Lent 5, Year A | John 11:1-45
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 26, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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The tale of Jesus raising Lazarus has been one of my favorites since childhood. It’s a powerfully emotional scene that in many ways brings the first half of John’s Gospel to a climax. You’ve got illness, death, and distress; a seemingly lackadaisical Jesus putting things off a few days; proclamations of Resurrection and Life; and finally what might be the greatest of Jesus’ miracles as he calls Lazarus forth from the grave. It’s a high stakes drama that, after its fair share of twists and turns, ultimately concludes with a hopeful and happy ending. What more could we ask from a story?
A commentary I was looking at noted that this scene appears to be a turning point in the way Jesus relates to other people in John. Prior to this point, Jesus seems to have some walls up, often coming across as detached or sometimes even aloof from the people around him. But as Martha, Mary, and Lazarus begin to evoke his more emotional side, themes of friendship and endearment start to emerge and develop throughout the rest of the book.
I think it was last spring when we talked about the different words for “love” available in the Greek language commonly used in Jesus’ day. The Bible never uses the one indicating romantic love but instead alternates between agape—defined as “love as action”—and philos—more along the lines of what we think of as friendship or endearment. God’s love for people, and the love we’re called to have for those around us, is that agape term. In fact, when the Bible says that “God is love,”[1] it’s saying, “God is agape.” God’s existence is found within, through, and as love playing out in action.
Throughout our passage today, though, the term for love is philos. Jesus doesn’t love Mary or Martha in a romantic sense. Nor is there any overt declaration of “love as action” in this story. What it comes down to is that Jesus, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus are friends—good friends.
Because it’s based in action, agape is a kind of love that one can choose to do. Jesus tells us to agape our enemies, but he never demands that we become philos: friends. Agape is certainly easier if we like the person we lovingly serve, but again, we can choose to behave kindly and generously toward anyone, even if it goes against our personal feelings. Philos, though, isn’t necessarily something we can control. It’s that sense of comradery or enjoyment that makes you want to spend time with the other person. Jesus isn’t responding to the other three main characters in our story out of some kind of obligation; he has a natural, inborn affinity for them. These are the kind of friends you’d happily spend Thanksgiving with or go through the work of throwing a surprise birthday party for.
Realizing that makes Jesus’ reaction to Mary and Martha’s call for aid more surprising. Even considering that “this illness does not lead to death,”[2] it would still make sense for him to want to go and help the sisters until Lazarus had recovered.
But he doesn’t. He just stays put.
We can’t be certain where exactly Jesus was when he received the message. The last mention of his locale was “across the Jordan…where John had been baptizing earlier.”[3] If he was still there, it probably would’ve taken Mary and Martha’s messengers about a day or so to reach him and then another day or two for him and the disciples to make it back to Bethany. If they happened to be back home in Galilee, the fastest—and highly dangerous—route would have been a minimum of three days traveling, one way. That means Lazarus probably died either before or right around the time Jesus would have heard the news. So his choice to wait two more days was unlikely to have made much of a difference between healing versus raising his friend.
And this is where I think the passage gets really interesting. We read about the sisters and their comforters weeping and then Jesus weeping, but there are two different words happening behind the scenes. Mary, Martha, and their guests are mourning or crying or wailing—the more public display of grief or despair. The term used where “Jesus began to weep”[4] specifically includes the mention of tears. I would guess that means Jesus wasn’t necessarily making a big scene. He wasn’t following the lead of the professional mourners wealthy families would hire to put on a display over the death of a loved one. He teared up. He was genuinely sad with that deep grief that expresses itself only in silence and tears—sad for his friends; sad for himself; sad for the pain and loss life can’t help but bring to us.
Sometimes I think we get scared of the idea of Jesus having real emotions. It’s much easier to think of the Savior of the World in an abstract sort of sense, kind of like a puppet or cardboard cutout, someone more layered onto the world around him than fully part of it. Despite being able to interact with and affect his surroundings, we envision him as still somehow separate at heart, largely impassive to the joys and tragedies of human life. For some deep-seated reason, we like to imagine a hero “unresting, unhasting, and silent as light, nor wanting, nor wasting, [but ruling] in might.”[5] There always seems to be a part of us that wants a detached God. We expect—and pray at—an inhuman Lord. It’s like we’re looking for Zeus or Spock or Superman to save us. And I think that expectation causes us to misinterpret what else we see happening here.
We read that Jesus “was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved”[6] and a few verses later that he was “again greatly disturbed.”[7] But there are some clues here that suggest a slightly different reading. First off, the verbs are all in what’s called “middle voice,” which indicates an action one does or has for or toward oneself.[8] For example, if I squat, I make my body lower itself. When I stand up, my body raises itself. If I want to go investigate something, I’m trying to see it “for myself”—that kind of thing. Secondly, we need to remember that “spirit” generally isn’t the preferred translation of the Greek word pneuma; air, wind, and breath all come in before it. So instead of being the passive, utterly certain, icon-style Jesus we’ve come to expect and read onto him, it sounds to me more like Jesus “castigated himself under his[9] breath and was agitated with himself!”[10]
Now that’s a different image!
Have you ever considered that before? Jesus kicking himself for not arriving sooner? Jesus regretting that the sisters had to bear the pain of their brother’s death longer than necessary, even if everything was going to turn out okay in the end? The idea may not line up with our normal expectations of Jesus; however, it does line up with the God we see acting throughout the Hebrew Bible, and it would stand in line with our Trinitarian doctrine of Jesus being fully human.
So then, what might a fully human, fully emotional Jesus mean for us today?
For one thing, as Deacon Phil mentioned last week, by now many of us have dropped or forgotten our Lenten resolutions. We may be disappointed with or upset at ourselves. Even knowing it happens to a lot of people, not keeping up with what we told ourselves we would do might cause us to feel isolated or ashamed. But what if Jesus shared in that part of our being, too? Could he be “without sin”[11] yet still wish he could’ve made different decisions?
Can we?
From childhood we divide our emotions or feelings into “good” or “bad” categories. Happiness, love, joy and the like fall under “good” while fear, disappointment, and anger fall under “bad.” But what if our labels and designations are misleading us? What if none of those truly carry moral connotations? What if, in the end, they’re all just human emotions? Preachers will tell you that Jesus validated anger as an emotion when he cleansed the Temple. What if here we see Jesus validating our more subtle “negative” emotions like annoyance or sorrow or even regret?
What might our lives begin to look like if we could accept ourselves for who we truly are—all of ourselves, not just the parts we’ve been taught to think are okay? What if Jesus stands with us even in remorse, frustration, and disillusionment? What if these aren’t things to bury, to neglect or abandon in the wreckage of a dying world, but seeds for us to nurture and develop as we enter a new life, a new kind of being?
What if we can finally accept that being human is not a sin? What if we weren’t afraid or dismissive of our own emotions but rather learned to make friends with them? What if we could embrace our human selves as fully as God did in the Incarnate Son? Where might we go and grow and love from here? How might we, too, come forth from the grave?
[1] I John 4:8 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] John 11:4
[3] John 10:40
[4] John 11:35
[5] “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise;” text by Walter Chalmers Smith (1824-1908)
[6] John 11:33
[7] John 11:38
[8] I realize that not all middle voice verbs translate into English as action toward the self, but I suspect that’s a result of the different ways language and culture affect how we understand actions to take place.
[9] The pronoun “his” is not literally in the text, but it’s necessary to form the English idiom.
[10] John 11:33 | My translation
[11] Hebrews 4:15