Jesus

by James Martin

  As I looked down the flight of uneven stairs, which led into darkness, I wondered what I would find.

  HERE’S A FACT ABOUT Jesus that is sometimes overlooked: he had friends. Most of us know that Jesus had apostles, Jesus had disciples, and Jesus had followers. Jesus is often called “Rabbi” or “Teacher” in the Gospels, and his relationship to those around him was often in those roles. The Greek word for disciple (mathētēs) means “one who learns.”

  But as a fully human person with a fully human desire for companionship Jesus also needed, and had, friends. Like any other loving person, he likely had friends from his youth, people he knew from his boyhood and adolescence in Nazareth. As a young adult, he doubtless befriended fellow carpenters and local laborers. And during his public ministry, he enjoyed the friendship of those with whom he could relax, unwind, and perhaps talk about the challenges of his unique call.

  Among his close friends during his public ministry were Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. The Gospels describe Jesus going at least twice to their house in Bethany, two miles east of Jerusalem. On one occasion, Martha and Mary host a dinner for Jesus, prompting Jesus’s encouragement to the ever-busy Martha to relax and simply enjoy his company.2 The second occasion for his visit to their house is far sadder. He goes to Bethany to comfort his friends after the death of their brother. It’s a natural thing for a friend to do, but it would have consequences that even Jesus’s closest friends could not have predicted. It will also be one of his last miracles, for after his time in Bethany Jesus will set his sights on Jerusalem for a final visit.

  THE GOSPEL OF JOHN is traditionally divided into two parts, which Raymond Brown calls the Book of Signs (Chapters 1–12) and the Book of Glory (Chapters 13–21).3 The Book of Glory includes the Last Supper; a series of long discourses in which Jesus speaks at length to the disciples; the arrest, trial, and Crucifixion; the death of Jesus; and the Resurrection. The Book of Signs focuses on Jesus’s public ministry and the signs (sēmeia) he performs—his miracles. The last and greatest of these signs is the Raising of Lazarus.

  John begins his story by saying that a “certain man” of Bethany, named Lazarus, is ailing. He is identified not only as the brother of Martha and of Mary, who had anointed Jesus’s feet with perfume,4 but with another lovely term. “He whom you love (hon phileis)” is ill, says the message from the man’s sisters. It’s a small but touching indication that Jesus and Lazarus must have been extremely close.

  Strangely, after receiving word of his friend’s illness, Jesus does not leave immediately for Bethany, but remains where he is for two more days. He tells the disciples that this sickness will not end in death, but “for God’s glory.”

  The disciples must have been flummoxed by their master’s response. Why would Jesus, who healed strangers, not rush (euthus) to the bedside of a good friend? Why would he actually delay going? It may have seemed heartless. Some commentators suggest that he wanted to ensure that Lazarus was truly dead in order to authenticate what he was about to do, what would be the greatest of his signs in John’s Gospel.5 Others say that Jesus may have wanted to demonstrate his freedom—he will go to the tomb when he wishes to. God acts when God acts. But as elsewhere in the Gospels, and especially in John, Jesus makes decisions that seem mysterious by human standards and that make sense only afterward, when the disciples reflect on his actions.

  It also points out Jesus’s existential aloneness. He is not without friends or without the comfort of his Father in prayer, but Jesus must make decisions on his own, choices that probably seem confusing, and, in this case, offensive to those around him. This is often true of all of us when we make truly free decisions.

  Jesus is supremely free. But with this freedom comes loneliness. His struggles are compounded by the fact that he probably knows he is moving closer to the great test in Jerusalem. Perhaps he was wondering about this as he thought about his friend’s death.

  Two days later, he tells his disciples that he will return to Judea, where Bethany is located. “Our friend Lazarus,” he tells them, “has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” As they often do, the disciples take him literally. If he’s asleep, they say, he should be fine. “No,” Jesus says plainly, “Lazarus is dead.”

