“Two Miracles in One”

March 13, 2005

Scripture Reading:  John 11:1-45

Rev. Dr. Carol L. Kerr

Blue Point Congregational Church

 

When Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead it was a great miracle.  Lazarus had been dead for four days.  His corps was bound with strips of cloth, his hands and his face.  He was like a mummy.  He had been dead so long that his body was deteriorating.  The stench would knock you over.  But, Jesus ordered the stone of his tomb to be taken away.  He cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 

One poem describes what happened from Lazarus’ point of view. 

From inside myself,

there was a rumble,

a disturbing movement.

I could feel myself churn

And then there was an explosion,

A shot of life,

twisting through me.

I couldn’t contain it.

It was forcing itself out:

a whirl,

a chain reaction,

building.

I could feel myself heave

and from inside myself,

and all my stony coldness,

broke resurrection.  (Seasons of the Spirit, Lent/Easter 2005 page 55)

Amazing isn’t it?  It was a great miracle.  It also was a wish come true for Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha, not to mention for Lazarus himself.  They wished their brother hadn’t gotten sick.  They wished he was alive and back with the family just like it had always been.  All their wishes were sunk until Jesus came.  Then they came true. 

Many people believe the raising of Lazarus is Jesus’ greatest miracle.  But, I don’t think so.  Yes, it was a very great but not the greatest.  I think another miracle happened that day.  One that is greater still.  That is when Jesus wept.  Remember when Mary came to 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 Jews 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.”  Then Jesus began to weep.  Jesus, the Son of God, cried and cried.  That to me is the greatest miracle of Jesus. 

The fact that Jesus wept is the very center of Christianity.  It is what makes our God so outrageous.  It is why even many of us Christians get it wrong half the time.  You see, Jesus was both God and a person.  Jesus was a two for one.  Buy one, get one free type God.  Jesus was divine Doublemint.  Jesus was completely God and completely a person.  There were raging controversies about this in early Christianity.  People kept trying to make Jesus a little less than God because if Jesus was completely God it would be hard to get your mind around.  Finally they wrote the Nicean creed to nail the fact down once and for all.  It says, “We believe…in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man…” 

In modern language the Nicene creed might go something like this:  We believe…in Jesus Christ the one and only ruler of the universe.  He has no imitations.  There was no one before and no one after him.  He is the Son of God who was  from/with/within God from before the big bang.  He is not a step son of God.  He is not a foster child of God or adopted.  He is God’s clone.  He is not just sort of God, or pretty much God, but very God of very God.  God made us.  Jesus made us.  There is no difference.  It is this clone of God who came down to our small blue planet to save particularly the species homo sapiens.  He came to save that species which is really messed up most of the time, and yet that species that knows that there is something better.  God became like us in order to save us from ourselves.  Total God became a total person in order to show us the way to go.  He was not just half a person and half a God.  He was not just God in disguise.  He was completely human like you and me.  He was born.  He ate and drank.  He felt pain.  He even cried.  We agree it is hard to make sense out of it.  It is mind blowing.  We sure wish it was easier to explain.  But, if you look at the facts, it is the best explaination we can come up with.  So we are making this creed up and memorizing it.  We are doing this so that when we feel like squirming out of it and making Jesus less than God, or different than God it will bring us back to the plain truth whether we like it or not. 

The best way I have of thinking about the Nicene creed is looking at the cross.  See it has a vertical axis and a horizontal axis.  The vertical axis is God.  The horizontal axis is humans.  Jesus is the point right in the middle where the two axis come together.  The point that is both horizontal and vertical.  He is at the one point that is part of both.  That is Jesus – all God and all human at the same time. 

So what? So what does the Nicene creed have to do with us?  It has everything to do with us.  Yes, Lazarus was raised from the dead.  Jesus fulfilled a wish for Mary and Martha and Lazarus that is unbelievable.  Yet, the problem with wish lists is that when one wish gets fulfilled another one pops up.  It is like my shopping list for the house.  As soon as I buy something I think I will never need anything any more for the house.  Yet, another thing pops up.  The list seems to have a life of its own, creating itself with no end. 

The fact is that Lazarus at some time died for good.  As Michael Card mentions in his article, “God’s Disturbing Faithfulness” in Discipleship Journal, Jan/Feb 2005.  Death remained a reality.   What is new is that God wept.  That means that the way Christians see God is one who is present to us in our deepest pain.  God is a God who is present, right here and right now and with us.  Lazarus will die again, but God/Jesus continues to be with us.  That will never end.

The poet Chip Aldridge finds great comfort from this fact when so many of his friends were dying with AIDS.  He writes:

Jesus wept.

Cried aloud.

Split the heavens with his pain.

The pain and loss of death.

Death of friend.

His friend.

Lazarus.

Again and again

Christ cries to God –

The pain of loss.

 Friend for friend.

Taken by AIDS.

These were my friends.

Yes, weep with me\

Brother Jesus.

 

Christianity is so radical and the Nicene Creed is so important because it is saying that our relationship with God is not a wish list relationship.  It about way more than questions and answers.  Rather our relationship with God is about God being present with us no matter what.  This is a huge paradigm shift.  God is a God who weeps.  Dr. William Lane said, “We want a God of the magic wand.  The God who makes cancer go away.  But more remarkably, He is the God who comes alongside us and suffers with us.   He is the God who never leaves us.” 

Jesus prays to God in the gospel of John and he says:  As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.  The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, and they may be completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.  (John 17:21-23)

Jesus doesn’t mention anything about wishes coming true.  All he is talking about is us being present with him, God and him accompanying us, and we abiding in one another.  It is about weeping, laughing, sadness, joy and sharing all of it. 

Sometimes it is easier having a wish list for God to check off.  Certainly, there is nothing wrong with Mary and Martha wanting their brother to be alive again.  No doubt I will doggedly keep demanding God to provide me with stuff I want on my list on any given day.  It is a big list and keeps on growing.  It has material good, health of myself and my family, love, good friends, wonderful church, money, world peace, ecological well being, and on and on it goes. 

Often for me God is a caricature really – a cartoon picture.  Jesus walks about three inches off the ground.  God is way off in the sky somewhere.  Nothing really bothers them because they are “know-it-alls.”  God hears our prayers and hands down lectures on what we should or should not do.  It seems to me my cartoon picture gets bigger as my wish list grows and grows.  Many people who say they don’t believe in God say that because their wish list never got answered they way they wanted.  It might be a good wish list such as no pain, no wars, that their marriage stayed together.  “If God exists why doesn’t God help out on this very noble list I’ve got?” they wonder.

Certainly I will continue to be disturbed by the lack of things on that list that are answered.  I will shake my fist at the sky and wonder why?  But, I must remember that that is not what Christianity is all about.  I went to a continuing education several weeks ago on being with people who are dying.  I learned something.  Apparently when people are dying the last thing they can feel is pressure around their chest.  So when they are very close to death, one is to place your hand on their chest and place their hand on your chest and just breath with them.  I can’t imagine anything more profound and comforting than that.  That is the essence of Jesus weeping.  Jesus has his hand to our hearts and  breathes with us in life and in death.  God is present always.  That is the greatest miracle of all.

Let me end with something Frederick Buechner wrote: 

Recent interviews with people who have been resuscitated after being pronounced clinically dead reveal that, after the glimpse they evidently all of them get of a figure of light waiting for them on the other side, they are very reluctant to be brought back again to this one.  On the other hand, when Lazarus opened his eyes to see the  figure of Jesus standing there in the daylight beside him, he couldn’t for the life of him tell which side he was on. 

 

The presence of Jesus with us is the miracle of miracles.