What Happens When God is Too Late?
Preached at Hunting Ridge Presbyterian Church on All Saints’ Sunday 2024.
Scripture Reading
John 11:5-6, 17, 32-44
Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
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When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.
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When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Judeans who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Judeans said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Sermon
This is a text that doesn’t need too much explaining. We don’t need a neat sermon illustration to make sense of what’s happening, and we don’t have too much history or Greek to unravel. And since it’s a Communion Sunday, that’s a really good thing, because I want to get us out on time.
I don’t think this text needs too much explaining, because the reality is that grief—and death—are always close at hand. And even if someone is spared of their own grief, they know and love someone who has grieved. All Saints’ Sunday is an essential part of the Christian calendar, because it’s when we talk about the elephant in the room: there are people missing from the pews. People missing from our bedrooms and kitchen tables and even cribs. It’s when we break the silence on grief—pull the cork out of the bottle together—and acknowledge that to be alive, means to have a relationship to death. Life, and death, are always talking to each other.
In today’s Gospel reading, life and death carry on that conversation with each other. And we find ourselves companions to Mary, Martha, Jesus, and this whole community who knew Lazarus. And from the start, we find emotions and experiences that we can identify with. As an aside, the authors of this text don’t include many emotions from those other than Jesus. That makes this text even more identifiable, because it is so easy for us to map our lives and feelings onto.
Mary kicks us off. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” We might hear this as anger, or bargaining, a moment when Mary articulates what she is feeling in the aftermath of Lazarus’ death. [1] We can easily put some rawness into her voice, some disappointment or disillusionment, or even disgust behind the words. But regardless of how she said it, the message is clear: this didn’t have to happen. She weeps. This was unnecessary, or at least she believes so.
“[All Saints’ Day] is when we break the silence on grief—pull the cork out of the bottle together—and acknowledge that to be alive, means to have a relationship to death. Life, and death, are always talking to each other.”
Some of those who knew Lazarus, but not all of his neighbors and family, also say something: ”Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Like elsewhere in John’s gospel, there’s a divide between those who accept Jesus and those who don’t. This is uttered by the latter group, those who don’t accept Jesus. We might read all sorts of things onto these people - we might commiserate with them, or we might feel that they should believe a little more. We can hear sarcasm in their voice, or sincere confusion. But this doesn’t need to carry any shame. We don’t need to guilt any of these people, because I think this scene is a pretty astute observation. In the midst of death, and crisis, and grief, some of us will soften our hearts, and some of us will be hardened in heart. It’s human nature, no matter how devout we are our how much we believe and love God. Grief is complicated, and so are we.
We might want to look at Jesus, to see how messy grief can be. In the first part of this chapter, we hear that Jesus receives word of Lazarus’ illness. Jesus has a troubling decision: is this illness severe enough that he needs to drop everything and leave immediately? Or is Lazarus ill, but slowly declining? Does Jesus have some time that he can tie up a few loose ends? Or maybe this is some sort of garden-variety illness, something that is serious, but not life threatening? Maybe Jesus doesn’t need to rush, but can visit Lazarus as he recovers. Well… one of the paradoxes in our Gospel reading is that Jesus seems to make a very shortsighted decision. We skipped over a verse, believe it or not; verse 4: “But when Jesus heard [of Lazarus’ illness], he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death.’” When I served as a chaplain, this was a really common conundrum for family members of those who were sick. ”Do I need to get on a flight now, or should I wait until morning?” I don’t think anyone wants to claim Jesus did something wrong. For us humans, we can’t predict or anticipate death. Sometimes our decisions work the way we plan. Sometimes they don’t. No one needs to earn guilt from it.
Even still… in the midst of all these feelings, and all these experiences, and all these relationships, we have an awkward question to ask. It’s the one I ask in today’s sermon title. “What happens when God is too late?”
As far as Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ neighbors were concerned, God was too late. He was dead. Irreparably dead. There was zero reason to believe that Jesus was going to be able to help, as we hear these characters suggest. What’s done was done. What’s gone is gone. What’s dead is dead.
And yet… Lazarus was resurrected.
And yet… Lazarus was restored to his community.
And yet… The glory of God was revealed.
”And yet…” That’s at the heart of this passage. We don’t have to water down the despair we feel, the grief we hold, the pain we carry. We don’t have to pretend that things are okay when they’re not. We don’t have to stay silent, or inurn our feelings within our hearts. No. We acknowledge the pain of our lives and feelings that overwhelm us. We open our hearts to one another, and let others into our sorrow and grief. Jesus doesn’t walk away from our hurt and longing, or tell us to believe harder or be more faithful. Jesus instead enters into that pain, identifies with us in that pain, not merely for the sake of empathy, but to tell us something else. To say, “I weep with you, and yet, this is not the end.”
We miss our loved ones deeply, and yet, we are also reunited with them in Christ.
We are lonely in the midst of grief, and yet, there is also a great cloud of witnesses, alive on earth, sitting next to us in pews and in Bible study.
We suffer in body or in spirit today, and yet, the presence of God also surrounds us in that pain.
We’re not asked to simply look on the bright side. We’re asked to submerge ourselves in the hope and love of the Gospel, a hope and love that acknowledges our suffering and grief all the while writing a new story within us.
Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus shows us that wherever God is, resurrection is close at hand, even when it feels too late. Wherever we see God at work, whether it’s in an AA meeting or a grief group or a church service, resurrection is close at hand. We can trust that God is at work, still on the way, traveling toward us. Even if it feels like it will be too little too late.
“We’re not asked to simply look on the bright side. We’re asked to submerge ourselves in the hope and love of the Gospel, a hope and love that acknowledges our suffering and grief all the while writing a new story within us.”
Alongside this, the power of the gospel is that there is no despair too deep for God’s love - it is never too late for hope. The depths of Mary and Martha’s grief must have been overwhelming. They weep, they plead, they lament. Even Jesus is found in the depths of despair, with tears streaming down his cheeks, consumed by grief. And yet even in the depths of that despair—those feelings that nothing can ever be fixed, that nothing will ever be the same—that is where God stirs around. Just as life and death are constantly in conversation, negotiating their boundaries, despair and hope remain in conversation. Despair and hope are only known entangled in one another. Where there is the deepest pit, there is the deepest movement of God. Time, and time, and time, and time again. For if God can resurrect what was dead, how much easier it is for God to bring hope into despair.
Today, let yourself be softened to God, softened to the possibility of hope. Because though our circumstances, or our world, feels too late, or too far gone, God is on the way. And it is never too late for the hope of God.
References
[1] Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, widely regarded as the theorist behind the pop-psychological “five stages of grief,” originally modeled them on patients experiencing life-limiting (“terminal”) diagnoses. She later wrote a text prior to her death to attempt to clarify and reinterpret what she considered “misunderstandings.” As Ada McVean wrote for McGill University, “The five stages of grief are ingrained in our cultural consciousness as the natural progression of emotions one experiences after the death of a loved one. However, it turns out that this model is not science-based, does not well describe most people's experiences, and was never even meant to apply to the bereaved.”
