than Satan. Why is that?
In Genesis 3:4-5 Satan deceives Eve by saying:
“No! You will certainly not die,” the serpent said to the woman.
“In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
He tells a lie, followed by a half truth. A half-truth is basically a lie using a part of the truth. He contradicts God who stated in Genesis 2:
And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden,
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”
The consequence of death is one imposed by God and Satan is the mechanism by which temptation, sin, and ultimately death is spread across the world. Death is the consistent companion of a sinful humanity, death is brought by our sin, not by Satan himself, although as we saw earlier in John he is still the father of lies and liars. But death is not his to hand out. We see this in Job as as God tells Satan to test Job stating:
“Very well,” the Lord told Satan, “he is in your power; only spare his life.”
So, we see death enter into the lives of Mary, Martha, and Jesus. John gives us some key biographical details. Mary is the one who bathed Jesus’ feet with perfume, something that is alluded to in the other gospels and explicitly stated later on in John’s gospel. Mary is also the one who had seven demons driven out of her and its Mary and Martha who bicker over who should be doing housework in front of Jesus. In other words this is a broken family with normal problems that Jesus joins himself to. He not only loves this broken group of sinners, but even subjects himself to their ordinary, mortal nature, loving those whose lives are but a vapor.
For he knows what we are made of, remembering that we are dust.
Death then gets in between this family affair, interrupting what I suspect was routine life, something that many of us are likely familiar with. Death sneaks in and with shocking fury and often unexplainable power takes what we love away. Death does not seem to care, but we try to give some sort of rhyme or reason to it, we try to explain it.
We have probably seen some sort of personification of death, typically as a shrouded or hooded figure, a skeleton with a scythe perhaps. In Charles Dickens’ classic story, “A Christmas Carol”, he has three ghosts visit the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge. The third ghost is the ghost of Christmas future and looks like death personified. Now for purposes of visualization and a bit of levity, I have the Muppet Christmas Carol in mind. This is the one with Michael Caine and the story is narrated by Rizzo and his companion the rat. In this story Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts and for most of us we know that the third ghost is death personified. The reason I remember the Muppet Christmas Carol’s version of death was because he glided across the floor with a screeching noise that sounded like a ghostly version of nails across a chalkboard. He did not say anything, but simply pointed in the direction that Scrooge should go with a bony hand until they made it to a graveyard. Its there that Scrooge wipes snow off of a gravestone to see his name there and turns to the ghost promising to reform his ways asking if the name can be expunged from the stone. This ending to the story is right in one way and wrong in another. Our sin is what leads us to the grave, but our works cannot defeat this seemingly invincible enemy.
We need to understand that death brought on by our sin is the enemy. The one that has slunk into the background of our lives and cannot be ignored but nor should it be worried about. “Why?” you might ask.
Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15:
For he (Jesus Christ) must reign until he puts all his enemies under his feet.
The last enemy to be abolished is death.
To understand our savior, we must understand what enemy he is defeating, what problem he is solving. He is not merely making us more ethical or more moral as so many in this country believe, he restoring creation, giving life to a people who receive him in faith by destroying that most stubborn of enemies brought on by sin, death. The ghoulish eyes of death, sunken, empty, and hollow, lock eyes with the one whose eyes stretch into eternity, the glorious one whose light fills the empty recesses of death’s carnage, exploding him from the inside out, restoring the kingdom to his Father.
So why death then? This leads us to our second point.
Point 2: Death is an urgent reminder.
We see this idea in the message sent to Jesus by Mary and Martha and through the response of the disciples to Jesus’ stated desire to go back to Judea. Mary and Martha send what is no doubt a hurried and simple message to Jesus.
So the sisters sent a message to him: “Lord, the one you love is sick.”
Strangely, at least to our understanding, Jesus stays where he is for two more days. As John records in verses 5 and 6.
Now Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus.
So when he heard that he was sick, he stayed two more days in the place where he was.
Then Jesus decides to go into Judea. This is much to his disciples astonishment who exclaim:
“Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?”
It appears that death has Jesus in a bind. On the one hand if Lazarus isn’t healed as soon as possible then he will likely die and on the other hand if Jesus himself heads back into Judea he puts his own safety at risk. Both of these assumptions are based on a human understanding of Jesus and a lack of understanding and belief about who he is.
The urgency of death is something we feel as human beings almost from the moment we are born. Just about everything we do in this world is on some kind of schedule that if we sat and pondered it we could link to our mortality. The issue is that we don’t often sit and ponder our mortality, at least not until it is staring us in the face. Many of us have probably felt the pull of bad news when a loved one is found out to be ill and doesn’t have much time left. Just watch the news and you’ll see accidents, natural disasters, and wars that take the lives of other people. But for many people, maybe even for us, the constant barrage of bad news has numbed us to the urgency that death brings. Death always seems to be someone else’s problem. Our culture has in some ways numbed us to death and maybe even promised us things it can’t deliver; a long life, permanence, or an eventual scenario where human technology overcomes death. So we become deaf to the call that death brings.
