When Jesus Waits

We're going to be turning our Bibles to John 11:1-37. I will be taking this in sections as we go instead of reading the whole thing all at once. Also, you will see that this is not the end of the story, or the end of the chapter. I’ve titled this message, When Jesus Waits because we’re going to look at three responses to Jesus’ absence and how they relate to Jesus’ declaration that he is the Resurrection and the Life. Then, next week, we will pick up right where we are leaving off today and we’ll see the end of the story together. But before we get too far along, let's pray.

Pray

Let's let our text introduce the players and the location and timing of events. John 11:1-4: “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

We get to see the sisters Mary and Martha again. They appear in one other story in Luke 10. Where we see Jesus invited into their home and Mary sits at the Lord’s feet and listened to him teach. Martha asks Jesus to rebuke her for not helping, but Jesus tells Martha that she is anxious and worried and that Mary is doing the right thing. Apparently, they remain friends after this interaction and the relationship develops in ways that we don’t get to see in the text. We do know that he becomes familiar enough with them and their brother Lazarus that Jesus himself would declare that they were his friends.

And after this event, Mary gains a reputation as the woman who anoints Jesus feet with the expensive perfume. I don’t believe that this is the same Mary as Mary Magdelene, but they often get lumped together.

We also get this briefest of introductions here to Lazarus. This is the first mention of him in the gospels and one of only a few mentions altogether. John is the only gospel writer to mention Lazarus. This has led some to question the miraculous events that happen in this story, but I think I have a good answer for that. We’ll get more into that next week. For now, we know that Lazarus is sick.

Interesting Family

This is an interesting family because you have two women with no mention of husbands and they have a house and a brother. It is probable that they have inherited some wealth based on their circumstances. I tend to think that Lazarus might have been a young man, still old enough to be called a man, but since he is shown to be supporting these two ladies in any way. Mary and Martha could be any age.

Another idea is that Lazarus is very old, and they are his caretakers. Either way, their home could have even been a popular lodging place for those traveling from the East to Jerusalem for the feasts and holy days. It was definitely popular with Jesus.

Bethany, referred to here as Mary and Martha’s village, is about two miles outside of Jerusalem directly east on the far side of the Mt. of Olives. There would have been a road leading from Jerusalem around the Mt. of Olives to Bethany (Bethany means House of Dates so that could have been the family business. Then the road runs steeply down to Jericho before crossing the Jordan River just north of the Dead Sea and entering an area called Perea.

It is here in Perea that Mary and Martha send for Jesus when Lazarus gets sick. At the end of John 10, we see Jesus interaction with the Jews that he will reference here in a moment and then he leaves Jerusalem and goes beyond the Jordan to where John was baptizing. This would have been Perea. Mary and Martha probably gave Jesus and the disciples a place to rest before they went across the Jordan. That would explain how they knew where to find him. Remember, there’s no GPS, no texting someone “Where you at?”

They sent a messenger (another reason to think that they had some means) with a simple message, “He whom you love is ill.” There is a lot in that simple statement. But I want you to notice what isn’t there. There is no request for Jesus to come, there is no request that Jesus do something about it. They simply appeal to Jesus love and wait in expectation.

Healing of the Official’s Son

We see a similar situation in John 4 where an official’s son is sick and he comes to Jesus and asks him to come and heal his son. In that case Jesus says you won’t believe unless you see signs and wonders so go and your son will live and Jesus healed his son without ever laying a finger on him. I mention this because there are those out there who will take this difference in the two stories and will and say that Mary and Martha did something wrong in the way that they asked Jesus. These false teachers would say that Jesus didn’t heal Lazarus because Mary and Martha didn’t ask the right way. They would reference a verse like, “you have not because you ask not.”

This is demonic teaching that is seeking to turn Jesus into some kind of divine vending machine. If you feed in the right offerings and press the right buttons then blessings will come out. It makes me sick.
Let me set this straight. Jesus is under no obligation to you. Your prayers don’t pull the strings that make him jump. Jesus is the sovereign God of creation and he will do as he pleases regardless of what you think about it. There is no magic formula for avoiding crappy things in this life. We live in a fallen and broken world as is evidenced by the quarantine that we have all just endured. God has his purposes and plans that are bigger than we can comprehend and our goal should be to join in for the ride, not try to jump in the driver’s seat. Alright rant over.

