Father Stephen De Young:

Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away.  And many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother.

So again, you notice we mentioned this very early on. I don’t know if I mentioned it that much since, but St. John because he’s writing in Ephesus, in Asia Minor, in what’s now Turkey. When he writes, he has to explain where these places are or were in Judea, because most of the people he’s writing to don’t know where Bethany is. So, the other gospels also mentioned Bethany, and Jesus spending time there, but the other three don’t tell you where that is because they just sort of assume you know. “You know, it’s right there by Jerusalem.” But St. John doesn’t assume that. He says, “Oh, by the way, Bethany is just 2 miles from Jerusalem.” So he fills us in and he says not just remember when it says Jews, the word there is actually Judeans. So the idea is not only the people of Bethany, but people from the surrounding villages. There’s a pretty big crowd in Bethany now there to support Mary and Martha in their grief and to mourn with them.

Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met Him, but Mary was sitting in the house.

So word comes back to them, “Oh, Jesus is finally here.” And so Mary stays in the house grieving. Martha runs out to meet him.

Now Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.

So we’ll pause there for a second. That’s twofold. That is, on the one hand, kind of accusatory, what took you so long to get here? But also there’s faith involved there because she states that she fully believes that if he had made it there in time, he would have been able to save her brother.

“But even now I know that whatever You ask of God, God will give You.”

So further faith. She says, “Even now, even though he’s now dead, I believe that if you ask God, you can do this.” Now, you have to remember, it was not unheard of. Elisha did it, in the Old Testament, raised a widow’s son from the dead. So she is at least saying that she believes Jesus is a prophet, if not the Messiah, right? So she believes, “you know, he already died. But I still believe that if you ask, if you ask God,” notice how she phrases it. She doesn’t say, “I know that you have the power to raise the dead,” and we shouldn’t blame her for that, because you or I wouldn’t have said that either. But she says, “If you ask God, if you pray and ask God, he will restore my brother, even now,”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

And we need to remember the word “rise”, We associate, we think resurrection, like, is a technical term. The Greek word literally means “get up”, “stand up”. And our Pascha greeting, “Christ has risen,” in a lot of other languages, very literally is standing up. Like in Dutch, it’s “Christus is opgestaan” And in opgestaan, you can hear it’s standing up, literally, “Christ is standing up.” This is a very literal word. So this word isn’t talking about going to heaven. “Oh, his soul has gone off to a better place.” That’s not rising, that’s not resurrection. Rising or resurrection, it means “Right now, he’s lying in a tomb, he is going to get up again. He’s going to get up and walk.” So resurrection in the Scriptures, just from the vocabulary that’s used, is always talking about physical, bodily resurrection, someone who is physically dead, becoming physically alive.

And that’s important because for two reasons. Number one, you will hear a lot of people say about Jesus, “Oh, well, Jesus, yeah, he rose again, like his spirit is still with us,” that’s not what the Bible is telling us. And that’s why the Bible is so clear. Like with St. Thomas, you know, “Look, here’s the holes in my hands, here’s the to my side. You could touch it. This is the same body that went into the tomb, walked back out of the tomb.”

But also, secondly, it reminds us, we have a bad habit that we’ve picked up here in the West of talking about when people die, talking about people going to heaven or people going to hell. Usually at funerals, we’re kind enough to talk about people going to heaven, but we say, “Oh, well, their soul has gone off to a better place.” But that’s not what Christians are hoping for. That’s not what Christianity is about. Christianity is not about your soul flying off to be in a better place. Christianity is about the fact that the day is going to come when Christ returns and all those who are in the tombs, Jesus said, will hear the voice of the Son of Man and those who hear will rise, will stand up again. And that’s why in the Creed, we talk about the life of the world to come. We don’t talk about floating on a cloud, strumming a harp. We talk about the fact that Christ is going to transform this world and make it new again and we’re going to live here forever with Him, risen from the dead. So it’s very important that that’s what resurrection is, that’s what we’re talking about.

Interlocutor: And that validates physical existence and says the physical world is a good thing, it’s a right thing, a lot of religious people in America today over the centuries have said, “No, it isn’t. We need a nonphysical world.”

