John 11: A Funeral Homily

Charles Ailes’s Memorial Service

15 July 2023

Masonic Center

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer memorably begins its graveside service with the melancholy words uttered by the suffering Job found in chapter 14 of the book bearing his name: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay” (Job 14:1-2). In the New Testament, the author of Hebrews, shortly before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, wrote that “It is appointed for people to die once, and after that to face judgment” (Heb 9:27, trans. JRM). Needless to say, empiricism bears this transience out, acknowledged by everyone from Shakespeare¹ to Kansas’s Kerry Livgren, who almost 50 years ago admonished, “Give up your foolish pride/All that walk the earth have died.”² We may not like it, but we can’t avoid the single nastiest fact of life: Death is inevitable. It matters not whether one is good or bad, rich or poor, educated or illiterate. Death is the Great Equalizer. All of us will eventually be caught in its lethal trap. If this is true, and we all know that it is, it matters greatly how we come to terms with death,³ and how we respond when we inevitably come face to face with it.

In our brief time this afternoon, I would like to draw your attention to a passage in John’s Gospel that helps us along these lines. I’m speaking, of course, of the story of Jesus’ response to the death, and ultimate revivification, of his friend Lazarus in John chapter 11. There we find Jesus to be, not only the model of how to respond to death, but also―and more importantly―the one who provides the ultimate solution to the problem posed by death’s inexorability.

The story is as famous as it is vivid: Lazarus’s sisters Mary and Martha, because their brother had been taken seriously ill, send for Jesus to come and, presumably, heal him. Jesus, at this time staying across the Jordan River in Perea, about a day’s journey from Bethany, deliberately delays coming for two days, stating that Lazarus’s illness, though seemingly serious, “does not lead to death,” cryptically adding that his friend’s plight “is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4). By the time Jesus and the disciples finally arrive in Bethany, Lazarus has been dead for four days, and his sisters are seen following the cultural protocol by having mourners (some of whom may have been of the "professional" kind) aid in their lamentation. The ever-anxious Martha runs to greet Jesus, wistfully expressing her faith by immediately saying to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (11:21). Jesus responds by telling her that Lazarus would indeed rise again (11:23), to which Martha shows her theological orthodoxy (Pharisee-style)⁴―with perhaps a bit of exasperation―by saying, in effect, "Duh! Of course I know he will be raised on the last day; but that doesn't help Lazarus or me now" (11:24). Martha then sends for her sister, who proceeds to the tomb, along with her retinue of mourners, to meet Jesus and Martha there. When Mary arrived, she repeated Martha's sentiments (11:32) and, along with the consoling crowd who followed her, continued to wail (11:33).

Jesus’ response to this is instructive. Most famously, when he asked where Lazarus’s tomb was, Mary and Martha gestured for him to “come and see” (John 11:34). At this, the text says, “Jesus burst out crying” (11:35, trans. JRM).⁵ The onlookers, correctly, viewed Jesus’ response as an expression of his deep love for his departed friend (11:36). Death, you see, hurts, and that is true both for the one experiencing it and those loved ones watching death do its work. What Jesus’ example shows that grief is real, and that there is no shame in expressing it. Pretending death doesn’t hurt, whether out of some faux-“spiritual” impulse or simple repression, is no solution.

Jesus’ response goes beyond this, however. When Jesus saw Mary and her companions wailing, the text says, in verse 33, that “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (NRSV). Many translations, such as the NIV, follow the linguist Frederick Danker and understand the text in the sense of Jesus being “deeply moved” emotionally as a result of his seeing the mourners’ grief.⁶ That goes without saying, of course. However, I don’t believe this gets to the heart of the matter. You see, the first of the two verbs used here by John⁷ is consistently used elsewhere, not simply to speak of strength of feeling, but rather to express anger; indeed, it was the word used by the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus to refer to the “snorting” of horses when provoked to rage.⁸ Clearly, it would seem, Jesus was moved to inner indignation over what, to him, ought not have happened. Now, what caused Jesus’ fury and inner turmoil is not stated in the text, and so scholars have made various suggestions. It seems to me, however, that it is best to look behind the mourning which called forth Jesus’ response⁹ and understand Jesus’ anger to be directed instead at what caused Lazarus’s demise, namely death itself. Jesus was enraged because, seeing the grief expressed by Lazarus’s family and friends, he sensed death’s oppression, what John Calvin called its “violent tyranny” over humanity.¹⁰

Death, we learn from Jesus’ example, is always worthy of grief. It is worthy of rage. Death, in John’s view, is the defining feature of the kingdom of Satan, whom John’s Jesus calls “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). Indeed, the Bible consistently portrays death as an interloper disrupting God’s good designs for his creation. As such, death must ultimately be defeated. It must be destroyed. It must itself, as the English poet and preacher John Donne, wrote, die.¹¹ And this is exactly what was promised in the Book of Daniel, when it explicitly put forth the prospect of the resurrection of the righteous to eternal life (Dan 12:2-3). Such was the hope of Lazarus’s sister, Martha, who confidently, if with an air of disappointment, proclaimed her faith that Lazarus would “rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).