In Luke 12 Jesus states:
“I say to you, my friends, don’t fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more.
But I will show you the one to fear: Fear him who has authority to throw people into hell after death. Yes, I say to you, this is the one to fear!
Death and its urgency is used as a call to address the fear and dread that is within all us. It is a call to be united with the one who has such authority. It is a call to solve the problem of our sin and its rightful judgment. Mary and Martha are struggling because they understand the urgency and the permanency of death. They do not want to lose their brother. The disciples do not want to lose Jesus.
Jesus responds to both of these concerns in rather cryptic ways that demonstrates two aspects of Christ’s person. First, being infinite he is beyond the urgent call of death. Secondly, death does not control Jesus, Jesus controls death. These two aspects are related to one another.
Jesus talks to his disciples upon hearing of Lazarus’s illness by stating:
“...This sickness will not end in death but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
He then responds to the disciples concerns about his own safety by stating:
“Aren’t there twelve hours in a day?” Jesus answered. “If anyone walks during the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world.
But if anyone walks during the night, he does stumble, because the light is not in him.”
Jesus is not hurried by the call to heal Lazarus, he uses it to demonstrate the real power and the real glory of God. Mere healing of sickness is not what God is aiming for, although that certainly will be involved. Its a complete restoration, a new creation, in which all things are made new. And death follows his lead, not the other way around. Remember when Jesus states:
This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life so that I may take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have the right to lay it down, and I have the right to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
The glory of God is most reflected in victory achieved in the most improbable of circumstances. So to that end, Jesus waits for two days and walks back into the very place where he is most in danger.
As Jesus explains why he is heading back he says something that sounds strange to the disciples.
“Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m on my way to wake him up.”
The disciples don’t fully comprehend what is said and assume that if Lazarus is merely asleep then he will get better. But then Jesus clarifies and states very plainly that Lazarus is in fact dead. This illustrates a couple points of view. First, that death itself is the problem, not mere sickness or general bad feelings. Secondly that the human heart and mind resist the concept of death even if presented with hard evidence to the contrary. There is always some sort of eternal hope embedded in the soul of a person that wars against the idea of death.
Its Ecclesiastes 3:11 that states:
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts...
Death and the loss of permanence brought on by our sin wars against the inclination towards life that we all have. Which leads up to our third point:
Point 3: Death is nonsensical.
You can also put the word “ridiculous” in here as well. I was wrestling with which word to use, but the point is that death was not originally a part of the plan, yet here we are.
The author of Ecclesiastes doubles down on his insistence on God’s eternal power by stating:
I know that everything God does will last forever...
So what you see here in these first few verses of John 11 is this resistance to something that should not be and yet is. There is a hope for life, love, and permanence. As was stated earlier the family did not want Lazarus to die and the disciples did not want Jesus to die. Those who believed in Jesus did not want to see him die, whereas those who did not believe in him wanted to kill him. Remember its Peter that confronts Jesus and tells him that he should never die only to find himself strongly rebuked as a messenger of Satan. Its the disciples who are fearful of the claims of Jesus that declare that he must be killed by the teachers of the law and then rise again on the third day. The death of the Messiah, of a perfect man, does not make sense to them. But the high priest in Jerusalem declares later on to his fellow Pharisees in John 11:
You’re not considering that it is to your advantage that one man should die for the people rather than the whole nation perish.”
An odd prophecy indeed.
Death produces nonsense throughout human history. There is an idea from an excellent book on the home front of the American Civil War that comes to mind. When soldiers died in battle or of disease in the camp they would often be transported back to their hometowns in a pine box or in some cases a metal coffin via the railroad. They might go from the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia to a hometown in Minnesota or Maine. There are stories told of families waiting for their loved ones at railroad stations and picking them up at the station, likely among other passengers and possibly with other goods. This had to be a surreal and tragic moment as families received their sons, brothers, or fathers back in a manner they had not anticipated or hoped for. In fact the American Civil War, and other wars, created this entire system devoted to managing death at a scale they could not imagine. Land for cemeteries, care for orphans and widows, transportation of the dead, and other things that most people don’t typically think about on a national scale. This was not how it was meant to be.
Likewise during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s young children and the elderly died of the dust that overwhelmed much of the Great Plains. One woman who lost her baby to an infection brought on by the dust stared out at a church building, from inside a car, covered in dust in what likely looked like a wasteland in the Midwest, with hate in her heart for the God it represented. This was not how it was supposed to be.