Fr. Stephen: Right. “The world is bad. The world is bad and we need to get out of it.” “One bright morning when this life is over I’ll fly away.” [Laughter]

Interlocutor 2: We have to talk about that. Because I feel in this dying and resurrecting and what happens when you die. There’s so much I’m confused about.

Fr. Stephen: The picture we’re going to get in the epistles, like when we get to First Peter, is that the world itself, the creation itself, is going to die and rise again.

Interlocutor 2: [Hesitantly] Okay… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It’s a picture. It’s a picture. It’s an analogy. The analogy St. Paul is going to use when we get to First Corinthians is you drop a seed in the ground, it dies. You drop an acorn in the ground, it stops being an acorn, right? The acorn is gone. The acorn is ripped open, but then an oak tree grows out of it. And that’s what St. Paul uses as an example of the Resurrection, that we die in our physical body that we have now and our existence as we know it now in this sinful world. And then we rise again to new life in the world to come.

Interlocutor 2: That’s not going to happen until the Resurrection?

Fr. Stephen: That our bodies are going to be raised, yes.

Interlocutor 2: Okay, when we die…

Fr. Stephen: Your soul will be with Christ.

Interlocutor 2: Okay, so my soul is there with Christ, and then when the Resurrection comes, what’s going to happen? Bam. The soul is going to come back into the body?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Interlocutor 3: But there’s no body.

Fr. Stephen: But your body will be restored. Your body will be restored.

Job, which is the oldest book in the Bible, in Job, he says, “I know that though I die and my body goes into the earth and is dissolved, that I will stand on this earth and see my redeemer with these eyes.” That’s the resurrection.

Interlocutor 3: We don’t have a complete idea. We believe, but we don’t comprehend it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This is another one of those things. We don’t comprehend it. We know it’s true, but we don’t understand it.

Interlocutor 2: I don’t understand. When we die, okay, we go before the judgment seat.

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s when Christ returns.

Interlocutor 2: OK, but we’re going to be judged too when we die?

Fr. Stephen: When you die, yes, you will be with Christ. Paul refers to people, the dead in Christ. Where is Christ? This is a trick question. Where is Christ? Christ is everywhere, right? And St. John Chrysostom reminds us of this. He says, “Wherever Christ is, there the angels are.” There the saints are, right? There heaven is. And what he means by that is when we worship, Christ says, “When two or three are gathered in my name, I am there.” So when Christ is in our midst in worship, it’s not just Christ. It’s Christ. It’s the angels, it’s the saints, it’s our departed loved ones are all there with us when we’re with Christ worshipping in the Divine Liturgy. So when we die and our soul is separated from our body, our soul, our life is, as St. Paul says, in another place, “Our life is hidden in Christ.” Hidden meaning the people who are still alive can’t see you, can’t see you anymore, but you are still there with Christ, until the time comes when he returns, when he appears on this earth and we’re raised again.

Interlocutor: When you say we’re still there with Christ, we don’t mean a literal physical thing.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, because your soul isn’t a body. It’s everywhere. It’s everywhere where Christ is. Which is everywhere.

Interlocutor 3: Maybe it’s more than what our brain can understand. It’s just that you believe it then.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And St. Paul says, “What we will be has not yet been made known will be made known.” Meaning we can’t understand it because we think in terms of this world and what we see with our eyes and feel with our hands. That’s how we think, and this is different than that.

Interlocutor: We’ve talked a lot on Wednesday nights about time and how God is outside of time and how hard that is to imagine. Well, this is indicating that space is… he’s also outside of space. And we can no more think imagine one of those than we can the other. I mean, we can’t imagine…

Interlocutor 2: So you mean if I say an Our Father that I don’t get a day of indulgence?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] No, but it’s like the analogy I use, and a lot of people find this unflattering, but I like dogs, so when I’m sitting there looking at one of my dogs and I’m looking him in the eye. I could sort of get an idea of what he’s thinking and feeling. Do you think he understands what I’m thinking and feeling? You think he has the same mental… like if I’m sitting there thinking about one of the prayers of the Divine Liturgy, you think my dog Emmett…? He knows my feelings. He can understand my feelings, but he can’t process on the level that I’m processing. So, my dog loves me. He thinks I’m great, greater than I have any right to have anyone think I am. He thinks I’m wonderful, but he doesn’t really understand me. He doesn’t understand how humans think. He’s clearly confused by what I’m doing. Yeah, he’ll be happy when I get home, but he has no idea where I am or what I’m doing or why. I just show up and sometimes I bring him food and that makes him happy, and so that’s an analogy of us with divine things, right? We love Christ and we trust Him and he gives us these blessings, but we don’t really understand how all these things work. And we don’t need to just like my dog doesn’t need to know where I am right now. Because why? Well, because I love him, and I’m providing for him, and he’s safe, and he’s protected the same way we don’t need to understand all the details because Christ loves us, he provides for us. We’re safe. He protects us. And so we could just trust in Him without having to know all the details of how this all works and everything.

