The Resurrection Before the Resurrection

Listen or read the following transcript from The Gospel Coalition as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelism from John 11.

According to the Bible, God is both an ordered God and an immensely surprising God. We might contrast three different views of the universe. In an ancient pagan universe, the whole structure is open. That is to say science isn’t possible because nothing is, in principle, regular enough to be predictable.

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In a pagan universe, there are all these gods and goddesses that stand behind all the processes of life. If you want a fat baby or you want the crops to come in or you want to be protected from danger on a trip, the trick is to offer the right kind of sacrifice to the right kind of god or goddess in the hope that somehow you will find favor.

But in that kind of universe, it’s very difficult to imagine science as we have come to know it because the gods are just too whimsical. They’re a bit arbitrary. They’re not very predictable. Within the rules of the religion, there are some predictable elements, but it’s very difficult to have an empirical, hard, number-based science. That’s an open universe.

Then there’s the closed universe where the assumption may be bound up with a philosophical materialism. All there is is matter and energy or matter and energy on the space-time continuum. That’s it. Now in that sort of universe, of course it’s very possible to have science. Everything is ordered. Everything is bound up with the analyzable causes and effects. If we haven’t got the answers yet, just cheer up. Give us a few more years and a little more technology and some more research money, and we’ll sort it out.

That sort of universe on the long haul tends to drift toward some form of dehumanization. It’s very difficult to avoid it. If all I am is a conveniently arranged order of atoms, if I have arisen from the primordial muck with no more significance than muck, it’s very difficult to give me as a human being significance.

If then I look at the world around me and see all of these other nicely and conveniently arranged atoms out there that I call people, the fact of the matter is it’s very difficult to find much significance in any of you or in me. Or is it difficult to find good and evil in any sort of transcendent sense, in any sort of a real sense? It’s just the way the blessed electrons are bouncing.

There are, in my view, scientific problems bound up with design and all of this too, but that’s another thing to explore on another occasion. The Bible’s view of the universe is neither open nor closed. You might call it a controlled view. Here there is a sovereign God, and he is in charge. But he does things in an ordered way. He establishes an ordered universe. So science is possible. That is, things are regularly done in a regular way.

Although the biblical writers, for example, know about the water cycle.… They know about water that falls to the earth and the little streams that go into rivers and rivers that go into the sea. Then water rises again into clouds, and clouds then dump. They know about the water cycle. Read Ecclesiastes.

Yet they prefer to say God sends the rain, not because they don’t know about the water cycle nor because they’re contradicting their own knowledge, but because they see this God ordering things in this structured fashion. So he still stands behind them, and yet it’s in an ordered way so that science is still possible.

The earliest scientists in the Western sense of science as we have come to know it (1600s, 1700s, and so on) almost all were either Christians or deists of some sort precisely pursuing the understanding of the universe because they felt God had disclosed himself in an ordered way in it. But this God is also personal enough, surprising enough, that he can invade it or he can intervene. He can do something different. He can do something other than the ordered thing he usually does.

Now clearly these three views of the universe are very different, and they bring entailments. It is very important to see these massive structures (they’re not the only options; they’re just three I happened to mention) affect your view finally of just about everything. If you do not think about them, you do not escape their influence. You merely end up by adopting some worldview or structure or other unwittingly. You cannot escape worldviews. All viewpoints bring entailments with them.

For instance, here is Richard Lewontin, Harvard biologist. I’m reading from a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science … in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.” We can’t have that!

Well, of course inevitably Christians work from another set of assumptions. We insist that in some measure, such assumptions can be inspected for coherence and integrity, but people who are adamantly committed to an opposing worldview are often so turned in on themselves that it takes a major revolution to open up to alternative possibility. From my perspective as a Christian, God is sovereign. God is wise. God is ordered. God is providential. God is faithful.

So science is possible. Indeed, the sheer glory of the created order testifies mutely to its Creator. But God is also personal, all-powerful, and he can (if he so chooses) intervene in the way he normally operates to do something rather different. Yes, I do have a category for miracles, but I cannot stress too strongly that this does not mean every claimed miracle is genuine or that we become gullible or confuse gullibility and faith.