The disciples probably had that same thought going through their mind as they witnessed and heard about their Lord’s crucifixion. The thing they were nervous about, the thing they were attempting to steer Jesus away from happened. As he was executed and then buried they had to be thinking to themselves that this was not how it was supposed to be.
Jesus says another strange thing to his disciples toward the end of this passage:
I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let’s go to him.”
It was more important, and still is, that we believe in the one whom was sent to us, than it is for us to avoid physical death.
This leads us to our final point this morning.
Point 4: Jesus confuses our understanding of death.
In the final verse of this section, in verse 16, Thomas makes a strange comment that took some research to really understand what he is saying and why. Thomas exclaims to the other disciples:
...“Let’s go too so that we may die with him.”
Now I discovered a variety of positions on this verse and why Thomas says this.
John Wesley calls this statement of Thomas “the language of despair”.
John MacArthur calls Thomas a “heroic pessimist”.
And still another commentary calls Thomas the logical one who saw this situation as hopeless, yet he still goes with Jesus into Judea.
I believe what we have in this statement given by Thomas is a good summation of how many of feel us about the Christian faith in light of death. It is a faith mixed with despair and pessimism all logically oriented towards the finality of death. For many the despair and pessimism is avoided through a new logic that suggests that the church is really for our moral improvement or its an engine for social change. The new logic avoids the idea of a resurrection faith and insists on a faith that comfortably buries someone in their plot of choice with the hope that they were remembered as a good person. Thomas on the other hand leans into that despair, leans into that pessimism, and trusts Jesus anyway.
Of note, this is the one whom we often refer to as “doubting” Thomas. So, doubting Thomas, if we must call him that, doesn’t understand the direction being taken by Jesus, but goes with him anyway.
Jesus’ actions and commands confuse our understanding of death and insist on a glory for us that we can scarcely imagine. And we must, as sinners, be shaken to our core and forced to rely on Jesus, just like Thomas to the death. Our understanding of death, our grip on death through unbelief must be broken. I’m going to read Isaiah 28:14-19, a relatively long section of the prophet, but I think it is worth reading at this point because it suggests things about unbelievers and ourselves that strike at our understanding of who we are and how we view death from a Christian perspective. In my opinion its almost like an argument between the people of Israel and the God who is determined to win them over.
Therefore hear the word of the Lord, you scoffers who rule this people in Jerusalem.
For you said, “We have made a covenant with Death, and we have an agreement with Sheol; when the overwhelming catastrophe passes through, it will not touch us, because we have made falsehood our refuge and have hidden behind treachery.”
Therefore the Lord God said: “Look, I have laid a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation; the one who believes will be unshakable.
And I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the mason’s level.” Hail will sweep away the false refuge, and water will flood your hiding place.
Your covenant with Death will be dissolved, and your agreement with Sheol will not last. When the overwhelming catastrophe passes through, you will be trampled.
Every time it passes through, it will carry you away; it will pass through every morning— every day and every night. Only terror will cause you to understand the message.
We are brought to our senses through the enemy that is death, urging us toward the truth of God’s love for us, breaking our bonds with death, peeling our fingers off of control of our own lives through a fear of the one who judges and forgives.
This passage sounds strange to us because many of us don’t think of ourselves as having a covenant with Death or an agreement with Sheol, the Israelite word for the underworld. Yet that is exactly what we have and it is a fear of the Lord, something greater than mere physical death that nudges us towards life and the seemingly foolish journey that it entails. Faith does not need to be perfect, it just needs to be oriented on the one sent to break our deal with death.
I can see Thomas marching off toward Judea in a huff. He’s picked up his bag and he’s walked off leaving the rest of the group to try and catch up with him. He doesn’t understand but he’s willing to go to the very edge of faith, the very boundaries of existence to be with Jesus.
We are confronted with this boundary nearly every time we open our phones, watch the news, talk with friends and family. Death is the enemy that haunts our waking hours, reminding us that time is short and forcing urgent questions to the forefront of our mind.
“What is the chief end of man?”
“Who is the first and chiefest being?”
“What is your only comfort in life and in death?”
And like Thomas we huff are way into church to remind ourselves of what was done for us, to remind ourselves of a true faith that extends into the grave and comes back out again.
As I call Carly up for our invitation this morning I want you to pray for the kind of faith that extends the very boundaries of existence.
I want us to pray for the kind of life that reflects eternity in Christ and bends everyone’s understanding of our existence away from the commonsense understanding of death.
In short, I want an understanding of Christ undergirded by faith, hope, and love and not by cynicism, fear, and anger.
If you need to commit yourself to the Lord Jesus, the one who is timeless and the ruler of all things, including death, than we would love to pray with you about that as well.
PRAYER
OFFERING
DISMISSAL
