Jesus Is The Resurrection And The Life
JESUS IS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE
JOHN 11:17-27
Jesus understands and feels deeply for us in our sorrows.
Jesus arrives on the scene, not only too late to save Lazarus from dying, but also to find him already buried for four days. Many people from Jerusalem have come to console the sisters. The news then comes that Jesus is on the way. It is Martha, the active and aggressive sister, who goes out to meet him and apparently rebukes him for his slowness in coming. She and her sister do not have faith like that of the centurion, that a word spoken from a distance would suffice. They expected Jesus to come back with their messenger, and the fact that he did not do so must have seemed to them hard and inexplicable. Even so Martha’s faith in him remains and she knows that he will be able to do something to help.
Jesus tells Martha that her brother will rise again. This is taken by her as merely an orthodox statement of belief. She knows that he will in the end. Jesus then speaks to her the fifth of the “I am” sayings. He is the resurrection and the life—faith in him means in one way the overcoming of death and in another the avoiding of it. When he asks whether she believes this, her reply is a confession of faith in him as Christ and Son of God without any reference to his claim to raise the dead.
Martha and Mary both say the same—“if you had been here ….” But if he had, their faith would not have been tested, and neither they nor the other people with them would have seen the great sign of eternal life. God delays for a purpose, and this is surely an encouragement to us in those trying times when his failure to intervene seems to us both endless and purposeless.
Notes 11:17: he would have been buried on the day he died. 11:18: this fact may be recorded in order to show that he was not far away from a still greater raising of the dead from which alone all other signs drew their significance. 11:19: there would be seven days of solemn mourning. “The Jews” are representative of the Judeans who are about to be given their last chance to believe. 11:21: even if there may be a note of reproach, it is more in sorrow than in anger, and her faith in him remains. 11:25f.: the relationship of physical and spiritual life and death has already been foreshadowed in 5:25-29. Here was the proof that the hour was not only coming but had actually arrived. Martha’s orthodox faith had to be turned into a living experience through seeing Christ in action. So has ours today.