Every culture has produced its quota of witchdoctors, soothsayer, tricksters, magicians, uncontrolled faith healers who resort to psychosomatic tricks and so forth. Every culture! But none of this means that there cannot be genuine miracles. In fact, I would like to adopt a principle that only the valuable is worth counterfeiting. No one goes and counterfeits the Australian pennies. You go after $20 bills or $100 bills. The presence of counterfeits merely tells me that there might be something there that’s worth counterfeiting.

One of the striking elements of Jesus’ ministry, in fact, was his miracles. They constituted only one side of a complex multi-faceted ministry, but they were so extraordinary in his own day that even his most vociferous opponents could neither refute nor ignore what he was doing. They had their share of uncontrolled faith healers in those days as well, but he did not the psychosomatic stunts of so many. The things he did were so extraordinary they were very difficult to overturn.

One of these miracles is in the passage before us. Now on the Christian calendar, Easter is the time when Jesus rose from the dead. But here he raises someone from the dead before he himself dies. In a sense, here you have a resurrection before the resurrection. That is an extraordinary story. There are all kinds of elements in it that have surprises in what Jesus says, how he responds, what he does.

Almost as astonishing as the miracle itself are the things Jesus says. One of them was drawn attention to by Phil. You don’t normally comfort people by comments like this, and yet if we come to terms with what Jesus says here, we’ll understand not only what the passage says about this miracle; we’ll understand a little more about why Jesus died and his own resurrection. This God of the Bible surprises us, and he will not be domesticated. Jesus surprises us, and he will not be domesticated.

1. Jesus receives a desperate plea for help and demonstrates his love by delay.

We’re told, “A man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.” Now it’s going to be a lot easier to follow this if we just orientate ourselves to a couple of points on the map. Down here is Jerusalem, the capital city. Bethany is only a 3 or 4 kilometers away.

But at this point, Jesus is up here, about 150 kilometers away, at a time when a day’s journey for a healthy man walking was maybe 40 kilometers. So you’re about three-and-a-half (conceivably four) days away. That’s the setting you have to bear in mind. Jesus and his bunch are up here, and this family (two sisters and a brother with whom he is tightly linked in Scripture, close friends) is down here in Bethany.

We’re told then that, “(This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.)” That was such a common story that the identification is made here. It’s actually told in John’s gospel in this mini book in the next chapter, but we won’t pursue that here. “So the sisters sent word to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ ” I love even the description of that. “The one you love is sick.” You know, a cynic might say, “Well, I guess Lazarus was the only one Jesus loved.” But it’s just not the way it is at all.

I have a friend who is a pastor in Washington, DC. One of the remarkable things about this man in his relationships with people (Mark Dever is his name) is that almost everyone believes he is Mark’s special friend. He has this ability to give himself to people as such that everyone feels especially loved.

That’s the way Jesus was too. The writer of this book, John, actually describes himself as the Beloved Disciple. He doesn’t mean, “I was the Beloved Disciple, and all the other ones were the hated ones.” It’s just that when you get to know this Jesus, you feel particularly loved by him.

The apostle Paul was writing away, for example, in the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, and he mentions Jesus, “Who loved me and gave himself for me,” the kind of spontaneous delight in a kind of personal recognition of the love of God in Christ Jesus when you get to know him. There’s a small hint of that in his human relationships even here.

“ ‘Lord, the one you love is sick.’ When he heard this, Jesus said …” Now he is talking to his disciples. “Jesus said, ‘This sickness will not end in death.’ ” Now, of course, in one sense it does as you’ve read the story. But it does not end finally in death. That’s not it. “No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”

The particular expression “for God’s glory” does not here mean in order that God may receive glory but in order that God’s glory may be displayed. That’s why this has come about, he says. We’re told then in verse 5, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” Then our version of the Bible here has, “Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days …”

In fact, it’s actually stronger than that. This book was originally written in Greek. The connecting word here is not a concessive. It’s not yet. It’s therefore. Now read verses 5 and 6 together and see if they make any sense. In fact, they make so little sense, that’s why the translators didn’t translate what is actually there. “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Therefore, when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.”