Interlocutor 2: I guess that’s why they call it faith.

Fr. Stephen: That’s it. It’s faith. Yeah. Faith is trust and loyalty and all those things that my dog has for me. My dog actually has a lot more faith than I do. He’s actually better. He sins less too. So he should be my role model in some ways.

I also use dogs as an example, when I talk about… you’ll hear people talk in the Orthodox Church about Theosis, about becoming like God. Sometimes it’s translated “deification”, and that’s kind of like, “What is that all about?” Here’s what it’s about. If you compare one of my dogs and a wolf, a wild wolf, you would not think these are the same species of animal. The way my dog behaves and acts and the way this wolf, this predator behaves and acts. Really, they’re the same species. They can reproduce together. They’re the same species. What’s happened to my dog and not happen to the wolf? Well, my dog has spent pretty much his entire life around humans. Around a couple of humans, me and my wife in particular.

And so by spending all that time with us and being that close with us and having this relationship with us, he started to take on some human traits that the wolf doesn’t have, because the wolf’s out there in the wild, not around humans. And it sort of changed and transformed my dog. Theosis, or what we call deification, is the same kind of idea with us and God. As we spend time with God, as we spend time with Christ, spending that time with Him, having that relationship with Him, being with Him, transforms us so that we become more like Him and less like we used to be. And that’s why when you compare, like, one of the saints to me, you wouldn’t think we are the same species because of the way I act out here in the world and the way the saint lived his life. But we are the same species. We’re both humans. He’s just spent his life drawing close to God, and that’s transformed Him.

So that’s the Gospel according to Canines.

Interlocutor 1: I’ve been thinking of this with cats.

Fr. Stephen: I don’t know about cats. They’re kind of evil.

Interlocutor 1: It works better with cats because they’re less obedient.

Fr. Stephen: That’s true. So that’s a little bit about the resurrection. But it’s important that we understand the resurrection is this physical reality that we’re talking about, not just, “Oh, well, he’s alive somewhere off in a better place,” but we’re talking about resurrection. So Jesus says, your brother will rise again. Your brother will stand up again. Your brother who is in that tomb is going to get up and be alive again.

Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

So Martha is a good believing Jewish person at this time in history, right? She interprets that sort of, “Oh, well, Jesus is saying something nice because my brother died,” right? “You know he will rise again.” “Yes, I know he will rise again on the last day when the resurrection happens at the end of time.”

Interlocutor 2: Okay, well, at that time, they didn’t know Jesus but they have an idea about the resurrection and the final days that comes from Jewish learning?

Fr. Stephen: Right. At this time in history. What happens, and this happens really in between the Old and New Testaments as this really developed. Probably the best statement of it is in Second Maccabees. But they have the idea that you have to go back to, we go back to Deuteronomy at the end of the Torah. The teaching of the Torah is if you follow God’s law, if you follow his teaching, if you follow his way of life, then you will be blessed, right? If you rebel against it and you do evil, then you will be cursed. And the blessings and curses, the way they’re described there are very literal in the sense that God says, “If you keep My ways and you follow My teaching, your crops, you’ll have good crops, you’ll have lots of children, you’ll have a big family, all these things will go well with you.” And then the opposite, right? “If you don’t follow my law, you’ll be cursed and the sky will be like iron and the ground will be like bronze. You will have famine, you’ll be barren and won’t be able to have children. All these horrible things will happen to you.”

