I struggled and struggled with this passage, the resurrection of Lazarus.* Finally I had to accept there was no getting around it: I have really complicated feelings about this story.
If I’m honest, what comes first is the hardest to acknowledge: resentment. I seethe as Jesus justifies letting Martha, Mary, and Lazarus suffer “for God’s glory.” Jesus deciding that their pain (and death!) was a fair price to pay for his magic trick feels downright cruel. As when I read the book of Job, I can’t grasp this portrayal of people’s real lives as incidental to God’s desire to make a point. I struggle to reconcile this Jesus with the person who shows true compassion at other times.
What comes next is defiance. Maybe I’m just reading myself into the story, but it feels like Martha is as troubled as I am, refusing to just sit back and be a pawn. Instead she pushes Jesus at every turn. She goes out to meet him on the road, not waiting for him to arrive at their home. Is it her sense of urgency for Jesus to fix things now that he’s finally come? Or because his absence over the past week has made him feel like a stranger, and she’s not quite ready to welcome him into her home?
Later, by the tomb, when Martha warns Jesus of the “stench”– there’s something about the severity of that word that feels like a rebuke, and I want to stand up and cheer. YES, tell Jesus exactly how bad things are because he did not come when you called! LET. HIM. KNOW. I want magic-trick Jesus to understand that his absence feels like a betrayal, because I, too, have felt the loneliness of the long dark night of the soul.
When the miracle finally happens, when Lazarus stumbles out of the tomb, my feelings get more jumbled: gratitude, disbelief, joy, confusion. Above all, it makes me believe that nothing is beyond God’s love. No situation is too far gone for redemption — which I guess is the point Jesus set out to make. And I hate that. I hate thinking about those days of waiting, those long dark nights of desperation as Lazarus lay dying, the idea that “God has a plan” and that plan involved a lot of people suffering God’s absence, all for the sake of making this point.
And what comes last is humility — knowing that this point is something that I have clung to in times of desperate hope. Like Martha, I have nothing left to say, because as insulting as it feels when someone tells you that there’s some redemption in those long dark nights of waiting, they’re rarely wrong.
–Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
