Materials
Gospel
of John, #6
When
Jesus Calls Your Name
John 11:38-44
by R. Todd Bouldin
All of us find ourselves at some point with a dead life. At
these points, we cry out in desperation for God to save us from what
seems like death, and perhaps it literally is death who has come to
visit our doorstep. Most of us have come to expect death and the fear
it has over our lives – so much so that we settle for just barely
living. But life is never over with Jesus, even when it seems that
your life is in the grave. Jesus refuses to abandon us to the tombs
where we are losing our lives.
Prayer
The Bible tells us that Jesus was good friends with Mary and Martha,
and their brother Lazarus. Lazarus had died, and his sisters came
begging for Jesus to save him. Jesus had taken His time getting there,
and now Lazarus was gone. When He heard that His friend had died,
John tells us that Jesus wept. If you have ever watched someone die,
you know that death is not pretty. It doesn’t smell good. It
hurts. It certainly hurts the loved ones who sit by the deathbed to
watch someone they love die because they are powerless to stop it.
That feeling of powerlessness in the face of death – of it being
beyond our control – that’s one of the reasons we don’t
like to talk about death very much. Despite our refusal to talk about
it, or to clean it up, or to try to overcome it, we experience death
all the time. Life is a matter of enduring one loss after another,
and it’s never pretty. There is not one of us who has not witnessed
the death of someone, or something, that we cherished. Like Jesus,
we weep at the pain of losing someone we love. Death comes in many
forms, but it always is about losing something we held dear. As
I said last week, it is even more difficult when it is something that
you thought God held dear too.
What have you succeeded in holding on to in your life? Did you get
to hang on to your children? Or your parents? Did you get to keep
your health, work, youth, body or your plans for life? Even if you
are still holding on to these, you know it is only a matter of time
before you have to give them up. After a while all the losses start
piling up on you. The day you realize that you have lost more than
you’re still holding is a dangerous day. The danger is that
this will be the day when you are tempted to give up on life and settle
for what you can squeeze out of it. That’s the day when death
will no longer be just a force in your life to come, but it becomes
a force that is determining how you are living right now. Sometimes
you can be dead before you are dead.
It isn’t just Lazarus who is in the tomb. It is you and me.
We entered the tomb the day we gave up on life, the day we gave up
for adventure and settled for security and for a life without passion,
risk, or a mission. We entered the tomb the day we settled for
a world where hunger, AIDS and poverty are accepted as inevitable.
We entered the tomb the day we said, “That is the way it is
and you can’t change it. Life is hard but at least I have my
little life in shape. I had better not take any chances with it. I
won’t risk getting involved. I won’t let my heart get
wounded again. I will never be vulnerable again. Instead, I will just
hang onto my neat, orderly, lonely little life.” That is the
day we just walked into a tomb and rolled the stone shut.
The only problem with walking into the tomb and shutting the stone
is that our hearts desire more – so much so that we will do
anything to avoid this death. We may have settled for the tomb,
but God has made our hearts to crave life. So we try to find our
way back out of the tomb – to live in but temporarily live above
it – with little vacation plans, schemes for making a little
more money, with retirement plans, with an affair, with alcohol or
drugs, or with plans to redecorate the house. But to be clear, this
is little more than just redecorating our tombs. You’re still
in the tomb.
Jesus does not settle for tombs as easily as we do. He has no interest
in helping you remodel your tomb. So He sometimes waits until you
are sick of the tomb. Sometimes He just weeps with us as the losses
seem to pile up one after another. But then there comes the day when
you are tired of the tomb, when you just sense you’re your life
has the stench of death, and it’s then that Jesus stands before
the tombs and the deadness of our lives, and He says, “Take
away the stone.” You have been dead long enough. It is time
to live.
“Take away the stone,” Jesus says. Martha remarks, “Already
there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Nice.
Martha already has settled. Everyone knows death. It stinks! But you
can’t do anything about loss – it is just the way it is
– “it stinketh.” Jesus responded, “Did I not
tell you that if you believe you would see the glory of God?”
If we can only believe in what we see, we would have to submit to
the power of the tomb. But if we believe in Who we see, the Savior
standing before the tombs of our lives, then we have found a power
greater than the tomb. So that is why we come here again today and
every week to proclaim that we believe that we are going to see more
than we can see – that we will see the glory of God.
Even if you have never been to Bethany, I'll assume you have been
in that tomb at some point in your life. Maybe it was when you came
home to tell your children that you had lost your job. Maybe it was
when the doctor tried to explain that he had found cancer in your
body. Maybe it was when someone rejected you, or a friend hurt you
and broke your heart. Maybe it was when you found yourself grieving
over the loss of a spouse or parent or a child. I think you know exactly
how a tomb feels. It is a cold, dark and fearful place. The question
is not how you will avoid the tombs – you can’t –
not even death itself. The question is whether you will allow death
to rule your life? Will you orient your existence in reference to
the tomb or in reference to life?
The best part of this story is that Jesus is not limited by our unbelief
or our half belief or our belief mixed with unbelief. According to
the text, surrounded by so much doubt, Jesus still steps up to the
tomb, He calls you by name, and He says, “Lazarus, come forth.”
Come out of your grief, come out of your fear, come out of your cynicism
and comfortable despair, come out of your loneliness and rejection,
come out of your boring dull life. Come out of your constant complaining.
Come out of your life where the tomb has gotten the best of you. Aren’t
you tired of that? Come forth from the places that you’ve been
nurturing addictions and hurt? Come forth from your anger and fear.
Why are you settling for that? He is the resurrection and the life.
He is calling for you by name, and He is bidding you to come back
to life.
The Resurrection and the Life has pulled back the door from your tomb
and has called you to return to life again. When Jesus comes to the
door of your tomb, and invites you into a new life, you can either
choose to stay in the tomb, or you can believe there is a new life
waiting outside of it.
“Then the dead man came out, his hands and his feet bound with
strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them,
‘Unbind him and let him go.’” Your disappointment
and grief have been great. Death always stinks. But the stone has
been rolled away – not just yours – most importantly,
His. The Savior is calling for you. Isn’t it time to come forth?
Life is waiting. All that it costs is giving up death.
When you walk out of your tomb, you will find yourself doing the most
extraordinary things. What would you do with your life if death
was not a limit, a fear or a factor? You will know you are out
of the tomb when your life is surrounded by people who unbind your
clothes of death and who accept and love you until you can breathe
and live again. Then you can do the most unimaginable things when
death no longer has a hold on you.
This last of the “signs” of Jesus in the Gospel of John
tells us that the tomb could not hold Lazarus, but this was not just
a once in history kind of moment, nor was it limited to one man in
Bethany. This sign is the last of the signs in this Gospel because
it points the way to another day, to Easter Sunday, when Jesus Himself
will come forth from the grave, and all of us with Him. Now your tomb
can no longer hold you. Come forth. The Savior calls you. He is the
Resurrection and the Life. The voice of God still echoes through the
ages, from the tomb of Lazarus, to the tomb of Jesus Christ, all the
way to the tombs that hold you, “Come forth!”
March 26, 2006
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