Love Prompts Jesus to Wait

They sent the message, “He whom you love is ill,” and Jesus sends a message back to Mary and Martha through this messenger and says, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

I don’t know about you, but if I put myself in Mary and Martha’s shoes and I get that message back from Jesus, I’m fully expecting Lazarus to get better. He clearly said that the illness does not lead to death. Thanks Jesus, you did it again. Lazarus is healed right? If you know anything about your Bible you know that that’s not how this story ends. Remember this message when we see the ladies confront Jesus in a minute.

The trickiest passage in all of this chapter for most people to grasp is right here in verse 5-6. It says, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” This is hard right? Not because it is difficult to understand, but precisely because it is so easy to understand. The text makes it clear that Jesus indeed does love not only Lazarus but also Martha and Mary, then (pay close attention to that transitional contraction) it says “So,” or “therefore” he packed his things and hurried immediately to help those whom he loved.

No, that’s not what we get. That’s what we are lead to expect, from his initial comment and from the declaration of his love for them, it comes as a shock to hear that Jesus decides to stay put there in Perea for another two days. Some people don’t know what to do with this passage because they don’t understand what love is. They can’t wrap their brain around the simple truth that this text says that sometimes God allows painful things to happen to us BECAUSE he loves us.

Acting on Behalf of Love

The inspired author could have used a different contraction there. It could have said He loved however he stayed, or he loved, but he stayed, and I would have trouble. But this text clearly says that Jesus is motivated by his love and that love led him to do something that he knew would cause despair and heartache and pain to those he loved. That means that there is something deeper than superficial familial love at work here.

The first time we see that word here when the messenger comes he says the one whom you phileo. “The one who you love like a brother.” But in verse 5 it says that Jesus loved Martha, Mary and Lazarus with agape love. His unconditional unwavering sacrificial love. We can see this kind of love as one that always acts on another’s behalf in their best interest.

Jesus here knows that Martha, Mary, the disciples, the Jews, and even Lazarus have a much greater need than a few more fleeting breaths on this terrestrial ball. He knows that the tears that Mary and Martha shed will be worth the return on investment that he is putting forth in love so that they might believe and that God would be glorified.

We can learn a lesson here about loving well. We are made to love others with this same kind of agape love that seeks the greatest good for its recipient in the Glory of God. If we play it safe, we are not living out the gospel. If we keep it to ourselves, we are like the servant who buried the talent in the ground out of fear. But this perfect love, casts out all fear!

Hear what C.S. Lewis says about this kind of agape love in his book, The Four Loves:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

If you think that maybe this kind of love is not worth the sorrow and pain, then you are more lost than found. Our culture is heavy with that kind of selfishness, but as believers, ours is the Gospel charge, to go to whatever means necessary to love those who are broken. Not for some vague humanitarian effort, but rather to make disciples of all nations, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). Oh, I pray that you know this love and I pray that you would ask God to awaken it in your heart for your neighbors. That you would do hard things not for your glory but through agape love to the glory of Jesus Christ.

Disciples Section

For the sake of time, I’m going to have to skim over the section with the disciples here, but recognize as you read it for yourself later that he is teaching them this same lesson on love. They are afraid to go because the Jews had just tried to stone Jesus before, but he tells them about Lazarus and their minds are dull and he very specifically tells them, “Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, that you may believe.”

Also, take note of what he just said about Lazarus. When the messenger shows up, he tells Jesus that Lazarus is ill. Now, the all-knowing Jesus has declared that Lazarus is dead. In fact, if we look at the timeline, Lazarus may have already been dead when the messenger arrived.

Perea is only about an 8-12 hour walk from Bethany. It’s about the distance from Williston to the Walmart in Dunnellon. The messenger left when Lazarus was still alive, it would have probably taken him a full day to get to Jesus, then Jesus waits two days before telling the disciples to pack up and then they have to get to Bethany and the journey uphill towards Bethany would be a more difficult journey and they would have probably split it up into two days.