That’s what it says! You can’t get around it. It’s just so uncomfortable that the NIV translators couldn’t hack it, and they stuck in a yet instead. This really is my whole point, isn’t it? Jesus receives a desperate plea for help and demonstrates his love by delay. We’re told he stays there two days, and then he says to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea,” which is down in the south where Jerusalem and Bethany are.

“ ‘But Rabbi,’ they said …” Rabbi was just an ancient word that meant teacher, my teacher. “ ‘Rabbi,’ they said, ‘a short while ago the Jews tried to stone you, and yet you are going back there?’ ” Of course, they’re up in the north where there are also Jews. This expression “Jews” simply means the Jews of Judea, the Jews in the south connected with the temple authorities, who really had it in for Jesus by this time. After all, they’re all Jews themselves too.

It means here, “The Judeans down there with the authorities who were after you. The last time you were there they tried to stone you to death.” That’s three chapters earlier in chapter 8. “You’re going back there? You’re asking for trouble.” “Jesus answers, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? A man who walks by day will not stumble, for he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light.’“

In the language of John’s gospel, that means Jesus has to walk according to the light of his Father. He has to do what the Father does. If he does what he is told to do, if he does what God has given him to do, it can’t possibly turn out the wrong way. He is walking in the light. Then he explains (verse 11), “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep.” In other words, Jesus is claiming some kind of supernatural knowledge that Lazarus is now dead.

In other words, when the report came, the report was, “Lazarus is sick.” Now he has waited two more days, and now he says Lazarus is dead. Then he says, “I am going there to wake him up.” He says, “Well actually, he has fallen asleep. I’m going there to wake him up.” His disciples say, “Lord, if he is asleep, he’ll get better. Maybe the fever has broken.”

“Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. So then he explains more plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there …’ ” More surprise. “… so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” What on earth is going on here? You see, Lazarus is ill. Then the messengers get sent up north. That’s three and a half to four days. At this point, Lazarus, so far as we know, is still ill.

Two days later, Lazarus is dead, according to Jesus. Now it’s still three and a half or four days back. By the time Jesus gets back there, Lazarus has been in the grave four days. That point is explicitly made a little later on in the story, if you recall, when Jesus wants the tomb opened, and Martha says, “But by this time there’s a bad smell.”

If Jesus had left immediately when he had gotten the news, then Lazarus would still have been dead by two days. So why bother delaying? Well, I think the reason actually springs from superstition in the first century. In the Western world now when people die, we embalm them pretty quickly, and we make them pretty for public viewings in many cases. But that’s a fairly recent phenomenon.

My grandfather died in London right at the end of World War I. Obviously I wasn’t there to see it. He died in 1919, and my mother at the time was only 10 years old. They laid him out in a box on the kitchen table (there was no embalming) and then they took him off and buried him. That wasn’t uncommon amongst poor families in East London in those days.

Without any embalming and sometimes without even a lot of medical assistance.… Occasionally somebody would go into heart fibrillation and there would be no discernible pulse … the person wasn’t quite dead. Then as you’re hoisting them along to the grave there would be sort of a little knock from the box. There would be a lot of embarrassment and so on. Lo and behold, the person wasn’t really dead.

That is a fairly common thing in a lot of cultures. In fact, I was explaining this in another country, and old lady came up to me afterward and said, “That’s exactly what happened to my father.” As a result, there were traditions like this in the first century. This is from a source called Leviticus Rabbah. It says when the soul leaves the body it hangs around for the first three days, intending to reenter it, but as soon as it sees the body’s appearance change (that is, decomposition has set in), then it departs.

Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that Jesus believed that particular superstition. All I’m saying is it was a common view at the time to explain the fact that sometimes when people seemed to be dead.… Bang!… they popped back up 24 hours later just as you were getting rid of them. Do you see?

Supposing Jesus had gone back right away so that Lazarus would have been dead by two days and then he performed his resurrection. What would the crowd have said? “We know where this one comes from.” He waits two more days … two more anguished, painful days for Mary and Martha. Then when he does perform the miracle, it is so stunning, precisely because decomposition has gone so far that there’s a bad odor from the tomb.