  By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been dead for four days, and many people have come to be with Mary and Martha in their time of mourning. The sisters’ grief was doubtless compounded by the fact that, despite their entreaties, Jesus did not show up. The man they hoped would cure their brother didn’t even bother to come.

  When Martha hears that Jesus has finally come, she leaves her sister behind and rushes to meet him.

  What was going through Martha’s head as she ran? She was probably overjoyed at his arrival, after spending days longing for his consolation. If we remember how the crowds longed to spend time with Jesus, we already have a sense of his charisma. People wanted to be near him and wanted him near them. How much more would Martha have longed for him during her grief. All of us want friends near us in dark times.

  But Martha may also have been confused, or angry. Elsewhere she is portrayed as the more practical sister, the active one who served the food for the earlier visit from Jesus, while her sister Mary was sitting at the master’s feet. With a sharp tongue she asked Jesus to order her sister to help her serve. Now that Lazarus was dead, Martha’s anger and confusion would not have been unwarranted over Jesus’s seemingly inexcusable delay.

  “Lord,” she says upon meeting him, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Is she rebuking him or showing her faith? Perhaps both. Martha mirrors many of us in times of pain; we toggle between anger and hope, confusion and belief. In the depths of sadness it’s sometimes hard to believe, much as we know we would like to, or should. Martha shows the entirely human struggle between fear and faith.

  Then Martha softens. “But even now,” she says, “I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Does she foresee what Jesus is about to do? Had she heard of his other miracles—the raising of the son of the widow of Nain or the raising of Jairus’s daughter, both examples of restoration of life?6 Either way, in the midst of her strong emotions, she gives voice to what people know about Jesus: he is a wonder-worker who can cure the sick.

  Then Jesus offers her comfort. He tells her that her brother will rise again. Yes, says Martha, she knows that he will rise on the “last day,” voicing a commonly held Jewish belief about the resurrection. But Jesus goes further, making an important statement in the midst of an emotion-filled day. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he says. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Martha professes her faith in this and calls him the Son of God.

  Martha is a fascinating figure in the Gospels. As I had mentioned, when Jesus dines at her house and her sister Mary sits at his feet, “listening to him speak,” Martha complains bitterly. “Lord,” she says, and you can imagine her bent over a stove saying this, “do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?”7 In that setting, as here, beside her brother’s tomb, she is blunt. Martha can be seen, in a sense, as a kind of female counterpart to Peter: a strong, impetuous, and outspoken friend of Jesus, who believes even as she feels free to question. The memories of her retained in the Gospels are so vivid that she likely was a formidable figure in the early church. Martha’s fierce honesty also reminds us that Jesus included strong women among his circle of friends.

  At this point, Martha returns (we can imagine her rushing) to Mary, the quiet one, who sits in the house, and reports that Jesus has finally come. John’s Gospel offers us two Greek words that bring to life their brief conversation. First, we are told that Martha spoke to Mary lathra—quietly or secretly.

  When Martha returns home, she finds Mary surrounded by mourners. Often in the days surrounding a death—either beforehand at a hospital bed or afterward in a funeral parlor—one is enveloped by friends
and family. In first-century Palestine, Martha and Mary’s house would have been crowded with people; the rites surrounding Jewish burials were extensive and detailed and required help from the community. Expensive ointments and spices were often used to anoint the body; if the body were still in the house, eating meat and drinking wine were forbidden; and for the seven days following the death it was forbidden to engage in any kind of work. Attending to all the various funeral rites and consoling the survivors was a solemn duty of all friends and neighbors.

  During those crowded moments, in the midst of the funeral preparations, it can be difficult to find quiet time with those closest to us. Important bits of news or small words of consolation are often relayed quietly, in the corners of rooms, outside hospital rooms, in backyards away from company. It is much the same for Lazarus’s sisters. Martha speaks with her sister, quietly. It is a deeply human piece of storytelling in the Gospel and underlines the intimate relationship between the two sisters.