Interlocutor 2: But there is no word about resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I’m getting there. That’s how it’s set up in the Torah. Now, the Jews that observe in life that things don’t always go exactly that way because they see, “Well, here’s this wicked person who’s doing all these evil things and is rich and seems happy and has all these children. And look, here’s this good person who’s really trying to follow God and they’re poor and they don’t have any children and they’re starving and they’re sick. How does that make sense?” And so the idea of the resurrection starts in Judaism in this period based on God’s justice, God has promised that these people are going to be blessed. So if they aren’t blessed in this life, then they’re going to have to be blessed afterwards. And if He’s promised that these people who are wicked will have justice for the crimes, for the evil that they’re doing, and so if they don’t have that justice in this life, they must have that justice afterwards.

So that’s the understanding that she has. She’s saying, “Yes, my brother Lazarus was a good man. He was a righteous man. So, yes, he will be rewarded in the future, in the life to come.”

Interlocutor: But the fact that she’s using the word “resurrection”, that’s what confuses me.

Fr. Stephen: The place where the physical resurrection comes into that. That’s why I mentioned Second Maccabees is there’s this period in Judaism starting really after they return from exile under the Persians in the 6th century BC. Then the Greeks come in after Alexander the Great, and for most of the third century, they’re under the Greeks and Antiochus the Fourth. Remember, Jesus was just celebrating Hanukkah, right? Antiochus Epiphanies came and desecrated the Temple and oppressed the Jewish people. And Second Maccabees, one of the main stories there is a mother and her seven sons who were all tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork or to deny the God of the Jews. They said, “We will not violate God’s teaching even if you kill us.” And so this woman had to watch all of her sons tortured to death in front of her for refusing to do it before they killed her also.

And so, again, this idea of God’s justice, these people had their bodies destroyed for keeping God’s law. Well, that’s not what’s supposed to happen if you keep God’s law. You’re supposed to be healthy and well and all that, but they had the opposite. And so the idea is for God to be just, he has to restore those people’s bodies. He has to heal these wounds that were inflicted on them. And so, as you get later in Old Testament Jewish history, it comes to not just be the life to come in general, but that comes to be physical, right? That their body has to be restored in order to make up for that.

Interlocutor: The Sadducees didn’t accept this.

Fr. Stephen: The Sadducees didn’t accept this at all. This is still kind of a vague idea at this point. It’s not until Jesus comes, and really in Christianity that we understand how this is still in Judaism today. Jews disagree about whether there’s an afterlife or not and whether there’s a resurrection.

Interlocutor: The Orthodox Jews believe in the afterlife and the resurrection.

Fr. Stephen: For the most part, yeah, for the most part. But they still don’t have a consistent teaching. It’s still kind of vague. But Christ, and this passage we’re reading is part of where Christ is explaining that and revealing that, Christ reveals to us what was shadowy in the Old Testament: we see clearly. And so it’s only in the New Testament, and then in First Corinthians, St. Paul talks about the resurrection a lot, Second Thessalonians, that we get real clear teaching about the resurrection. So, Martha has this sort of vague idea, right? And remember, she’s been mourning for four days, so she’s probably had lots of people coming up to her and saying, “Oh, well, you know, someday your brother will rise,” just to be nice. So she has this vague idea, but there isn’t a real specific concept in their heads at this point. Jesus is about to work on giving her a more specific concept in their heads at this point. Yeah, but so Jesus says he’s going to rise again. She says, “I know on the last day in the Resurrection, he’ll rise again.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

Interlocutor: That’s new. We haven’t seen that so far.

Fr. Stephen: So this is what I was talking about. Jesus is now trying to reorient her thinking from this vague idea to… so Jesus says that Jesus is the Resurrection and the life. We’ve already seen this talk about life. This has been a theme. Jesus being the life of the world has been running through the early part from the very first chapter of the Gospel of John. In Him was life, and that life was the light of man. Jesus said, the Father has life in himself. God is the living God. He’s given to the Son to have life in Himself, so that Jesus can give that life. He’s talking about giving eternal life to people. And so Jesus is saying, not only is he the one who has life and can give it, but he is also the Resurrection. The resurrection is where he is. And that’s why in Christianity, we associate that final resurrection, when everyone is raised, is going to be when? It’s going to be when Christ appears, when Christ returns.