By the time you get down a little farther, then even his opponents are saying, “We can’t overturn this sort of miracle. It’s so obvious. This one is not a psychosomatic trick.” As a result, his very delay has the effect of enhancing faith, increasing understanding. It becomes a rather strange but powerful display of love. Jesus hears this desperate plea for help and demonstrates his love by delay.

I suppose most in this room are not parents yet, but most of you will be. You will discover that when you have a 2-year-old or a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old there is only one time dimension: now. “Well, wait. I’ll be there.” “Now!” It’s very hard to get a 3-year-old to make any sort of trade based on time. “Lesser blessing now; bigger blessing later. Which would you like?” “Now!” I mean, this business of tradeoffs across time is just inconceivable.

There are a lot of people who approach spiritual things like that. They want God just to sort of dole it all out now too, not understanding that on occasion in this world of death and decay and pain and suffering, in this world where there are all kinds of mysteries of evil, sometimes God demonstrates his love in some strange delays.

I have a daughter who is going to university in the autumn. I don’t like telling too many stories about my kids, but you know, 10,000 miles away, she’s not going to hear that I’ve told you this, is she? When she was 14 or 15, we were living in England at the time. Her very best friend, Melissa, was slated to come out to visit us in England that Christmas. The night before I was to drive down from Cambridge to Heathrow to pick her up, her parents phoned. Melissa had just been diagnosed with leukemia.

Tiffany, my daughter, and Melissa were as close as they could be. They’d bounce off the school bus, and they’d go and raid our fridge, go down the street, raid the other fridge. Melissa herself was one of these tall, blonde lasses with hair down to here, active, an athlete, boisterous, loud, just full of vim and vitality. Now Melissa had leukemia.

To make a long story short, we flew Tiff home to Chicago on her own at Easter and she spent about three weeks in the hospital, 12 hours a day, cleaning out her trach tube and badgering friends to come and see her. Melissa was wasting away. They tried everything, but the long and the short of it is Melissa died. Melissa died that June. By that time, Tiffany was back in Cambridge. Then we flew back to Chicago in July.

On the whole, I was pretty proud of the way she was handling it. She was grieving appropriately. She was talking about it. She wasn’t burying it. These are hard things to go through at any age, but at 15, it’s pretty staggering. I knew there were all kinds of things she wasn’t dealing with too, even though at one level I was really proud of the way she was handling it.

In September, I heard her crying in her room. I walked into her room. She was just streaming buckets. I wrapped her up in my arms, and I said, “Tiffany, tell me what’s the matter.” She said, “God could have saved my best friend, and he didn’t. I hate him.” I let her cry, and I said to her, “My dearest Tiffany, I’m just so glad you’ve told me. There’s no point lying about it. God knows what you’re thinking in any case. Some of the psalmists in the Bible are just about as blunt as that when they get kicked in the teeth.

But there are two things you have to think about somewhere along the line. The first is do you want a God who is like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp? He is very powerful, but at the end of the day, that genie can only do what whoever owns the lamp says. Do you want a God who, at the end of the day, is so domesticated you control him, in which case who is God? The second thing you have to ask yourself is, before you calculate whether or not God loves you, you just have to remember that while you lost your best friend, God lost his Son. In fact, he gave his Son.”

Whatever mysteries there are in death and evil (and there are a lot of them), before you calculate too quickly whether God loves you, you must look at the cross and measure things from that perspective too. Here already, on the way to the cross himself, risking his life by coming south into Judaea, here Jesus does astonishing things, delaying to make a point.

He will sometimes delay in our lives. He will sometimes do mysterious things that don’t diminish him when they are put within the larger framework of his sovereignty and all of the evidence he has disclosed of himself, but sooner or later, you’re going to need to trust this God. You can’t control him the way you can the genie in Aladdin’s lamp.

2. Jesus comes up against devastating loss and consoles grief by diverting attention to himself.

Verse 17 to 27. He starts getting there, and to avoid the crowds.… Word goes ahead. Martha, one of the sisters, hears Jesus is coming. So she goes out to see him, to meet him. Verse 21: “Martha says to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ ” Then she realizes it sounds as if she is blaming Jesus somehow. She says, “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

It’s not that at this point she expects a miracle. The whole rest of the story shows she doesn’t. She is taken by surprise. She is just uttering her pious thought after sounding as if she is blaming Jesus. “Jesus says, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ ” Now that was part of just common Jewish beliefs stemming from the Old Testament. That is, at the end of the age, there is a final resurrection.

