Spoiler Alert (Fifth Sunday after Pentecost)

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As today’s Gospel story ends, Jesus tells people to unbind Lazarus and let him go.  And then John adds the parenthetical remark that many of the people who came with Mary saw what Jesus did and they believed in him.

And at this point, we expect the next line to be, “and they all lived happily ever after!”  Or at least, that’s the way we’d like the story to end.  Over the past couple of Sundays, we’ve read about the man born blind and the Samaritan woman at the well, and we could imagine that, having encountered Jesus in their lives, things just got better and better, and they lived happily ever after.

And for sure, when I’ve been through a terrible situation in my life, and I feel like Jesus has helped me overcome it, I want to just forget about what was and live happily ever after! Probably, you do, too.

But – spoiler alert – this is not how the story of Lazarus, Mary and Martha ends.  Actually, for as long as this reading was, it’s just the beginning of the story.  And in fact, this story is the pivotal story in John’s Gospel which sets up the whole narrative of the death and Resurrection of Jesus.

What’s happened up to this point is that Jesus has been attracting a lot of attention from many different sorts of people.  And this includes the Temple authorities who are increasingly worried that Jesus – or people around him – will start an uprising which will cause the Romans to crush them and destroy the Temple.  They’d like to either arrest or stone Jesus, and for this reason, Jesus has been hanging out with his disciples down by the Jordan River.

But when he’s told Lazarus is sick – after waiting two days – Jesus returns to Bethany, which is a village just outside of Jerusalem. And there, he performs the final “sign” in John’s Gospel – he raises Lazarus from the dead, which is the one and only time in John’s Gospel that Jesus raises anybody from the dead.  And he does this after Lazarus has been dead for 4 days, which is a “sign” in and of itself, because people believed the spirit of the deceased would only hang around the body for 3 days…

This clearly impresses a lot of people, but not everybody!  The next verse is NOT “and they all lived happily ever after”, but this: “But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.”  And so, this event becomes the “final straw.”  And, John reports, “from that day on, they planned to put Jesus to death.”  Jesus can’t go about openly anymore, so he temporarily heads back to the wilderness area, until the Passover arrives, when he again returns to have dinner with Mary, Martha and Lazarus. (And it’s after that dinner that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.)

And because many people hear that Jesus is with them at dinner, they come to see Jesus, but also Lazarus, because they wanted to see the person Jesus had raised from the dead.  Therefore, John reports, “the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.”

The poor guy got sick and he died.  But Jesus raised him from the dead!  Yet just 22 verses later, there’s a plot to kill him again!  It’s not happily ever after!

So – spoiler alert – it’s not “happily ever after”, at least as we usually think of “happily ever after” when we imagine that means “Jesus will come along in my life, do something great for me, and then I’ll live a happy and stress-free life!” 

But actually, the spoiler alert points us to something bigger and better.  The spoiler alert is the reminder that:

• Jesus does these “signs” not to make people happy and carefree, but to give them hope and strength to face a future which is often not happy and not carefree.  One of the most important things that people learn about Jesus in the story of Lazarus is not just that Jesus can raise the dead, but that Jesus hadn’t forgotten about them or given up on them even when they themselves had lost hope. And that’s a really important thing for all of us to remember when life is a mess and things are not looking up in the world around us…

• My life and even my pain, are not simply about me but about how I can be the “sign” in somebody else’s life.  Unlike the Samaritan woman at the well or the man born blind, Lazarus never has a speaking part!  He doesn’t say anything, but because of him, many other people come to experience life and hope.  Lazarus is important, not because of what he says or what he does, but because God’s works are done through him.  And this is a reminder to us that through both our happiness and even our pain, Jesus is often working to bring life and hope to others through us in ways we might not even know about…

• Even our own death is not the end of us.  And this is not because Lazarus is temporarily resuscitated by Jesus.  Lazarus is gonna die again.  We don’t know whether the authorities succeed in killing him off, or whether he dies in old age, but one way or another, he’ll die again.  Rather, we know death is not the end because this story begins and points us toward the death and Resurrection of Jesus.  And because Jesus lives, death won’t have the final word for Lazarus or any of us, either…

So, the story of Lazarus doesn’t end with “they all lived happily ever after.”  But that’s OK, because “happily ever after” is how fairy tales end, and this story isn’t one of those! 

Instead, the rest of the story reminds us of something real and something better.  And the real and better thing is that Jesus never abandons us, even in our darkest tombs.  The real and better thing is that Jesus can give hope and strength to others through the witness of our lives and even our deaths in ways that we may never know and can’t even imagine.  And the real and better thing is that the real end of the whole story isn’t death or merely temporary resuscitation, but Resurrection and eternal life.

Amen.