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Believe also in me
Fifth Sunday of Lent, April 2, 2017
Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” – from John 11
Jesus asks Martha, the practical one, to believe him. But his words – are they about physical life, spiritual life, eternal life? He tries to be as clear as he can. If you die, you don’t really. Or at least, if you die, you also live. And believing in me (what does that mean, exactly?) keeps you from dying at all. Do you believe this? This is not clear to me, but Jesus is looking straight into Martha’s eyes when he speaks, and she says, “Yes, Lord. I have to come to believe that you are the Christ.”
Martha brings Mary to Jesus. Mary and Martha have lost their beloved brother Lazarus, who has been dead four days. When Jesus sees Mary, he himself begins to weep. But he pulls himself together and moves toward the grave. “Take away the stone,” he says. Jesus prays to his Father and shouts into the cave, “Lazarus, come forth!” And Lazarus does, wrapped though he still is in burial bands.
I always wonder how Lazarus later died. We all do. Die. But Jesus, the Christ, asks me to believe that if I believe in him I will never die.
Blaise Pascal did not waver; in what is called his “wager,” he simply said, “Why take a chance? How can you lose? Believe.”
But he said this for an audience. Pascal’s belief was not skin deep. His physical life was painful and short, but he had confidence – he believed – that he would live forever with God.
Alistair Cooke wrote in 1945 about America’s future after the war: “All the undefeatable human aggressions would push on, the search for power disguised as justice, the doctrine of self-determination, the cyclical re-juggling of economics, the practise of diplomacy, the pride of sovereignty … all the vital distractions that permit most men to postpone for a lifetime the business of living.”
And I think Jesus’ words are confusing! Cooke’s are poetic, primary and pleasing to the ear, but what on earth does he mean? Am I not living while I’m alive? But even biologists have trouble with this. “We don’t have a very good definition of life,” says synthetic biologist Christopher Voigt. “It’s a very abstract thing … way too murky.”
As I live and breathe, I think I’ll turn back to the book of John and settle into Jesus’ words. He raised Lazarus, and then just a few days later was killed and resurrected himself. The stories are too good to believe, but I believe them anyway.
John Updike wrote a marvelous poem about all of this that comes to mind. Its first of seven stanzas goes like this:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
We each go on living our seventy-eighty-ninety years. Sometimes much less, perhaps a bit more. The key word in that sentence is living. Not how long, or where. Jesus calls, and we answer. Here I am, Lord.
Just because you teach us to ask these questions, Lord, does not mean we must have answers. Thank you for every morning’s rebirth of wonder, thank you for your life which vitalizes mine. Thank you for talking with Martha, weeping with Mary, and breathing new life into Lazarus’ dead old bones. You know us all like a book, so much better than we know ourselves. Wow!
http://www.davesandel.net/category/lent-easter-devotions-2017/
http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archived_devotions.php?article_id=1588
