Revelation Over Miracle

A sermon for All Saints Sunday on John 11:32-44

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Paolo Nicolello on Unsplash.]

On a Sunday when the loved ones we have lost are held so close in our awareness, I think today’s gospel can be an emotionally complicated story to hear.

The open expression of grief can resonate… or feel a bit too close to home.

The reproaches questioning Jesus’s failure to act before it was too late give voice to questions that, perhaps, we wish we could quell in our own hearts.

And the resurrection itself, the miracle at the climax of the story… well… perhaps it falls a bit flat.

Because how can we fail to ask, “why then and not now?”

And once we have asked, what do we do with the answer: “so that people might believe that God sent Jesus.”

It feels, so… cold, and calculating. Like that trauma of the people in the story is all just a means to an end.

But, to really hear the story the John is telling us, I think we need to remember that John is telling us a story… a story that draws on eye-witness accounts of Jesus’s actual life and ministry, certainly, but also a story that is, itself, a carefully-constructed narrative, shaped to teach us the meaning of that life and ministry.

In his commentary on this passage, Brian Peterson offers this reminder:

In this Gospel, the astounding things Jesus does are not “miracles,” not simply places where the general patterns of the world swerve wildly. Instead, they are revelations, signs that point beyond the astounding event itself to something else. More precisely, they point to someone else. They testify to Jesus as the Son to whom the Father has given life (John 5:25-26).[1]

What I draw from this reminder is that we won’t get the message John is offering if we try to put ourselves in the scene, experiencing it directly.

Instead, we need to pull back a bit from the pathos of the story and look for the revelation. We need to ask what glimpse we are being given into the deeper truth of who Jesus is and what he came to do.

Only then, I think, can we hear what Jesus has to offer us in our own experiences with death and grief.

So, what are those revelations?

The first insight about Jesus is how he joins people in their grief.

We all know that “Jesus wept,” but when read as an intentional revelation, we can see how John frames the significance of the details that he includes in the scene.

If the only point in the story were the resurrection, the narrative would quickly move to the miracle. But it doesn’t.

It stops for Jesus to see Mary weeping and for the gathered crowd to notice how disturbed and moved he is in response.

It lingers in the moment of Jesus’s open tears for those around to interpret them as an expression of his love.

It reiterates the depth of his distress one more time when they arrive at the tomb before moving the action forward.

John wants us to notice Jesus’s emotion, and the way in which it responds to and engages the mourning of the people around him.

He wants us to see that, despite the words that come later about seeing the glory of God and his prayer admittedly offered for the instruction of those gathered near, Jesus is not calculating in this interaction.

He is not unmoved by the pain that death evokes.

Even knowing the joy he is there to unleash, he also knows that tears need to be shed together…that grief is one of the most important ways that we love.

So, Jesus pauses the action to weep, joining every person who has ever felt the track the tears make down their face when faced with a goodbye.

He does not leave us alone in that experience.

But that does not mean that he is like any other human in the face of death.

This is the second revelation, the emphasis on how Jesus is there to change our experience and our expectations in the face of death.

When Martha offers a valid caution about opening the tomb, Jesus asks, “did I not tell you, you would see the glory of God?”

It sounds like a rebuke, but then his prayer makes it clear that Jesus intends this as a teaching moment.

The resurrection itself is already arranged. There’s no need for intercession. The Father hears Jesus without the spoken words.

Jesus says what he says so that those around can hear and believe.

Of course, the resurrection is not irrelevant in the scene, far from it… but it’s not the central thing.

The resurrection reveals the central thing: the truth of who Jesus is.

The one whom God has given power over death.

It’s a truth that is much more impactful than one resurrection.

Because if the resurrection is the thing, then its power stops at this story.

And it’s meaningless for every other death in which Jesus does not show up 4 days later and demand that the stone be rolled away.

But by making the resurrection a teaching moment that is actually about who Jesus is, John is changing our understanding of death… teaching us that Jesus is stronger even than death.

And whether or not we get an immediate resurrection, that is still a transformative thing to learn.

Because the last revelation in this story is about another power that Jesus has: the power to free us.

After Lazarus returns to life, he comes out of the grave with his hands, feet, and face wrapped up in graveclothes.

His life has returned to his body, but he is still bound.

Until Jesus instructs, “unbind him and let him go.”

It’s an intentional detail included by the storyteller, a signal that Jesus’ power is about what happens in life, as well as death.

Brian Peterson, again, summarizes the teaching powerfully:

“Jesus is the place where death ends and everlasting life begins. Without denying the eschatological promise of resurrection and death’s final elimination, the life of Jesus breaks into our present and transforms it. What we need to hear is that on both sides of the grave there is life for us because Jesus has been sent to call our names. On both sides of the grave Jesus is life for us.”[2]

When Jesus tells the gathered mourners to unbind Larazus, John is telling us that the story is meant to unbind us…

to change not only our expectations about resurrection in eternity, but to change the way that we experience life here and now, because Jesus is life. He frees us for life.

In a way, by telling us the story, with specific moments meant to teach us specific truths, John is trying to unbind the story itself. To release it from the confines of one particular time and place so that it can live with the freedom to mean something in our lives as well.

And I think it does.

I think it speaks to our lives through the truths it reveals about Jesus.

I think there is a unique comfort that comes from knowing that Jesus weeps with us when we weep,

That his eternal perspective and victory over death does not inure his heart against the kind of pain that breaks ours.

When we grieve, he grieves with us, and he does not expect the promise of the resurrection to erase our pain here and now.

But that does not make the promise of resurrection irrelevant.

The assurance that Jesus has power over death…

that we can trust not just a vague promise of life after death but actually trust Jesus to be stronger than death…

that is a real hope.

Death will not forever separate us from those we mourn, because Jesus is more powerful.

And that power is not just reserved for resurrection. It also frees us now.

Jesus weeps with us, and teaches us, so that he can unbind us.