On the language on that, the word Parousia. That’s the word used for Christ’s return. We talk about Christ’s return all the time, and I’m not a fan of that term because Christ’s return makes it sound like he’s off somewhere, right? Like he’s not here now. And of course, we confess the opposite every time we worship. Christ is here in our midst. The word Parousia, that’s translated return really means presence. The Christ is going to become present again in a different way. It’s also referred to in the New Testament as his glorious appearing. So Jesus is still here, we just can’t see Him. The time is going to come when everyone will see Him, when he will appear, he will be present again. And at that point, what happens? Well, since he is the Resurrection, when he appears, then the dead are all raised. He brings that with him.

He says, “He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live.” So, he’s not saying he may die like some people do and they some people don’t. It’s a Greek subjunctive meaning, “Though this will happen. You’ll die on this earth, you will still live.”

And, “Whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” Meaning, “You’re going to have eternal life if you if you live and you believe in me.” And then he says, “Do you believe this?” Now, remember, we have to talk about faith just briefly again, that faith is not putting the right questions on the true/false test. “Yes, that’s true. Yes, that’s true.” It’s not just this intellectual thing that he’s asking her. Remember, faith is trust and loyalty and openness to receive Christ. So Jesus is telling her this when he says, do you believe this? What he means is, “Do you trust me that this is true? Are you willing to entrust your brother and his future to me?” That’s what he’s asking.

She said to Him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

So she very clearly, immediately, without pause, says, “Yes, I believe.” She identifies him as the Messiah. That’s another thing we always have to reiterate. People think that Christ is Jesus’ last name. That’s not it. It was not Joseph and Mary Christ, and they had their son Jesus. Christ is a title. It’s the Messiah. He’s the King. He’s the King who’s going to come to rescue God’s people. And that’s what she’s saying here. Who is to come into the world. I believe that you are the King who has come into the world to save your people. This is once again better than the disciples have mostly been doing, right? And again, it’s this woman, this poor woman from this little village who’s probably illiterate, but she again, why? Because she believes, because she has faith, because she’s close to God. She gets it more.

Interlocutor: This is also Martha who gets a bad rap. Mary is the one who sits at Jesus’ feet. Martha’s doing…

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Which is kind of a misread of that story. I don’t want to go to too much of a digression, but that’s kind of a misread of that story that when Jesus says there’s “one thing needful”, right. He’s praising Martha for what she’s doing, showing hospitality and serving him, but saying, in addition to this hospitality, you also need to be attentive to hear the word of God. He’s not saying, “Quit, quit it with your busy work.”

Interlocutor: That’s the way I’ve usually heard it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So she makes this profession of faith.

And when she had said these things, she went her way and secretly called Mary her sister, saying, “The Teacher has come and is calling for you.”  As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly and came to Him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the town, but was in the place where Martha met Him. Then the Jews who were with her in the house, and comforting her, when they saw that Mary rose up quickly and went out, followed her, saying, “She is going to the tomb to weep there.”

So she gets up all of a sudden and runs out. They’re like, “Oh, she must be going to the grave to weep and mourn.”

Then, when Mary came where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Where have we heard that before? [Laughter]

Interlocutor: They must have been saying that to each other.

Fr Stephen: They must have been, yeah. “If only Jesus had been here, he wouldn’t have died,” to each other.

Therefore, when Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled.

That “groaned in the spirit” is kind of an odd translation. St. Paul’s going to use the same word, talking about the earth, the creation, awaiting the resurrection, in groans and that groaning is the word is usually used to talk about a woman who is in labor, from the pain. Some of you here would know about it more than me. [Laughter] But, yeah, it’s that kind of this idea that he’s troubled.

Interlocutor: My translation here says he was shaking from inside.

Fr Stephen: Yeah, inside, in his spirit. Well, why is this? He knows what he’s about to do, right?

Interlocutor 2: Because he’s compassionate.

Interlocutor 3: He cares about suffering.

Fr Stephen: Right. And he has in front of him sort of the horror of death, right? Death is not a natural part of the world. God did not create the world with death in it. Death and destruction has come into it, despoiling God’s creation And so Jesus is grieved and troubled by the reality of death. This is what he’s here to get rid of, remember? We’re seeing the purpose… Jesus is about to go to his own death. And the purpose of that is so that this will never have to happen again. That’s the idea that St. John is setting forth here. This is why Jesus needs to go to his death, because men like Lazarus die. And this sorrow and the sadness of loss that’s here in this place.

