For Sunday Lent 5A
Collect
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
In one sense, this is the story of Jesus the healer, making his way to the site of yet another miracle. In another, it is about friends wanting to save a life. And in a third sense, it is about expectations of the Messiah. How we wrestle with all of these together speaks to our own expectations — of Jesus, of Scripture, and of what we are supposed to do with ourselves.
What may be the most understated character of this story is just how focused Jesus is on his mission here. And how much that conflicts with others’ expectations.
The people around Jesus are obsessed with preserving Lazarus’s life. They see Jesus’s job as needing to save it at all costs. We might say this is entirely consistent with a pro-life stance. But two things in the story stymie this expectation:
- Jesus isn’t compelled to save him — he plans to raise him.
- The timeline itself shows that saving him is impossible (he’s been dead for days).
In this way, it is both Jesus’s intention and the circumstances themselves that render these expectations for Jesus moot and kinda scandalous, actually. They want to take it out on Jesus for not stopping time or teleporting or what have you.
It isn’t just that people had strange expectations for Jesus, but that they also lacked sufficient vision to see a much simpler idea: that Jesus could bring Lazarus back from the dead. That this was a more reasonable assumption than stopping time.
Jesus, for his part, refers to Lazarus’s death as “sleeping” and that he is going to wake him up. And then, when he does, he invites the people to restore his form to the living. To take him out of the death clothes and bring him back in. That is their job here. To welcome him. To shed the expectations that don’t fit to free him and let him go.