Jesus doesn’t say anything like, “Your brother will rise again in another half an hour.” Just, “Your brother will rise again.” It’s as if somebody is saying, “Death is not the end. Your brother will rise again.” She replies, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Then Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Now that is really astonishing. Look carefully at its structure. He says (verse 25), “I am the resurrection and the life.” Then he says, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” That’s connected with resurrection. Resurrection is resurrection back from dead. “I am the resurrection.” Even if you die, you can come back to life. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

That is, there are two dimensions in all of this. There is one dimension that says, “If you really come to terms with who I am and really trust me, you won’t die.” On the other hand, he says, “If you do die, then there is life after death.” As the text moves on, you discover the life he gives even now is a kind of eternal life that goes right into eternity. Though we do die, there is not only immortality but new resurrection life, bodily life at the end.

Jesus claims to be offering all of that himself. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” It’s an odd way of speaking. The best analogies I can think of aren’t very good, but let me try. When I was a boy, Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken was racing its way through America. I’m sure it’s down here along with McDonald’s and all the rest, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, in those days, Colonel Sanders was alive with a little, white goatee. He was on the black and white televisions and on the radios and the billboards. You know? “Colonel Sanders and his Finger Lickin’ Good Kentucky Fried Chicken.” That was so ubiquitous for a while at the end of the 50s and in the 60s, you know, that you could have well-imagined Colonel Sanders saying, “I am Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

That would not have been an ontological statement. That is, he is not claiming to be a chicken.… Kentucky Fried or otherwise, complete with wings that flap. What he means by that is simply, “Kentucky Fried Chicken is so bound up with my operation and what I do that there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken that is worthy of the name apart from me. I am Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

I was brought up in the province of Quebec in Canada, so we have some interesting history with President Charles de Gaulle in France that I need not go through. At one point, Charles de Gaulle this side of World War II in one of the endless revolutions France seemed to be going through there for a while said, “Je suis l’etat” (“I am the state”). Well, of course he wasn’t. He was just a man. He is not a state. He dies, and the state is still there. As far as I know, France is still on the map even though Charles de Gaulle isn’t.

On the other hand, at the time, it was a reasonable statement. There was so much disarray, the only one who was holding the whole together was de Gaulle. Without de Gaulle, there was no France. Apart from him, France wasn’t there really. It was just going to be a bloody mayhem of internal anarchy. Undoubtedly, it was sort of an arrogant way of saying things, but those are the sorts of analogies we need to bear in mind when Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

It’s not an ontological statement. He is saying, “The truths are right to believe there is resurrection on the last day. There is such a thing as eternal life.” But now he is saying, “I am that resurrection and life. That is, apart from me there is no resurrection and life. I’m the one who gives it, bound up with me. Do you believe this?”

In other words, when he asks Martha in verse 26, “Do you believe this?” he is not asking if she believes that he is about to raise her brother from the dead immediately, but if her faith that there will be a resurrection at the end can extend to deep trust in Jesus as the only one who grants eternal life and will resurrect the dead in the last day. In short, if she can trust him as the resurrection and the life.

3. Jesus confronts implacable death and displays his sovereignty over it in tears and outrage.

Verse 28. After this conversation is over, Martha goes back in and gets her sister, Mary. “The Teacher is here … and is asking for you.” When Mary hears this, she gets up quickly, and she goes out. This time, however, the crowd sees her go, so they go with her.

Now we have to understand that in much of the Western world, especially the Anglo-Saxon Western world, we have a heritage of funerals that is sort of restrained. We cry quietly. We weep silently. We try and hold it back. But in many cultures, it’s not like that. Most Greek funerals are not silent. You go to some cultures, and of course they let it all hang out as a matter of principle. I’m not saying one is better than the other. They’re just cultural ways of handling grief.