And He said, “Where have you laid him?”

They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.”

Jesus wept.

There’s your shortest verse in the Bible. There, only two words. “Jesus wept.”

Then the Jews said, “See how He loved him!”

So again, they don’t get it. They don’t understand why Jesus is weeping. Jesus is weeping about more than just Lazarus. He’s weeping about death. He’s weeping about what’s happened to his creation. But they say, “Oh, wow, he must have really loved Lazarus. Look, he’s crying.”

And some of them said, “Could not this Man, who opened the eyes of the blind, also have kept this man from dying?”

Right. So even here, there are trolls even here. [Laughter] But remember, I mean, we’ve seen this over and over again in Jerusalem. Jesus will say something. Jesus will do something. There’s one group that says, “Oh, he must be the Messiah.” There’s another group that says, “Oh, no.” Even here, right? Even here, there’s one group that says, “Now, wait a minute. He did all these miracles and healed all these people. Why couldn’t he heal his friend?” There’s still this separation happening.

Then Jesus, again groaning in Himself, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”

So, as we mentioned before, they would seal over the opening. Now, when you think about a cave, this isn’t a big cave. This is really just sort of a hole or a break between a couple of rocks where they’d have sort of a shelf where you could lay a body, but they put a large rock in front of it to keep animals and that kind of thing from getting into the tomb. So Jesus tells them to move the stone out of the way.

Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.”

So she made that great profession of faith, but still we’re human.

Interlocutor 2: She’s a housekeeper, she doesn’t want this nasty smell.

Fr. Stephen 2: Right. But this shows how she’s understanding what’s happening, right? Even though she made this great statement of faith, she’s still not really expecting that Jesus is going to make him come to life again or she wouldn’t be worried about this. She’s still understanding this as, “Oh, Lazarus was his friend, so he wants to see his body and pay his last respect,” and sort of like, “Oh, Jesus, it’s been four days, you don’t want to go in there,” because they still don’t quite know what’s coming.

Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you would believe you would see the glory of God?”

So Jesus says, “What was I just saying? And you just agreed that you just stated you believed it.”

Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. And Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, “Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. And I know that You always hear Me, but because of the people who are standing by I said this, that they may believe that You sent Me.”

Jesus basically says, “I’m praying out loud right now for the sake of all of these people.” Because what’s been the whole debate with the Pharisees and the people of Judea, every time he’s come to Jerusalem? It’s Jesus saying that he’s come from God, and them saying, “No, you haven’t.” That’s essentially been it. And so Jesus says, “Look, I’m going to pray publicly to you. I’m going to pray to the Father publicly so that they’ll know when I do this, because they’ve been saying, oh, well, you heal people, but you’re demon possessed. No, I’m going to pray out loud so everybody hears so that when this happened, they’ll know that it’s from God and that Jesus is from God. They’ll still find a way, but they won’t have any excuse to make those arguments, right?

Now when He had said these things, He cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!” And he who had died came out bound hand and foot with graveclothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loose him, and let him go.”

So now, notice, this is important. He makes this prayer, to God the Father for their sake, so they’ll know he’s from the Father. But you’ll notice after he makes that prayer, makes that statement, he doesn’t pray for the Father to raise Lazarus from the dead. When Elisha raised the widow’s son from the dead. He prays to God and prostrates himself seven times and goes through all this so that God will raise him. Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus makes this prayer to the Father for their sake so they’ll know who he comes from. But then Jesus just commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb. And Lazarus, who’s been dead for four days and decomposing, gets up and walks out.

Because Jesus is God, as he tells us, he has the power. Because remember, he said that he is the resurrection. He’s not just a prophet who has to pray for God to do these miracles. He’s God, so he can do these miracles. And notice also, remember, how did God create the world in Genesis 1? With his voice. He commanded it. He spoke. And that’s translated in English like “Let there be light”. But what it actually reads in the Hebrew is “light, exist”. He’s giving a command. He’s telling light to exist. And so light exists. And he says to the sea and the sky, separate. And they separate. In the same way, Jesus commands this dead man, “Come out of the tomb.” And he gets up and comes out of the tomb. So it’s not just that only God could do something like this. This is the way God does it.