  The word Martha uses to describe Jesus is also significant: didaskalos, or teacher. “The Teacher is here and is calling for you,” she tells her sister. Earlier, when Martha encountered Jesus at the tomb, she referred to him as kyrie, Lord. Both titles show the esteem in which the sisters hold their dear friend.

  Mary now rushes to meet Jesus. The contemplative one becomes active. She is joined by her friends, who by tradition would have taken every opportunity to mourn with her, as a sign of solidarity and affection. Unlike her sister, Mary is portrayed in somewhat more positive tones throughout this story. She kneels at Jesus’s feet and echoes her sister’s words, wishing that he had arrived earlier.

  Jesus asks where the body is. Mary answers: “Lord, come and see.” The next line in Greek is only three words: Edakrusen ho Iēsous, Jesus wept.

  Some have surmised that this brief sentence means not that Jesus is weeping for Lazarus, but is upset because Mary has joined with her friends in mourning the loss of her brother and is thus showing her association with those who do not believe in him. He weeps, in the words of one scholar, because his message “will never be understood or accepted.”8

  That interpretation is supported by the fact that Mary’s friends say, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Her friends are therefore—so goes this interpretation—presented unflatteringly, and Mary’s affiliation with them viewed as undesirable. Bolstering this interpretation is the fact that immediately before he weeps, Jesus is described as “greatly disturbed in spirit.” The Greek word is a strong one: ebrimaomai can mean frustrated or even angry and is sometimes used to describe a horse snorting.

  I see things differently—and not simply because that is a negative way of portraying the Jewish faith of Martha and Mary. It seems more likely that Jesus weeps because he is sad. How could he not be? His tears are an unmistakable sign of his humanity and show his compassion for his friends. Were Jesus a stony-faced divinity untouched by emotions, he would have been unmoved, embodying the classic Greek understanding of a God characterized by apatheia. But Jesus is not untouched by suffering. He is not so detached that nothing moves him. The crowd notices. “See how he loved him!” they say.

  Yes, see how he loved him. Once again, we should not underestimate the importance of friendship in Jesus’s life. Not simply in his public ministry—in which he offers friendship to those on the margins and participates in “table fellowship,” sharing food, with a wide variety of people—but in his private life as well. A careful reading of the Gospels shows that Jesus treasured people’s company and enjoyed celebrating with them. It’s easy to imagine Jesus spending time with Martha, Mary, and Lazarus at their home in Bethany, taking time off from the rigors of the road, perhaps sharing with them some of the loneliness of his ministry, and of course, since he was fully human and so were they, laughing.

  But now, by the tomb, he weeps. Many of us know the pain of losing a close friend. Remember that Lazarus is called by the sisters hon phileis, he whom you love. Their friendship must have been deep. He may be weeping both for the loss of Lazarus and for the pain that his death has caused Mary and Martha.

  On one retreat, I imagined Jesus breaking into tears after asking, “Where have you laid him?” and hearing the response, “Come and see.” When you finally realize that someone has died, just a word is enough to push you over the edge, perhaps “coffin” or “body.” In my prayer Jesus felt Mary’s words to be unbearably poignant—“Come and see”—because he remembered how he first used them with his disciples, inviting them to taste new life. So he weeps.

  John’s Gospel invites us into an intimate moment with Jesus. His humanity is on full display. So is his divinity. He weeps, but he also publicly declares that he is “the resurrection and the life,” and Mary affirms his divinity. The man who is proclaimed as divine shows compassion. God weeps for Lazarus.

  When Jesus is brought to the tomb, he orders the stone to be taken away. At the time some of the tombs in the region consisted of a cave whose opening was covered by a stone that fit into a groove dug in the ground, so the stone could be rolled away. So the idea of “taking away the stone” fits with archaeological evidence; this kind of burial was widespread in first-century Palestine.9 Many of the dead were buried in either a natural cave or a hole carved into the rocks, where there would be several shelves for bodies, each wrapped in linen, with the head and hands wrapped separately.

