On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.
“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” (John 11:17-27)
In our passage today, Jesus goes to a funeral. How is that for a setting for the start of the week? To kick off this week, we are with people crying at a tomb. What a contrast to today. Its getting warmer, the holidays are nearly here, you are all so young and full of potential, death is the furthest thing from your mind.
And we don’t want to think about death. We don’t see it around us. Our experience is, if you die in a game, you just respawn. Our meat comes from the shops. The production line before that doesn’t exist in my world; it just appears in Wollies. The elderly get put in age care places and die in hospitals, away from us all. In the past, houses used to have a formal room called the parlour, which had many uses, but one would be to store the coffin in your house of a dead relative if the need arose. We don't do this any more, which is why we have living rooms instead. Death for us has become abstract, something hidden in the background.
This makes our funerals even worse today, as we are not familiar with death; we don’t know how to talk about it. And so it is awkward when someone dies. What do you say? I have done a few funerals in my time, and the worst was a suicide for a guy in his 20s. Sometimes I wish there was a script we could all read along with, so we knew what to say in situations like that.
When Jesus gets news that his friend was sick, he delayed coming for another two days. When he made it to the house, his friend was dead, and both his sisters say the same thing to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died”. Jesus, the great healer, was too late to heal. He had healed others but not this time. This time, he was too late. His friend had been in the tomb for four days.
What do you say? Jesus says, “You brother is going to rise again”, which Mary takes to be some sort of end-time, resurrection thing years from now. Some sort of religious comfort, that sure one day he will rise again. This was basic Jewish theology.
But then Jesus says something stupid, something you don’t say at funerals.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26 NIV)Jesus makes the outrageous statement that He is the resurrection; that He is the one who gives life. That if you believe in Him, you will not die. That is just nuts. Who does He think He is? Maybe Jesus should have been given a script of things to say at a funeral, because this is not what you say.
If the story ended there, we would think He was crazy, but it doesn’t, and spoiler, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Jesus shows that He has the power to raise the dead. He is stronger than death.
I remember once I was talking to a kid in year 8, and trying to work out what makes him tick, and he said, he has to win. Winning is everything. He plays soccer, not for the social, but for the win. In an argument, he has to win. On the field, he has to be the strongest or the fastest. I asked him, “How was that working out for you?”, and being in year 8, it was going fine. So I pressed and asked what happens when you are older and when things are harder and you come up to an immovable force that you can’t win against? He didn’t think there was such a thing, so I said, "What about death?"
You can't beat death. However strong you are, whatever trophies you have, those will not save you from death.
To steal some lines from the movie Taken: Death is an enemy. Death does not care who we are, or what we want. Death is not after a ransom or money. Death has a particular set of skills, that he has acquired over a very long career, that makes him a nightmare for people like us. He will look for us. He will find us. And he will kill us.
I don’t mean to unsettle you first thing this morning, but that is the truth. That is certain. And if you are not prepared to die today, can I urge you to think long and hard on your eternity... You can’t beat death -- but as Christians, we know a guy who did, who gives us His victory.
When it all comes down to it, this is about trusting. Trusting if Jesus knows what it is He is talking about. Is He telling the truth or not? Is he the resurrection and the life? What would He know about any of this anyway?
I think we can trust Jesus, for less than two weeks after this event, He was dead in the tomb. The one who said He was life was dead. But after three days, He rose again. That first Easter, He walked out of the tomb, never to die again. He had tasted and swallowed death. And now rules over everything. He had passed through and conquered death and has now made a way for us to get to God.
Jesus doesn’t say you have to be a good person to get eternal life. Or that you have to give a certain amount of money to charity, you don’t have to visit certain Holy Places and perform special rituals to earn eternal life. Jesus says the only way to get life is through Him. We just have to believe in Him. We have to trust him.
This week you are going to be asked a whole bunch of questions in maths, geography, science, English, whatever. If it all goes well, you crush might ask you out; your friend might ask if you want to go over theirs, you are going to get a bucket load of questions this week, and you will have to work out how to answer them. But right now, at the start of this week, before you get decision fatigue, the question Jesus asks here is the most important question you will be faced with. He asks Mary, and by extension us: "Do you believe this?"
Do you believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life? Do you trust what He says? Is He King over your life, not just an important thing in your life, but the ruler over your life? Do you think He has power over death and is able to grant life? That His ways of living are the best way of living?
Now I am the new guy at Lanyon Valley Anglican Church. If you don’t already attend a church, you're welcome to come along, it's a great church. And since I have started there, people are all trying to get to know me and my family. I have a wife and three kids, two boys and a girl. But what most people don’t know yet is that we had another son between our two boys. His name was David, and he died at 20 weeks.
We buried him on the 26th of August 2015. It was raining, the minister spoke on John 11, and then we had Turkish for lunch. We have a proof of birth certificate and a 20-page autopsy report saying that medical science does not know why David died. From all their tests, the report lists the many things he didn't die from. But let me tell you why David died: he died because he had lived.
When Josh asked me to speak on this passage, he didn’t even know this next bit, but here is David’s plaque, and you can go see this in Woden Cemetery, in the rose garden where they bury all the small children.
Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, thought He die, yet shall he live… Do you believe this? (John 11:25–26 NIV)I bank my life on Jesus and His resurrection. There is far too much historical evidence to prove that He got out of the tomb. It is true. We live in the same real world, or Marvel timeline, where Jesus walked out of the grave. I know that because He rose again in a real, physical, material body, I too will rise in a real, physical, material body. Jesus took the sting of death away. Death now may hurt, but it isn’t fatal.
I believe that life is found in Jesus so much that we put it on a plaque in a cemetery, surrounded by death, because what better place is there to say that Jesus has conquered the grave?
Some of us here don’t like talking about death; they avoid it, because they are uncertain about what there is afterwards. But Jesus tells us the grave is not the end for the believer; there is a resurrection, in Him there is life.
Do you believe this?
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