In first-century Palestine, Jews would actually hire professional mourners to help things on as it were, to sort of stir things up a wee bit. Even the poorest family was supposed to hire at least two flute players and one professional wailing woman. I mean, it might sound a bit strange to us, but if things were sort of quieting down a bit, then the professional wailing woman would really start and crank it up a bit. The flutes would start playing dirges. It would sort of help along the flow of tears. It was a mark of respect.

Now this was not a poor family. This was a filthy rich family. It’s made clear in the next chapter. This family was not restricted to one professional wailing woman and two flute players. They had the whole orchestra from Jerusalem here. You must understand that what takes place now is full of noise and power and mourning and wailing. That’s what’s going on.

They see Mary going. They think she is going to the tomb. They want to come and comfort her. By comforting her, this does not mean putting a gentle arm around her and saying, “There, there, there now, Mary.” What it means is going out and having a wailing session. That’s what it means. But when Mary reaches the place, therefore, where Jesus is, still outside of town, she falls at his feet, and she begins with exactly the same words Martha had begun with. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Obviously the two sisters had been talking about this. “Oh, if only Jesus had been here. If only Jesus had been here! Oh!” She starts exactly the same way, but this time the conversation takes a very different turn because all these people are crying and wailing and making a lot of noise. We then read, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”

Now I don’t like criticizing our English translations, but I’m afraid I have to do it again. There is just no way that’s what the original Greek here says. “… deeply moved in spirit and troubled.” None of the German translations have it that way. They all say something about his being outraged and troubled. That’s really what the verb means here. He was outraged. He was angry, and he was troubled. Then by verse 35, he was weeping.

The question is why these strange responses. You read some silly things by way of answer. One notable scholar writes that Jesus is crying and is outraged because he feels forced into performing a miracle. Give me a break. Jesus, as he is presented in John’s gospel, isn’t forced into anything. He does things according to what he judges to be right.

To imagine, you see, that he is weeping, weeping, weeping for no other reason than the reasons we weep at funerals would make him a bit of a hypocrite. I mean, would you weep outside the tomb of someone whom you knew you were going to raise up again in about two minutes? You see, to imagine the tears here are bound up with, “Well, Jesus has the same sort of feelings and compassions we do. This was his friend, and so he is very, very sad …” It’s all a bit phony, isn’t it, when, according to the storyline, he is going to be calling Lazarus forth in a couple of minutes.

It just doesn’t make any sense. No. The reason in the light of the whole flow of John’s gospel is different again. You see, Jesus looks at Mary weeping and the Jews who have come along with her also weeping, and he is outraged. He is not outraged with them for their weeping. That’s not the point. He is outraged. He is outraged by everything that has brought this about.

In his whole understanding rooted in the Old Testament Scriptures, he understands death itself is the mark of sin. It’s the mark of the curse. It’s the mark of a whole world in disarray. We’ve defied God. This is not the world as God originally made it. As God originally made it, it was a good thing. Now it is so mingled with good things and bad things, with beauty and hideousness, with kindness and just sheer hatred.

All of this mix of rebellion and goodness, this rising antipathy toward God, this multiplied sin, attracts inevitably God’s rejection. God himself pronounces this curse upon it. He says again and again, “Because of this, there must come an end of human life. There must be death. That is the result of this defiance of me.”

Would God be better, would he be a more noble person, if he said, “Well, I don’t really give a rip what you do. You can do anything you like. I don’t care. If you want to be good, be good. If you want to be bad, be bad”? Would that make God more moral? The God of the Bible is a holy God. He is defied by his own image bearers, and his own justice demands that there be judgment pronounced.

Death itself is part of that whole cycle of things. Jesus looks at it and all the devastation it causes. He is outraged, he is troubled, and he weeps. I tell you frankly that moral outrage without tears easily descends into hard-hearted, self-righteous erasability. Tears without moral outrage in this broken world descend into mere sentimentalization. Jesus will not run either direction.

In fact, his response here (on the one hand, full of outrage, and yet in tears) is a picture of God himself in all of this. For there is a sense, you see, in which God stands over against us in judgment or else his own holiness and morality and integrity are impugned. But he stands over against us in love too because he is that kind of God. Now what will he do?