  The practical Martha, however, protests. “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Why would Jesus want to open the tomb anyway? Martha might have thought that Jesus wanted one last look at Lazarus, “our friend.”10

  Martha’s protests are entirely reasonable—she is concerned that if the tomb is opened, there will be a smell. Neither she nor the Gospel of John sugarcoats death. But notice something else: her inability (entirely understandable) to imagine something new, to look toward the future. Rather than anticipating something life-changing, she is concentrating on something small—the smell.

  But let’s not be too hard on Martha. She could not have known what Jesus was going to do. How could she? She had never seen anyone raised from the dead! By the same token, when Jesus asks that the stone be rolled away, Martha does not trust, but remonstrates with him. Her faith in God does not seem full. How often do we find ourselves focusing on the small problems (it will stink) or rehearsing past grievances (you’re late) rather than trusting that God may bring about something new? She concentrates on the negative, on the privation, on the loss. Again, this is natural and human, but it prevents her from seeing the possibility of the new.

  Undisturbed by Martha’s protests, Jesus prays. “Father, I thank you for having heard me.” Then he says in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

  The dead man emerges from the tomb, wrapped head to toe in his burial clothes, before the dumbfounded and frightened onlookers. Lusate auton, says Jesus, kai aphete auton hupagein. “Unbind him, and let him go.”

  IT’S HARD FOR ME not to be overwhelmed by emotion even when writing about this passage. This is Jesus’s supreme miracle, demonstrating the power of God over even death. Interestingly, John’s Gospel says nothing about the reaction of the crowd. In other stories they are “amazed” or “astonished.” Perhaps this is taken for granted. How could they be anything but amazed and astonished? It is a stunning example of the life-giving word. Jesus’s words literally give life to Lazarus.

  As astonishing as this narrative is, it may be easy for us to identify with elements of the story. When Jesus decided to stay behind with the disciples rather than visit his sick friend, it must have seemed confusing to both the disciples and later to Martha and Mary. “What is he doing?” Who hasn’t felt that God wasn’t doing what God should be doing in a painful situation? When Mary falls at Jesus’s feet and tells him that he should have come earlier and prevented so much suffering, it’s easy to agree with her.

  It’s also hard not to think about the movies. No matter how man
y times I pray with this Gospel passage, I always think of my two favorite film depictions of this miracle.

  In the 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth, the director Franco Zeffirelli provides an almost word-for-word reproduction of the scene. Mary’s lament about Jesus’s absence is slow, heartfelt, gentle. “Lord . . . if you had been with us, our brother would not have died.” Martha on the other hand, remonstrates with him about the stench. “His body must already be decaying,” she says. Jesus leads the crowd down a sandy outcropping to the place of the tomb.

  Then comes a close-up of Robert Powell, the British-born actor who plays Jesus, kneeling down before the tomb as he prays. He stands, lifts his arms, and shouts, “Lazarus, come forth!” The camera pans back and we see Jesus standing before the inky black opening of the tomb. Suddenly we see a small white figure emerge into the daylight to swelling music and hear the sounds of disbelief from the crowd. It’s all terribly moving.

  In The Greatest Story Ever Told, released in 1965, the director George Stevens handles the scene differently, particularly Jesus’s words. The director gives us the widest shot possible, with the crowd peopling a hillside far below a tiny tomb hewn from the rock. Then we are in the tomb, as if we too are the dead, and we see the stone slowly being rolled away. Max von Sydow faces us and whispers, “Lazarus.” The camera pulls back, revealing more of the crowd, and we hear him say, more forcefully, “Lazarus.” Then he shouts, “Come forth!” The music swells, and an even tinier figure in white suddenly appears at the entrance of the tomb. The dumbfounded disciples literally fall back in astonishment.

  Why does Jesus shout? It is not a cinematic flourish; both films hew closely to what is described in the Gospels. John’s Gospel says that Jesus spoke in a phonē megalē, a “great voice.”11 But why? Lazarus is dead and cannot hear. For a long time I wondered about that. Then something occurred to me about Jesus’s voice.