Day 24 - Friday, March 17
Title: “LAZARUS, COME OUT!”: JESUS SHOWS HIS POWER OVER DEATH
Scripture: John 11:38–44
Jesus was again deeply moved at these words, and went on to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay in front of it.

“Take away the stone,” said Jesus. “But Lord,” said Martha, the dead man’s sister, “he has been dead four days. By this time he will be decaying ....”

“Did I not tell you,” replied Jesus, “that if you believed, you would see the wonder of what God can do?”

Then they took the stone away and Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I know that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of these people standing here so that they may believe that you have sent me.”

And when he had said this, he called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with grave-clothes and his face muffled with a handkerchief. “Now unbind him,” Jesus told them, “and let him go home.”

Poetry & Poet:
“The First Request of Lazarus” 
by Brett Foster
1.
…so newly separated
From the old fire of Heaven.
                            —Ovid

Already weary
from second living, new
dying of renewed patience,

old Lazarus of Bethany
betrays the uplift, desperate
for a death pregnant

with meaning, reliable passing.
How does one return,
happily, to work the olive groves?

How to age now? Even feasts
felt nebulous, and villages—
he seemed beyond them. True,

nothing terrifies like that
desertion: fading one
swallowed in the cave mouth,

linen strips to bind
the limbs. Though loss like this,
however uniquely it strikes

the forsaken, is ordinary still,
more familiar than altars,
fruitful as peasant markets.

LAZARUS COME OUT!: JESUS SHOWS HIS POWER OVER DEATH

Deep anger
Deeply troubled
Wept
Still angry
Shouted

How do you respond to the idea that, in addition to being holy and powerful, God is emotional?  We tend to read the word in a negative sense as a sign of not being in control.  Does God have emotions and do they move him?  It may surprise you that many early Christian leaders and theologians answered in the negative.  Their answer was an attempt to separate the Christian God from the scandalous behavior of Greek gods such as Zeus who handed out vengeance while in fits of rage.  Assigning emotions to God seemed to these early leaders to weaken God and make him too human.  Thus, the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) concluded that God could not suffer or be emotionally moved by events or persons.  If God isn’t moved by emotions, then neither should we.  The difficulty with such a position is that it doesn’t mesh with the picture of God and Jesus we find in the Scriptures.       

After seeking to support a Christian friend who had experienced deep personal suffering and the doubt that ensues, author Philip Yancey sought to understand how God responds to our pain.  To find the answer Yancey spent two weeks in an isolated cabin in Colorado reading the Scriptures cover to cover.  “Is God stoic in the presence of our pain?” was his question.  When the two weeks were over Yancey offered this assessment:

“Simply reading the Bible, I encountered not a misty vapor but an actual Person.  A Person as unique and distinctive and colorful as any person I know.  God has deep emotions; he feels delight and frustration and anger.  In the Prophets he weeps and moans with pain, even comparing himself to a woman giving birth: ‘I cry out, I gasp and pant.’ . . . I know, I know, the word ‘anthropomorphism’ is supposed to explain all those human like characteristics.  But surely the images God ‘borrows’ from human experience point to an even stronger reality.”

The emotions of God are on full display when we consider Jesus who is the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).  In the description of Jesus found in today’s passage, we see a wide range of emotions.  At the death of his friend, Lazarus, we see Jesus deeply angry and troubled.  In the Greek “deeply angry" can literally be translated as “snort like a horse” ready to charge.   We then read that Jesus shouts for Lazarus to rise.

Interesting that he would shout.  Why?  Certainly, the Son of God doesn’t need to raise his voice to heal or raise people from the dead.  When a leper boldly approaches and asks if he is willing to heal, Jesus calmly answers, I am willing; be healed (Mt. 8:3).  Yet, at the tomb of Lazarus he shouts with the intensity of a snorting stallion.  He does so because he is angry that death has entered his Father’s world.  Ancient philosophers identified anger as the moral emotion because it is often based on a reflective judgment that an injustice has occurred.  Outside his friend’s tomb, he was righteously angry at the injustice of death warping God’s shalom.  Jesus wasn’t play-acting or drumming up his power by shouting.  He did so because divine anger surged through him and exploded in a passionate yell.  His friend—made in God’s image—had died.   

Jesus experienced the same deep emotions at his own death.  As he entered the Gethsemane experience, raw emotion pours out of him as he collapses to the ground and declares, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mt. 26:38).  Such an admission was so uncharacteristic for one claiming to be the Messiah, that early Christian apologists used it as evidence that stories of Christ had not been altered.  If followers of Jesus were editing stories to make Christ more credible, then surely his seemingly emotional outburst would have been deleted as a sign of weakness.  When Jesus encounters a temple system that turns worship into a money making enterprise that unnecessarily burdens the poor, Jesus becomes angry and takes action.  As he overturns tables and benches, he declares that he will not tolerate a house of prayer being turned into a “den of robbers” (11:17).   

As I write this someone close to me has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.  While we pray for healing, we can’t be sure God will intervene as we desire.  Not every follower of Christ is treated like Lazarus.  What we can be sure is that at every instance of disease and death God—as modeled by Jesus—is deeply moved and righteously angry.  In a fallen world, such a reaction can bring comfort amidst the sorrow.  We are not alone in our pain, sorrow, and yes, anger.

Prayer:
God, thank you that you are not immune to the pain and suffering of this world.  As you see the same ravages of death we do, it’s comforting that you are not passive or immune.  Rather, you are deeply moved and angry.  While we can’t always presume healing, we can know you shout at death and will one day forever banish it.  For today, that knowledge comforts.

Tim Muehlhoff
Professor of Communication
Co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project
Biola University

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