This ultimate defeat of death is the point of the Lazarus story. As we know, the story comes to a climax when Jesus commands his dead friend to come out of the tomb, and he does so, head wrapped up, feet and hands bound (John 11:43-44). Now we must realize that Lazarus himself was not “resurrected” per se. Presumably Jesus raised him back to the same mortal life he had before he died, and ultimately found his way back to the grave. But for John, Lazarus’s resuscitation and revivification is intended to be understood as the seventh and climactic “sign” in a series of mighty works designed to reveal Jesus’ glory and elicit faith in him as the bearer and bringer of “life.”

This symbolic significance is made clear in Jesus’ conversation with Martha before he raises Lazarus. After her confession of belief in the (future) resurrection, Jesus responds: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even if they die, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never, ever, die” (John 11:25-26, trans. JRM).

The restoration of Lazarus to life, in other words, was a vivid picture of Jesus’ power as the agent of resurrection and the one who not only, as John put it earlier in his Gospel, possesses the divine life (John 1:4; 5:26), but also conveys eternal life now to those who believe in him. Jesus himself was raised, as John says, “on the first day of the week” (John 20:1), the start of the promised new creation. His resurrection is, as Jesus himself claims in John 14:19, the guarantee of his followers’ future resurrection. But the defining characteristic of John’s Gospel is its argument that Jesus, through his death and resurrection, has brought this promised future, and the “eternal life” proper to it, forward into the present.

Earlier this week, Charles’s son Ben, my son-in-law, told me that Charles’s favorite verse of Scripture was John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (NRSV). In a real sense, the Lazarus story may be viewed as a narrative illustration of that verse. The raising of Lazarus both foreshadows the future resurrection and pictures the giving of spiritual resurrection life even now to those who believe. For John, such belief in Jesus involves a confessional element, an assent to various propositions about who Jesus is. In his statement of purpose for the Gospel, John says he wrote that people might believe “that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God (John 20:31), the very confession Martha makes in our story (11:27). But such confession transcends the boundaries of Jewish Messianic expectations of the time. For John, Jesus was not only the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), but also the eternal “Word” (John 1:1), the self-expression of God, who took on human flesh (1:14) to reveal God to humanity as a human being, and who manifested his glory supremely on the cross (12:23; 13:31).

But John is most famous for his speaking of “belief in (or into)” (πιστεύειν εἰς) Jesus, which he does 37 times. Such belief is not only assent to such propositions about Jesus, necessary as they are. It speaks of a relationship between the believer and Jesus―a relationship that involves entrusting oneself to him, personal commitment to him, even allegiance to him. It is, in the words of the British theologian Anthony Thiselton, a “nailing of one’s colors to the mast as a self-involving act of Christian identity and commitment.”¹²

The Lazarus story tells those of us who believe that, though we still live in this world of sickness and death, Jesus the resurrection and the life has guaranteed that ultimate future when, in the words of John the Theologian at the end of the 1^st century CE, "[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former days have passed away" (Rev 21:4, NRSV).
To God alone be the glory.

1 E.g., Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.63-64, 80-81, 83.

2 Kansas, “Child of Innocence,” Masque (1975).

3 It goes without saying that this applies not least to those of us, like myself, for whom, as John Mellencamp once sang, “There's less days in front of the horse/than riding in the back of this cart.” “The Real Life,” The Lonesome Jubilee (1987).

4 One of the distinguishing differences between the Pharisees and the aristocratic Sadducees was their contrasting views on resurrection: the Pharisees affirmed it; the Sadducees denied it. Cf. Acts 23:7-9; Mark 12:18 et par. (on the Sadducees); Josephus, Jewish War 2.162-65; Antiquities 18.13-17.

5 Gk. ἐδάκρυσεν [an ingressive aorist] ὁ Ἰησοῦς.

6 BDAG 322.

7 Ἐνεβριμώμενος (aorist middle participle of ἐμβριμάομαι).

8 Cf. LSJ; BDAG; EDNT 1:442.

9 Presumably Jesus, himself moved to tears by this friend’s death, would not have taken umbrage when he witnessed the lamentations of Lazarus’s sisters and others.

10 John Calvin, John 11-21 & 1 John. Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, vol. 5 (trans. T. H. L. Parker; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) 13. Cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John I-XII (AB 29; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 425-26; and esp. B. B. Warfield, “The Emotional Life of Our Lord,” in The Person and Work of Christ (ed. Samuel Craig; Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1950) 116-17.

11 John Donne, Sonnet X (“Death Be Not Proud”) (1633).

12 Anthony C. Thiselton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007)