5th Sunday of Lent

I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of being “blue-ticked.” Being left hanging by someone who has read your message on Whatsapp but then doesn’t reply gives enormous blue tick anxiety. We are left wondering why the person is not replying us, we wonder if we our message has offended them in some way, and we rack our brains to see if we forgot their birthday or something. I’m sure we’ll all agree that it is an unpleasant experience and should not be inflicted on someone else without good reason.

But if you think about it, Jesus effectively blue ticks Martha and Mary in today’s gospel. He gets a message from them that Lazarus is sick, and they expect that he will come rushing to their aid in order to save Lazarus. Instead he decides to blue tick them and leave them hanging. It must have been an awful experience for Mary and Mary. We are told that Jesus was only a day’s journey away from Bethany. So after sending the message, Martha and Mary would have expected Jesus to arrive in Bethany the next day. Instead he keeps them waiting a whole two more days, which must have been agony for Martha and Mary. They must have wondered if he indeed got the message, and if he got the message why had he not come yet.

Finally when he does come, they don’t let him off the hook and let him know that they are not amused that he has left them hanging. Martha tells him “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died, but even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Then Mary comes and says the same thing: “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Then as accompanies Martha and Mary to the tomb, he hears the crowd muttering behind him – “he opened the eyes of the blind, could he not have done something to prevent this?” In effect, what everyone is saying to Jesus is “you should have got here earlier.” Perhaps we have the same experience, of making a judgement call, and then having everyone criticize us and call our decision into question. Sometimes the doubt and criticism of others is so overwhelming, we begin to doubt ourselves and question ourselves.

It can’t have been easy for Jesus. One the one hand there are the silent reproachful looks that the the mourners are giving Jesus. Eyes that stare daggers into him – saying to him “how can you be so cold-hearted, how could you have done this? What could have been more important to you than coming to save your friend – why didn’t you get here earlier? On the other hand there are the pleading eyes of Martha and Mary – willing Jesus to do something, to work a miracle – to end their pain. I’m sure many of us have had the experience of being surrounded by people who expect so much from you. You feel overwhelmed by the demands made on you. Jesus knows that what these people really want from him is to simply take their pain away and restore things back to the way that they were.

The point I’m trying to make here is that we should not imagine Jesus simply waltzing in to Bethany suavely like a superstar and saving the day to the rapturous applause of the all the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem. Jesus has to work through the messiness of human emotion – the emotion of others and his own. When John tells us that Jesus is “deeply troubled” he is not so much sharing in the general sadness of the mournful situation of a funeral. Rather, this emotion is meant to express Jesus’ frustration and even anger at being surrounded by so many people who simply expect him to take their pain away with a wave of his magic wand.

But Jesus knows that this is not what he came for. In admist the recriminations and the reproachful looks and words, in admist the pleading eyes and pain of loss, Jesus must see through all this mist that can drown out the still quiet voice of the Holy Spirit that is his guiding light, his moral compass. This is the voice that conveys to him the will of the Father, and as Jesus has said earlier in the gospel, “my food is to do the will of the one who sent me.” It was this same quiet voice that he listened to when he decided not to respond immediately to Martha and Mary’s cry of distress when Lazarus is sick.

It would have been so easy for Jesus to instantly kill all the reproachful looks, to instantly show everyone why he delayed in coming and simply call Lazarus out of the tomb as soon as he arrived. This would have spared him a lot of angst. If the point of the miracle was to simply take away the pain of Martha and Mary and the other mourners – this is what he would have done. But Jesus never comes into our lives to restore things back to the way they were before we knew any pain or suffering. Jesus comes into our lives in order to help us move past the pain and suffering and emerge on the other side transformed by the experience. This is why Jesus takes the time to engage with Martha and Mary and to invite them to faith. For this is the real reason that he raises Lazarus from the dead. It is not to take away their pain – but rather to invite them into faith. When it feels as if God is blue ticking us, perhaps the real reason that we’re being blue ticked is to invite us into deeper faith.

By the time that John was writing his gospel, which could have been as late as 60 years after Jesus’ death, he had become aware of a certain trend in early belief in Jesus that tended to focus on Jesus as a miracle worker. In writing his gospel, John underlines the fact that a belief in Jesus as a miracle worker does not go far enough. Our belief in Jesus needs to go deeper than simply seeing him as the solution to our problems. This preoccupation of John with moving people beyond faith in Jesus as a miracle worker forms one of the central leitmotifs of his gospel. This is why in John’s gospel, we do not find the word miracle. Instead of talking about miracles, John prefers to talk about the signs that Jesus performs. Additionally, John has far fewer signs than the synoptic gospel’s miracles. Indeed, the first part of John’s gospel, the book of signs, contains only 7 signs, the culmination of which is the raising of Lazarus that we hear about in today’s gospel. The book of signs culminates with this story which forms the segue into the next part of John’s gospel, called the book of glory. The raising of Lazarus from the dead is the final sign that points to God’s ultimate power over death, God’s ultimate power over everything that threatens our lives.

Questions for reflection

1. How anxious do I get when I am blue-ticked by someone. What does this say about my trust in God who orders all things accordingly?

2. Do I blue-tick people without good reason?

3. How do I respond to pressure situations charged with emotion, am I still able to discern and hear the quiet voice of the Lord speaking in my heart?