You see, if I tell you I love my wife and you ask me, “Well, why do you love your wife?” if you probe me hard enough and if I can get over my residual British reserve so as to give you some straight answers, well, I will say more than, “Well, we’ve been married for 25 years.” I will start giving you some reasons. “I like her quickness of mind. I love her laugh. I like her smile. I think her eyes are beautiful. I like her personality. I like the way she commits herself to the kids.”

There is so much about my wife I love. I mean, you ask me why I love my wife. There are a lot of reasons why I love my wife. Some of them I’m not going to tell you. But now when we come to God’s love for us, why does he love us? Does he love us because, well, quite frankly we’re so charming and so lovely, the color of our eyes? “Heaven would be lonely without us. Dear old God is sort of trapped in his own limited emotions. He can’t do without us.”

Is that what is meant when we read a few chapters earlier, “God so loved the world that he gave his Son”? Oh rubbish. God loves because he is that kind of God. Not all of it but so much of human love is bound up in part with our perception of the loveliness of the love. I don’t want to tell you that I love my wife even though I think she is a really ugly creep of a personality like Attila the Hun. That’s not why I love my wife.

My love is bound up in part with my perception of the loveliness of the love. God doesn’t love me because I’m so charming. There is something in God that says, in fact, he is dead set against me. His holiness demands it. I stand under his curse. The biblical word is wrath. God displays his wrath against me.

That too is used in the same chapter (John 3) as, “God so loved the world,” that world that stands under his wrath. Yet God loves that world anyway, not because we deserve it or earn it or win it but because he is that kind of God. Then in the last place, the story unfolds. Jesus is once more, we’re told (verse 38), deeply moved again. He’s outraged, we’re told. “Take away the stone.” Martha protests.

“ ‘… by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.’ Jesus said, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believe, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he said this, Jesus called out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’“

(Someone has said that if he hadn’t prefaced his command with “Lazarus,” every tomb would have opened. I like it.) But it doesn’t convince everybody. Even the spectacular miracle with eyewitnesses, even when the body started to decompose, it doesn’t convince everybody. Some people see that it’s happened, but it doesn’t change their minds or hearts or anything. They live in another worldview. They still don’t have a real category for it.

Some are very impressed. They want to put their faith in him (verse 45). Others just go and rat to some of the leaders, seeing if they can get Jesus in trouble. This might be good for a few political brownie points. The chief priests and other leaders call a meeting of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council under the Roman governor. They enter a sort of handwringing session.

“What are we accomplishing? Here is this man performing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” You see, what they are afraid of is that with rising enthusiasm for Jesus, people will try to make him king. After all, the Jewish literature had predicted a coming King, a coming Messiah, a coming Anointed One, a Leader.

Many of the popular expectations were that this would be a political figure. If this political figure begins to draw together a massed crowd, you have the beginning of a revolution. Then what will the Romans do? The Romans are the superpower. You know? What they’ll do, of course, is send in the legions. That’s what they’ll do, and they’ll crush the city. “They’ll take away our place and our nation.”

Now “our place” has a pun in it in the original. It could be “our place,” that is, the temple. Or it could be “our place in society.” These are the leaders. They don’t want to lose their place either. Whether they really mean the temple or “our place as leaders …” “If the Romans come in and crush the rebellion and impose an immediate military governance instead of letting us have our own Sanhedrin to operate things, then we’re going to be a lot worse off.” They’re afraid of Jesus’ rising populace power.

“Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that fateful year, he spoke up, and he said, ‘You know nothing at all!’ ” The particular expression used is not flattering. “You bunch of nincompoops!” “You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

Now there’s level upon level of surprise and irony here. At the one level, it’s just weighing out the pros and cons of political expediency and sorting out what to do. Justice is sacrificed to expediency, but if you know your first-century Jewish history, you know, four short decades later, the Romans came in anyway. They did sacrifice Jesus. Four decades later, Jerusalem was razed to the ground. The temple was dismantled.

A bare six decades after that, it happened again under the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132, 135. After that, it became a capital offense for any Jew to live within the area of Jerusalem. A deeper surprise. A deeper irony. John comments on it. He draws our attention to it. He makes us understand. Verse 51. Caiaphas, we’re told, “… did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year, he was actually prophesying Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.”