In order to match with the text’s statement in verse 17 that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days then he must have died pretty soon after the messenger left. That also means that the message that Jesus sent back to Mary and Martha that “this illness doesn’t lead to death, but is for the gory of God,” would have been received by two grieving sisters. That should help set the stage for the encounters that Jesus is about to have.

Martha Confronts Jesus

Let’s jump to verse 17, “Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.”

This is what I call the hands on the hips meeting. Martha is conflicted. As she hurries out of the village to meet Jesus before anyone else, we see her eagerness, but I cannot help but see her stopping just a short way off from Jesus and putting her hands on her hips as if to say, “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”

Maybe you’ve had a conversation with Jesus like this recently. You had an expectation and plan for how things were going to work out. You had come to Jesus with your problem and when he didn’t immediately respond you might have thought, well I guess he doesn’t care enough about me to do something, or maybe I’ve heard that God helps those that help themselves, so I’m just going to go about my business and do what I think is right and make my own plans.

Maybe that didn’t work out too well for you, or maybe you thought things were going okay, but then Jesus shows up and before he can say a word, you are already laying blame on him, you are already arguing with him. Giving him a thinly veiled hostility. That is the read that I get from this meeting between Jesus and Martha.

She says the exact same statement that Mary says in just a minute, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” but Martha’s is followed up with a “But.” Some have taken this statement to be a declaration of faith, and I think there is a seed of faith here, but it’s not fully grown.

She says, “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” She’s not asking him to bring Lazarus back from the dead. No one was expecting that. I think she’s expressing her continued faith in his words as true even though it appears in her limited perspective that Jesus has lied to her.

Remember, Jesus said, “This illness does not lead to death…” Yet, just a few hundred yards away, Lazarus is already beginning to smell as decomposition sets in. He’s been dead for four days and Jesus was no where to be found. Her statement was an affirmation that even though it looks like Jesus has failed her and faltered in this moment that she is still holding onto hope that he is the Messiah come to bring the kingdom of God.

I know that she wasn’t expressing hope that Jesus would raise Lazarus because the very first words out of Jesus’ mouth to her is a statement of what his is going to do. “Your brother will rise again.” But she doesn’t say, “That’s what I’m taking about! Let’s go to the tomb and see some miracles in action!” She instead almost bats away his words as if they were just some platitude meant to comfort her as if we might tell someone, “at least he’s in a better place.”

She says, in verse 24 “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Those Jewish mourners are here, and they keep telling me to put my hope in the resurrection, but that doesn’t help me now as I’m dealing with this grief over my brother.
And Jesus’ response to her is disarming. I feel as if he may have taken her hands from her hips and looked deeply into her eyes as he said this, “I am the resurrection and the life.” They are telling you to put your hope in some far-off future day of resurrection, but I am right here in front of you and I am the resurrection, and not just the resurrection but I am your life. He expounds on this as he continues, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

Let me ask you the same question. Jesus here is offering eternal life. But we so often think of eternal life as something that starts off in the distant future after we die. But Jesus here says that this eternal life is not rooted in death but in life and belief. If you believe today, eternal life has already begun.

Jesus is assuring Martha that Lazarus still lives even though he has died, but then he turns his attention to her and says to her and us, “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Do you believe me? Stop worrying about Lazarus, I’ll take care of him. Stop worrying about Mary, I’ll talk to her in a minute. Stop worrying about all the mourners at the house.

Remember, Martha is a worker, she’s probably got a ham in the oven and is organizing a nice memorial service. No one has asked her to do any of it, but she sees her worth in what she does. And Jesus stops her in her tracks and tells her to stop putting on a mask, stop her frantic worry and rest in him.

And I still don’t think she quite gets it in her heart, but she makes a profound confession of faith in her head. She is more fully understanding exactly who Jesus is. But she will still need to experience who Jesus is to her. She says, “Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

Mary Worships in Her Sorrow

As we continue, we move from Martha to her sister Mary, and if Martha’s confrontation was hands on the hips then Mary’s is knees on the ground. Hear what happens next in verse 28, “When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet.”

