Jesus is Life: A Meditation on John 11 for the 5th Sunday in Lent

Then said Martha unto Jesus,

Lord, if thou hadst been here,

my brother had not died.

 But I know, that even now,

 whatsoever thou wilt ask of God,

God will give it thee.

 

Jesus saith unto her,

Thy brother shall rise again.

 

Martha saith unto him,

I know that he shall rise again

 in the resurrection at the last day.

 

Jesus said unto her,

I am the resurrection, and the life:

he that believeth in me,

though he were dead, yet shall he live:

And whosoever liveth and believeth in me

shall never die. Believest thou this?

 

She saith unto him, Yea, Lord:

I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God,

which should come into the world.

 

Among the inescapable realities which Lent encourages us to face, is the inevitability of death.  In the 11^th chapter of John’s Gospel, we learn of Lazarus, a friend of Jesus and of his ministry, who was also a familial relation to both Mary and Martha.  Lazarus had become ill, and as a result of that illness, he died.  Messengers had been sent to Jesus to woo Him back to Lazarus’ side in order to heal him, but Jesus very intentionally did not do so.  And when Jesus told His disciples that He was heading back to “wake” Lazarus, they appeared to concur with Thomas that they were destined to die right alongside him.  Even Martha and Mary could not reconcile their grief at Lazarus’ death with Jesus’ claim to be the very “resurrection and the life” they were hoping for, perhaps because death was to them (as it is for us) such an engrossing event.  When Jesus actually called Lazarus out of the tomb in which he had laid dead four days, by the power of His own spoken Word, the shock among everyone who witnessed it seems even more overwhelming.  Many believed on Jesus, and others went to the Pharisees to plot Jesus’ death, but what Jesus had done in raising Lazarus from the dead was incontrovertible:  death was the unconquerable enemy of all mankind, and Jesus had just sent it away with a Word.

 

Jesus raising Lazarus was certainly a foreshadowing of the Resurrection Jesus would accomplish in Himself after having been tortured and murdered through the collusion of Jewish and Roman authorities.  However, it was also a revelation of who Jesus really is, and why it matters so much for every human being on the planet.  There is no one in the history of the world who has saved themselves from death by their own power.  In the history of the Old Testament, there are two individuals—Enoch of the ancient pre-Noah era, and Elijah during Israel’s prophetic period—who appear to have been taken from the earth by God without having died, but everyone else has succumbed to some sort of illness or violence that separated their spirit from their body.  Even Lazarus would eventually die again after Jesus raised him, with the Church’s history and traditions placing him as a bishop in Cypress before dying again about 30 years later.  Death is the curse which all men must face, because sin indwells all men, and the wages of sin is death.  Whether we fear it, ignore it, obsess over it, chase it, hide from it, or run from it, death catches up to everyone eventually.

 

Fortunately, death isn’t the end of the story, because Jesus wouldn’t let it be.  Instead of allowing us to simply bear our curse and the justice due for our evil, Jesus entered into the life and death of our humanity so that He might shepherd us all through to a life that never ends.  Death is certain for us, but it is not final, because the Author of Life has conquered death for us so that we might live forever with Him.  When Jesus told Martha that He is the resurrection and the life, He wasn’t using a metaphor or symbology—Jesus really is, in Himself and according to His divine nature, life.  Death is not organic to God’s nature, but a consequence in us due to our rejection of Him.  We experience death because our race is fallen away from God, and the Original Sin of our first parents is passed along to every successive human until the end of the world, causing our bodies to sooner or later break down, and our spirits to return to our Maker.  It is, therefore, a mark of infinite love and grace that God condescends to us in our fallen state to pay the justice due for our sins through His Cross, and then offer to us the gracious gift of forgiveness and life in Jesus.  Death is inevitable for all, but it isn’t the end of our story.  Because Jesus is the Eternal Word of the Father which speaks life even to the dead, we know that we have a future beyond death, secure in His fellowship and His Kingdom which has no end.

 

Jesus is Life.  That realization is greater even than the irrefutable fact that death comes for us all.  Like Mary and Martha, we are tempted to fall into our grief over death like it was the end of the world, as if somehow God has failed us if He hasn’t perpetually prevented the deaths of those we love.  But the reality is that God has not taken away from us the temporal consequences of our fallen nature, but rather, entered into our fallenness so that we might rise again from it.  God has not unmade us from what we were, but He has made us new in Jesus, transformed by love and grace into His children so that even death cannot separate us from Him.  Such love and grace pours out to us lavishly by His Word, giving us faith to trust in Him unto eternal life.  And as it is Jesus alone who is the Only Begotten Son of God; Jesus alone who unites in Himself our humanity with His divinity; Jesus alone who lived a perfect life of service to His Father in the unbroken fellowship of the Holy Spirit; Jesus alone who ascended the Cross as our spotless sacrificial Lamb, who alone could bear in Himself the eternal judgement due to every living soul; Jesus alone who by His own power rose from the dead and gave the free gift of His grace and forgiveness to His disciples, so that they might give it away as freely as they had received it; Jesus alone who ascended on high to the right hand of the Father, who sent to us the Holy Spirit to be our Comforter, wisdom, and power until His final return to judge the living and the dead; so it is by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone that eternal life is poured out to all people.

 

Be of good cheer, dear Christian, for though death will come for you, it cannot overcome you, for Jesus has conquered death for you already.  And by His victory will all the saints who have pressed on before us be united together with us when we arrive in that hallowed Kingdom, because we all will live forever in our Savior who is Life immortal.  Let the devil rage and the nations imagine vain things—let the tumults of the world and of our own lives fade into the background of our minds by this one overwhelming truth:  Jesus is Life, and He is our life, now and forever, and unto ages of ages without end.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.