We need to understand what John is actually saying. In the Old Testament, there’s a story on one occasion of God actually speaking to a very stubborn man called Balaam who was a prophet. God is actually speaking to this stubborn man who wouldn’t listen by Balaam’s ass, by his donkey.

It’s as if, “You’re not going to listen to anybody else.” It’s presented as a flat-out miracle. Balaam’s ass speaks. That’s the way it’s presented. You’re not supposed to imagine that this ass was giving its opinion, but here God isn’t speaking through Caiaphas the way he speaks through Balaam’s ass. Caiaphas is giving his opinion.

Caiaphas’ opinion is, “What we need is a substitute sacrifice. If this Jesus is allowed to get away with what he is getting away with, eventually we’re going to lose the whole nation. Instead of sacrificing the nation, we’ll just sacrifice one man. If we have to rig the courts to do it, if we have to sacrifice justice on the altar of expediency to get away with it, so be it. We sacrifice one man for the sake of the nation, a substitutionary sacrifice.” That’s what he wanted. He was giving his hard, calloused political opinion.

The courts went with it, and Jesus died. John says God … this surprising, ruling, providential, intervening God … was working behind the scenes in Caiaphas’ life so that Caiaphas was speaking better than he knew. A lot of people in John’s gospel speak better than he knew. He was asking for a substitutionary sacrifice. That’s what he wanted Jesus to be. Do you know what? That’s what God wanted Jesus to be too … a substitutionary sacrifice.

Not to stop the Romans from coming in, but if this whole race is under the curse, if it is rightly under God’s condemnation, if it is already sentenced to death, if God goes away from it and says in effect, “Okay, I’ll forgive you. I don’t really care. You do what you like,” then God sacrifices his own justice somewhere along the line, his own integrity, his own believability.

Instead, what he does is provide someone to pay that penalty: his own Son, who becomes a substitutionary sacrifice, meeting the demands of God’s justice while nevertheless displaying the sweep of God’s love. God doesn’t have to do this. He doesn’t owe it to us. God so loved the world that he gave his Son.

While Caiaphas was speaking about a substitutionary sacrifice nearly at the level of political expedience, Jesus was being presented as the substitutionary sacrifice God himself had provided to take our sin in his own body on the tree. That’s what this surprising God has done.

He stands over against us as Judge to rebels, as Holy God to sinners, yet he reigns so wisely and providentially and kindly that he introduces his own Son into the course of human history to absorb the wrath that should be ours, a substitute dying our death, absorbing our guilt so the scattered children of God (that is, those who would come in due course to know this God because of his death) would be brought together as one.

Are you willing to call your assumptions and presuppositions into question as you confront him? One honest person in this regard is Coupland. I’m sure many of you know the name. He coined the expression “Generation X” in his famous book of the same title. He coined the expression “Generation X” to describe those up-and-coming men and women who not only watch Wayne’s World but find it funny.

They sort of hang loose, he says, and they find it difficult to make commitments. They’re fairly cynical, even about cynicism. Yet after he wrote his book Generation X, he wrote another book called Life after God. In the opening pages, this is what he says:

“Some facts about me: I think I am a broken person. I seriously question the road my life has taken and I endlessly rehash the compromises I have made in life. I have an unsecure and vaguely crappy job with an amoral corporation so that I don’t have to worry too much about money. I put up with halfway relationships so as not to worry about loneliness. I have lost the ability to recapture the purer feelings of my younger years in exchange for a streamlined narrow-mindedness that I assumed would propel me to ‘the top.’ What a joke. […]

I tell you with the openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me to give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me to be kind, as I no longer seem to be capable of kindness; to help me to love, as I seem beyond being able to love.”

Coupland, I have some news for you. What you need is forgiveness. What you need is forgiveness! You need to be reconciled to the living God. God so loved the world that he gave his Son to bear your guilt. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” If you are ready for this God, will you pray with me as I pray?

Dear God, I know I am not worthy to be accepted by you. I don’t deserve your gift of eternal life. I am guilty of rebelling against you and ignoring you. I need forgiveness. Thank you for sending your Son to die for me that I may be forgiven. Thank you that he rose from the dead to give me new life. Please forgive me and change me that I may live with Jesus as my ruler. Amen.