Mary is distraught, but she comes rushing out to Jesus bringing all the professional mourners with her and instead of reasoning with him as Martha did, she falls on the ground at his feet and in the midst of intermittent sobs, she chokes out the words, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” This has hit Mary harder than Martha. She is distraught.

There’s a quote that was made famous by an atheist scientist named Stephen Hawking but it actually reflects a verse from Ecclesiastes 9:4, “While there is life, there is hope.” Well, Lazarus is dead and Mary here feels like her hope is gone and that Jesus has personally let her down. But notice that she doesn’t flee from Jesus in her distress. Instead of running away from Jesus, she runs to him. Instead of cursing God in this moment of distress she worships him.

Can I encourage you that when you feel like hope is gone, when you feel like Jesus is giving you the silent treatment, when things have not turned out the way you have planned, cry out to Jesus. Not cursing him in anger, but falling on your face before him in worship. Because as we have already seen, with Jesus, the end of life is not the end of hope. The same message that Jesus gave to Martha still stands for Mary, but Mary is already where she should be. Though she doesn’t understand fully, she is still worshipping through her tears.

Jesus Weeps with Mary

Now we see one of the most deeply human moments in Jesus’ ministry. Let’s read verses 33-35, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept.”

We’ll pick up with this verse next week and look at more of the reasons why Jesus is so deeply moved to tears here, because I think it is more than him being caught up in the moment, because he knows what he is about to do. But the very simple explanation is that he is moved with compassion for those who are suffering.

It is true that Jesus let Lazarus die. He delayed coming, and he did not speak healing from a distance like he did for the centurion’s servant. Obviously, his reasons were good and merciful and glorious. But this did not mean Jesus took the suffering it caused lightly.

Jesus always chooses to do and say what will ultimately bring his Father the most glory, and sometimes, as in Lazarus’s case, it requires affliction and grief. However, he does not take delight in the affliction and grief itself. No, Jesus is sympathetic as our great high priest. And since Jesus is the image of the invisible God, here at the tomb of Lazarus, we get a glimpse of how the Father feels over the affliction and grief his children experience. Jesus weeps with those who weep. So the Jews in verse 36 are correct when they see Jesus weeping and they say, “See how he loved him!”

Senseless Skeptics

However, there is a third group (a fourth if you count the disciples) who responds to Jesus’ absence. Let’s read verse 37, “But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

Maybe this is you today. You are standing at a distance and when you see that bad things happen to good people you think, “See, here is proof that Jesus isn’t who he says he is. If he really loved them then wouldn’t he have stopped this terrible thing from happening? How can I believe in a God who allows babies to get cancer and who allows his followers to be imprisoned and murdered for their faith.

If he is powerless to stop it then he must not be God because God is all-powerful, and if he has the power but chooses not to use it then he must be some kind of sadist who likes watching people suffer. Either way I’m not going to worship him.

Jesus will answer their skepticism in the coming events, but I wanted to leave you with this picture of our choice of responding to Jesus. He is all powerful and he is all good, however his ways are above our ways and his purposes are above our purposes.

Remember Jesus first words in response to Mary and Martha’s message to him at the beginning of the chapter. He said, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

Jesus sometimes waits in his love and he sometimes kills to bring glory to God. That is hard for our minds to grasp, and we may never know the answers this side of heaven. But Jesus doesn’t ask us to understand it, he just demands that we believe.

So, the question is before you today. Whether you are a skeptic standing on the outside in judgment, or maybe you have your hands on your hips and you are questioning Jesus and wrestling with him, or maybe you are broken and feel that all hope is lost. Hear the words of Jesus, “I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

The world would say, “while there is life, there is hope,” but the Christian says, “even in death, there is hope.” Do you believe that all things, including even death, work together for the good of those who are called according to God’s purpose.

In the midst of the hurting, in the midst of the waiting, I invite you to fall on you face at the feet of Jesus as Mary did and worship him in your doubts. Be like the father in Mark 9:24 said, “I believe, Lord help my unbelief.” Doubt is not the enemy of faith as long as you end up on your knees in worship. Let us pray.