Interlocutor: It’s not the same way that the disciples…

Fr. Stephen: Or the prophets, right? The disciples will ask Jesus and the prophets would pray to God and ask God to do it. Jesus just does it because he’s God himself who believes in Jesus.

Interlocutor: They must have been freaking out.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. And not only does he come out, they would wrap up the body. And so he still wrapped up. And they have to come and unwrap him.

Interlocutor 4: How many years did he live?

Fr. Stephen: Lazarus lived for, I believe, 12 or 13 years. And he actually became a bishop on Crete.

Interlocutor 3: He’s mentioned somewhere else?

Fr. Stephen: Not in the New Testament, but in church history, that he went he became a bishop in Crete after that.

Interlocutor: Do we have a tomb of him?

Fr. Stephen: I believe in Crete, there is.

Interlocutor: Wow. I would want to see that.

Fr. Stephen:

Then many of the Jews who had come to Mary, and had seen the things Jesus did, believed in Him.

So, again, “I may not get everything that’s going on here, but I’ve definitely never seen anything like that where someone commands somebody who’s been dead for four days to rise. So this has to be the Messiah or somebody.” And so, they come to follow Christ.

Interlocutor 2: Okay, I’ve got a question. He’s dead for four days. Where was his soul? What was he doing for four days?

Fr. Stephen: Well, see, here’s the problem with your question. You just said, “Where was his soul?” His soul is not a physical object.

Interlocutor 2: All right, so where?

Fr. Stephen: In the grave, in Hades.

Interlocutor 2: Why can’t I comprehend this?

Fr. Stephen: Because you’re a human being. That’s why you can’t comprehend this.

So many of them come to believe.

But some of them went away to the Pharisees and told them the things Jesus did.

So there are some who are stool pigeons who they run off into the city of Jerusalem to tell the Pharisees, “Oh, Jesus is back in town. He just did this incredible thing.”

Interlocutor: Well, we don’t know the spirit in which they did it. I could picture them going to the Pharisees and saying, “You didn’t say this guy amounted to much, but guess what I just saw.”

Fr. Stephen: Well, but there is a “but” there. “Many believed. But some went to…”

Interlocutor 4: This is part of what Jesus [inaudible] for certain things to happen in his last week.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is going to this is going to trigger sort of the final showdown here, this event, because this is too big and too public to not have consequences one way or the other.

Interlocutor: If you’re against him, and you’re still against him after this, you’ve got to pull out your big guns.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to get rid of him.

Then the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said, “What shall we do? For this Man works many signs. If we let Him alone like this, everyone will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and nation.”

Well, what they mean is they obviously still don’t believe Jesus is actually the Messiah. But they see that all of these other people, the people they look down on, these common people who don’t know anything about the Law, they all think he’s the Messiah. And so what they’re saying is, “If we don’t do anything, they’re all going to go following him. The Romans are going to hear about it, that this guy is going around proclaiming… remember, the Messiah is a king, that this guy is going around proclaiming himself a king. He’s got all these people following and the Romans are going to come in here and wreck Jerusalem. They’re going to come down on us and we’re going to lose our temple, which is where we get all our money. We’re going to lose our position that we have because the Romans are going to get mad.” So they think Jesus is a phony. They’re like, “We got to do something about this phony or the Romans are going to take it out on us. We’re going to get caught in the crossfire here and we don’t want that to happen.” Because the Romans didn’t discriminate between the Jews like, “Are you part of this or not part of this?” They just came in and wiped people out.

And one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should perish.”

So Caiaphas is the high priest that year, the high priest is decided by lot from a certain priestly family. He’s the high priest that year. He stands up in the middle of the group being the high priest. He’s sort of the chairman and he says, “Listen, you’re not thinking straight. It’s expedient, it’s better for us for one person to die than for all the people.” So he’s basically making the argument because apparently there’s some discussion, even though what he’s see from their perspective, their killing another Jew is sort of traitorous, it’s treasonous. The Romans are the bad guys, right? And we Jews, we’re oppressed and we’re all in it together. And now he’s going to argue, “We need to go and kill one of our fellow Jews. We’re going to go murder this guy.” And he’s saying, “Look, we got to put the needs,” to quote Star Trek, “the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few.” If this one person has to get killed to save our whole nation, then so be it. We need to go and murder him. We need to go and kill him.

