Preparation for Death and Resurrection

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000O. B.C.

John 11

6-23-02

Preparation for Death and Resurrection

John 11:20-27, 32-35,  38-40, 43-46,53

                Ill. We don’t prepare for our deaths very well.  We don’t want to talk about them.

In Ecclesiastes 7:2, God says this:
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every person; the living should take this to heart.

                Martin Burnham -  “He died well.”

Mary and Martha have the same problem we do, when we face death or crises of soul shaking proportion. “What is going on?  How are we to make sense of this?”

Jesus moves through the ruins of their lives with four things:

1.        Tears –Mary (32-35)

2.        Anger –tomb (38-40)

3.        Truth –Martha (20-27

4.        Grace – everybody (43-47,53)

We need these four.

I.                   Tears of Jesus – Mary

Mary asks a pretty big theological question. “Lord, why weren’t you here?”

Jesus can’t even speak.  He weeps.  All He can say is, “Where have you laid him?”  He is troubled.  He is deeply moved.

This is amazing. 

                Jesus had two things you and I don’t have:

1.        He had knowledge.  He comes in knowing why this has happened.  He knows what He is going to turn this into – a glorious manifestation of the power of God.  He knows that in 10 minutes they are all going to be rejoicing.  He knows why.  He knows the purpose. We have no idea.

Ill. On the door of the patient rooms – oxygen in use;  NPO; please check in at the nurse’s station; “This sickness is so that the glory of God might be manifest.”

                Jesus knows where this fits in the Father’s plan for revealing who Jesus is.

2.        He had power.  He could do something about it.  We go in with nothing we can do to undo it. 

If you had knowledge and power, and knew that you were going to turn weeping into joy,  (the funeral is going to be a party) why would you weep? Why would Jesus do that?  Why would you enter into the trauma and the pain?  Answer:  because he is perfect.  He is perfect love. He will not close His heart for ten minutes.

                He does not say, “Well, we can put this grief all away because we’ll see it differently in ten minutes.”  He goes in.  What do we learn from this?

a.        There is nothing wrong with weeping in times of sorrow and loss.  There’s nothing wrong with falling apart.  The best people will be the biggest weepers.   All tears are not an evil.  The people who are more like Jesus will be pulled into the grief.  Weeping does not indicate a lack of maturity or information or faith.  You just feel sucked into it all.  The healthiest hearts are those who can weep…and rejoice.

b.       We think we need to fix it.

Jesus does not consider the ministry of truth; i.e. telling people how they should believe and turn to God is enough.  He doesn’t even believe that the ministry of fixing things is enough.  He is a proponent of the ministry of tears.   The ministry of truth without tears isn’t Jesus.   Weep with those who weep.

“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you.  Not as the world gives , give I unto you.  Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”

I Thes. 4:

                “Grieve, but don’t grieve as those without hope.”

There are two opposite mistakes you can make in the face of tragedy, death and suffering. 

On the one hand, you can try to avoid grief.  You can try to avoid weeping.  Put it out of your mind and get past it right away.  That will make you hard and inhuman or it will erupt later on and bite you and devastate you.

There is another mistake.  It is to grieve without hope.  The Bible indicates that the love and hope of God and the love and hope that comes from one another has to be rubbed into our grief, the way you have to rub salt into meat in warm climates or it will go bad.

Your grief is either going to make you bleaker and weaker or it could make you far more wise and good and tender, depending on what you put into it and what you rub into our grieving.

Mike and Debbie Johnson lost their first son.  I’ve learned a great deal from observing as they minister to others in situations of tears. When Benjamin died,  someone captured some timeless images of this little boy who was taken from them too soon.  Jill Johnson will read “Benji”.

Benji

                Dining room chair;

A child’s pulpit.

                                Not quite four

Preaching in his formal attire:

                                                Knee-destroyed Grover overalls;

                                                                                Tattered snow boots.

                Repent!

                                He says

                                                Beating

The words across his pictured Book

                                                                Speaking from a courageous, but failing heart

                Salt dripping from a father’s eyes,   

                                Loneliness on

                                                                Quivering

                                                Lips.

The new baby,

                                Who’ll someday

                                                Search for

                                                                His missing brother,

Is rocked by the mother’s voice, choking out:

                                                “it is well, it is well, with my soul”

Grover and boots lie discarded,

                                                                His courageous heart sings on.

                Ill. My earliest childhood memory is of my grandfather’s funeral.  I was three.  (I don’t remember the trip to California when I was two.)  I remember my grandfather playing with me and then his funeral and the wake at his house. Everyone was crying and I didn’t get it.  I wanted to go outside and play.   I think I was well into my teenage years before I went to another funeral.  When asked, I declined.   As a child, I didn’t know what to do with expressions of grief.

II.        Anger of Jesus - tomb

                You probably did not see indications that Jesus was angry. 

