Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8.6-11; John 11.1-45
THIS is the third Sunday in a row in which John’s Gospel reveals something about divine truth through Jesus’s interactions with women. Two weeks ago, it was a Samaritan woman. Then, last week, came the commendation of his mother and the beloved disciple to one another’s care.
I am so used to thinking of Luke as the Evangelist who puts women at the heart of the story that I have previously overlooked this as a feature of John’s Gospel. In a fortnight’s time, another woman will come to the fore, when Mary Magdalene encounters someone whom she supposes to be a gardener. And so the resurrection will be disclosed.
For this week, though, the women at the centre of events are Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. Or should that be Martha and Mary? The desire of some scholars to detect incongruities in the Gospels, where most readers happily and fruitfully take the text at face value, can be infuriating. We would not routinely detect different stages of composition, or different sources being combined, just because verse 1 refers to “Mary and her sister Martha”, while verse 5 says that Jesus “loved Martha and her sister”.
But, in John 11, there really is a case to be made that variant versions of the story are detectable. This is a recurring form of scriptural puzzle, akin to the two creation stories, and the two flood narratives, in Genesis. Here, we might ask why Martha is convinced that Jesus can help her brother (verse 22), yet fears to open the tomb because of the smell (verse 39). In verse 17, Jesus has arrived in Bethany, but, in verse 20, he is still on his way. Other examples have been identified, but this is enough to give the idea.
It is a good thing to pick up on such puzzles and questions in John’s Gospel (and the other Gospels, for that matter). But not because we cannot be proper Christians without noticing them. They matter because they confirm how Christian belief in gospel truth is set on a secure foundation. We do not promise those new to faith that Christian belief is a sealed unit, preserved from all error or flaws in the detail. The truth of scripture is proclaimed by fallible “tongues of mortals” as well as those “of angels” (1 Corinthians 13.2).
In John 11, two sources may have been combined, or the Evangelist may have shaped his source material to see events from different angles, side by side. No hypothesis of the story’s genesis will satisfy sceptics and believers alike. Some will always hold that Lazarus only “seemed” to have died, or that his raising up was fictitious. One scholar writes: “The Lazarus episode is not history reported but theology dramatised.” As it happens, I disagree — but Christian faith has room enough for both of us.
Read now in worship, John 11 is a preparation for Easter Day, when we shall celebrate an infinitely greater resurrection. And, on that day, “the first of days”, we will have bigger, holier things to think about than scholarly jots and tittles. Now, on this Passion Sunday (another name for the fifth Sunday in Lent), we can do the scriptural spadework (reflecting on the raising of Lazarus), which will allow us to see more clearly when we come to the Lord’s resurrection.
As encouragement that scepticism and faith are not necessarily at odds with one another, I notice that the same scholar who describes the raising of Lazarus as “theology” rather than “history” also comments, perceptively, that the miracles in John “form a series that is arranged in ascending order, so that the post-mortem raising of dead Lazarus forms the culmination and completion”. He also helpfully notes that the raising of Lazarus is at the centre, a pivot for the whole Gospel.
Why is the miraculous raising of Lazarus neither just a fact of history nor a pious fiction to inspire the credulous? Because it is truly a prophecy of the future of the faith: Lazarus was dead and decaying, dust returning to dust. The intervention of Jesus raised him from this death, to the life that is shared by all who love the Lord. Jesus called the dead man by name, “Lazarus, come out.” He calls us, too, by name, raising us up, in baptism, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness (1 Peter 2.24).