Interlocutor: Is the same person who we see him later when the people came and asking for Jesus to be crucified and his wife dreamed that…

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s Pilate, the Roman Governor.

And we found his [Caiaphas’] bones, by the way. They found them in Jerusalem several years ago. There’s a little public park and there’s a pipe going into the ground and they were excavating under the park to do some renovations and they found buried underneath it the family tomb of the high priests from the first century BC and the first century AD. And they put sort of a little remote-control camera down in there and they found Caiaphas’ bone boxes, his ossuary box with his bones in it, because they have the names on them, they found him and his son and his father and his grandfather all they’re in a family too. Yeah, because there’s sort of city built on top of city built on top of city. So when they excavate down but yeah, so Caiaphas just says, “Look, you know, I know we’re killing, but it’s better for us to kill this one guy than for everybody to die, especially me. When the Romans come in.”

Now this he did not say on his own authority; but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation,

So notice say John is saying, Caiaphas didn’t realize what he was saying. But really what he was saying was a prophecy that Jesus would die to save his people. Not the way Caiaphas thought, nothing to do with the Romans. But he accidentally told the truth when he said that.

and not for that nation only, but also that He would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad.

So Jesus isn’t just dying for the people in Judea, but for everyone.

Then, from that day on, they plotted to put Him to death.  Therefore Jesus no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there into the country near the wilderness, to a city called Ephraim, and there remained with His disciples.

So they commit at this meeting. The Pharisees, the chief priests, the high priests, they all agree we’re going to kill Jesus. They have this agreement now. And so Jesus does not stay in Jerusalem, immediately, we’re going to see is going to go to Jerusalem. But right now when he leaves Bethany, he doesn’t go into Jerusalem, he goes to another village and stays there.

Interlocutor: How far are we from Jerusalem?

Fr. Stephen: We’re going to see, just a few miles.

And the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went from the country up to Jerusalem before the Passover, to purify themselves.

So again, as we talked about before, when these feasts would come, Jewish people from all over the Roman world, all over the Roman Empire, would come to Jerusalem and especially Passover being the biggest feast of the year, huge influx. There would be more than a million people in Jerusalem, which at that time in history is a ridiculous amount of people to be in one city. And this is why the Romans cracked down so much during Passover, because there were so many people there that didn’t want riots breaking out, they didn’t want problems.

Interlocutor: They weren’t inside Jerusalem, they couldn’t hold that many people.

Fr. Stephen: No. So they’d be camped outside, they’d be staying in the villages like Bethany and that kind of thing. But so they have to come early because remember, if they’re going to worship in the temple, they’re doing these things. They have to do the ceremonial bathing and cleansing before they can go into the temple. So they’ve got to arrive a couple of days early so they can make all their preparations to celebrate the actual Passover. That’s what St. John is saying here. So the people are starting to arrive. This huge influx of people is starting to arrive in Jerusalem.

Then they sought Jesus, and spoke among themselves as they stood in the temple, “What do you think-that He will not come to the feast?”

So Jesus is sort of the hot topic. Word about Lazarus has gotten the rabble all talking. They’re there for the feast and they’re all doing, “Where is he? He’s not here. Do you think he’s coming? Do you think he’s going to stay away because they’re trying to kill him? No, he’s got to come. He’s the Messiah. He’s going to come and do something.” So they’re all abuzz.

Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a command, that if anyone knew where He was, he should report it, that they might seize Him.

So they’ve put out the “Wanted, dead or alive.” They put out the word on Jesus that if you spot him, if anyone spots him coming into the city, you let us know so that we can grab him.

Interlocutor: With a million people, how can you…

Fr. Stephen: Well, we’re going to see, Jesus makes his entrance pretty obvious. Nobody’s going to miss it.

So this is setting the stage here. There’s this huge excitement surrounding Jesus because of what he just did in raising Lazarus, word’s gotten around to everybody. The chief priests have committed that they’re going to kill him and they’ve put the word out, “If you see him, let us know. There’s a reward, and we’re going to grab him.” So this is setting the stage for what’s going to come next for this sort of final conflict here in the second half of St. John’s Gospel. So this is a good place at the end of the chapter to leave off for tonight. Thank you, everybody.