Translators are afraid of what the text says, (v.33) “deeply moved in spirit”.  The Greek word means, “to quake with rage”.   That is what it means everywhere else.  One translator said that it is lexically irresponsible to not translate it that way here. 

                He saw the weeping and was filled with rage. 

                (v.38) He was “deeply moved”.  It means to “roar or snort with anger like an animal”.   Like a lion or a bull, nostrils flared with fury.  “bellowing with anger He came to the tomb”

                Why is this relevant to us?

                Shock, weeping, sorrow, grief, anger, fear,

                What does Jesus do with His rage?  Two things He does not do with it.

                1.He is not  “Job’s friend”.  Job lost everything and his friends said, “clearly you are not living right.”             Jesus is not mad at the victims. 

2.        When Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  That is such a stupendous claim.  He is claiming to be God.  He is not mad at himself (God), the victims, etc.  

After 9-11 leaders began speaking out   They had to put it into a narrative structure in order to make sense of it.  You have to find a story line in order to make sense of it.  You have to find a story line.  Two story lines that people are using that Jesus is rejecting here. 

A.      This is happening because America is being judged for its sins.

In the wake of 911, the chancellor of my alma mater spoke out saying, “God is punishing the US.”

Blaming the victims.  How do you decide if God is mad at a country or pleased with it.  Do you look at how the life is going?  NO!!  Look at Jesus.  A good person who had a lousy life.

                                Jesus – born in poverty.  Grew up poor and underprivileged.  Father died when he was young.  His brothers did not believe in Him, maybe wanted him out of the picture. Unjustly tried, beaten, crucified.  Looks to me like God is mad at Him.

Lk. 13 – two incidents

1.        political massacre

2.        tower fell on innocent people

We all need to repent.

B.       Demonize.  We represent goodness, they are absolute evil.

This story line over reaches.

Enormous problems happen when I forget that my enemy is human and that evil is in me also.

                Jesus rages at death. Rage at the night.  Death is still our enemy.

C. Gospel story line (#3)

                I am going to turn this death into a resurrection.  I am going to bring out of this something that is better than ever before. This is the gospel story line.

#3 Truth – to Martha

                “I am the resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?”

The 5th “I Am”

The 7th sign

The Book of signs (1-11)

Sign #7 - The raising of Lazarus (11:1-46)

These seven miracles are signs because they point to where Jesus demonstrates His transcendent control over the factors of life where man has difficulty coping.  They address issues of quality, space, time, quantity, natural law, misfortune, and death.  These works of Jesus show to an increasing circle of people that He is God and prove superiority over humanity’s world. (Tenney, 31)

                If you want the ultimate way to overcome this death or disaster, you have to believe. 

“Do you believe that I am the Son of God come into this world?” 

                He offers, not a consolation, he offers a resurrection.  I am come to bring the power of heaven down to earth and restore.   Everything will be made right.

               

Doestoevsky, “The Brothers Karamozov”

                “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for.  That all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage. That in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice.  It will comfort all resentments.  It will atone for all the crimes, for all the blood that was shed. That it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify everything that happened.”

Someday will be the great morning.  The night will be gone.  It won’t just console us. Everything will be put right.

C.S. Lewis, “If we let Him, He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into dazzling, radiant, immortal creatures pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine.  He will make us into bright stainless mirrors that reflect back to God perfectly though of course in a smaller scale His own boundless power and delight and goodness.  That is what we are in for, nothing less.”

#4 Grace –

(v.48,53) From the resurrection of Lazarus, the Pharisees set out to kill him. Jesus had used Bethany as a safe haven.  Jesus forces the issue.

                Jesus knew that the only way to bring Lazarus out of the tomb was to arrange for His own funeral.  That is a picture of the gospel. 

                He is laying down His life to give death its death.  Most of all we need this great grace.

One commentator said, apart from trust in God, the world is a cemetery, but into the world God has sent in Jesus, resurrection life, the opportunity to pass from death to life. Just as the crowds wanted bread and Jesus offered them living bread, so here the sisters want their brother returned and Jesus offers resurrection life to them and to the whole world.

Yes, apart from trust in God, life is a cemetery, but into this world God has sent Jesus with the offer of resurrection life.

Many of the details of this story are really from the accounts of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, historically and chronologically, later events. John is doing what all Christians do, interpreting life and life’s details in the light of the bigger reality of eternity. (story line) The central reality is Christ’s death and resurrection. Even though it happened after, Christ’s resurrection enabled Christians to interpret correctly what happened to Lazarus earlier. Details such as the mourning women, the rock-hewn tomb closed with a stone, the burial clothes, the separate mention of the face cloth, the doubts of Thomas, these are obviously taken from the resurrection story in chapters twenty and other places. They helped to shed light on what Jesus was really doing in the case of Lazarus. He was signaling his own resurrection and ours, even as he was distinguishing between mere resuscitation and real resurrection.
Lazarus represents all Christians.

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