Yesterday, the Doors Open festival, we toured a bunch of people through the building, gave a bit of a historical talk. We had great jazz on the corner thanks to Biboet and a number of his friends, and that went on for several hours. So, if you missed it, next year, next year’s time. Hey, let’s begin by reading some scripture together, looking at God’s word, and you can pick up the uh the Bible in front of you like we’re going to read John 11:es 28-50. So, it’s a long chapter, John 11. We’re sort of starting in the middle of the story and we’re going to read through to verse 50. So John 11 28. When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him? They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him.” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?” Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there’ll be an odor, for he’s been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone, and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him and let him go.” Many of the Jews therefore who had come with Mary and who had seen what he did believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him. And the Romans will come and they’ll take away our place and our nation. But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all, nor do you understand that it’s better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.” It’s the reading of God’s word. Oh, and I need my quick So this is the seventh and final sign performed by Jesus in the Gospel of John. And John in the book of John, Jesus’ miracles. They’re not called miracles. They’re referred to as signs. Of course, a sign is something that points beyond itself. Can be very helpful and it can be bold and it can be striking. But the purpose of the signs is always take you somewhere else. sign might direct you to what’s directly behind it. In our case, the church might direct you to something that’s far away, but tell you that you’re heading in the right direction. And John affirms near the end of his book in chapter 20:30 that Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not recorded in the Gospel of John. But the seven signs that John chose were specifically chosen to include and and for the purpose that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. So the signs are there to point to Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, as the savior, directing us to move in his direction and to gain life in his name. The seven signs that John selectively chooses along with the seven I am statements that Jesus makes to disclose his identity in the Gospel of John, they all point clearly toward Jesus as being absolute God. Jesus is God. God alone can save us. And as Jesus repeatedly declares, he has the power to raise us up on the last day. So this seventh and climactic sign, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, it’s accompanied by Jesus’ fifth great I am statement. I am the resurrection and the life. And the sign and the statement make a powerful point together. It’s a great story we’re looking at this morning. A stirring story, but we don’t want to end our time thinking that was a great story or we’re in danger of missing the vital thing that the sign is pointing us toward. So this morning we’re going to view Jesus from three perspectives. We see Jesus in his in his glory, his greatness, his highness, his deity. Then we see him in his compassionate humanity. And then we see Jesus finally as an outraged warrior taking on that enemy that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15 as the last enemy to be destroyed, the great enemy, death. So see Jesus in his highness, his humanity, and his rage. And those are the three kinds of Jesus that we all need. We need Jesus to be all three for us today. Our passage begins with death stalking one of Jesus’ great friends. Jesus and the disciples were not in that region of Jerusalem. They had left the region because a mob had flashed their teeth against Jesus and they were out to get him. So at the end of chapter 10, we read that Jesus had gone all the way to the east side of the Jordan River where John the Baptist had previously been baptizing. But back in the outskirts of Jerusalem was that little village of Bethany where Jesus apparently regularly visited three siblings. Likely he stayed with them each time he went to and from Jerusalem. I don’t know if those siblings lived together. Uh more likely, it’d be more common certainly if all three of them were married and had their own homes. But the sisters Mary and Martha sent word to Jesus that their brother Lazarus was seriously ill. Their urgent note said,”Lord, the one you love is sick.” And when Jesus read that note, he said three things that must have sounded very odd to the disciples. First, he said, “This illness does not lead to death. It’s for the glory of God so that the son of God may be glorified through it.” He further explained to his disciples, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m going there to wake him up.” And they took that to mean know he’s probably on the men. He’s doing okay. He’s resting comfortably. Jesus said to them, “No, Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I’m glad I was not there so that you may believe, but let us go to him.” So Jesus deliberately delayed rushing back to his friend for purposes of glorifying God and boosting the faith of his followers and setting up that great conflict between Jesus and death, the last enemy to be destroyed. In that classic Ingmar Bergman film, The Seventh Seal has an iconic scene where this uh crusading knight returned from the Crusades and there’s black plague all around his fate now rests on a chess game with death. And a present- day upgrade has a modern guy saying to death, “I don’t suppose you play pickle ball.” see the the deepest existential crisis all of us face yet we have this amazing gift of life given to us knowing all the while that it’s going to be stripped away taken away suddenly uh and at someone else’s choosing we have nothing to say about it Bobby Jameson notes that roughly three different generations of people are alive on this planet at any one time but Ecclesiastes chapter 1 says that a generation comes and a generation goes but the earth remains forever In other words, blink once and one generation, 2 and a half billion people on the planet are gone. Blink again, another 2 and a half billion people. Blink a third time and no one who’s alive today will be left on the planet. It’s like humanity is not being renewed, it’s being recycled. And that wouldn’t bother any of us at all if we were a ladybug or a dog or a blue whale. But somewhat inconveniently, Ecclesiastes 3:11 reminds us that for us humans, God has set eternity in our hearts, making us what Jameson calls cosmic misfits. God has put something in us that’s bigger than anything around us. God has planted in us a vastness that spawns yearning and seeking and searching. The eternity within us doesn’t render us serene, but restless. Eternity keeps gnawing at us from the inside. And that gnawing always makes death seem incoherent and unnecessary and utterly unnatural to us. We’re built for eternity, but we’re fast fading toward a meaningless grave. So our biggest problem with life is death. And the best that many people can do is just try to stay distracted, not think about it. You that small rectangular screen we carry in our pockets, that’s a huge help to being distracted if we want to be distracted. And AI promises a much greater revolution. As amazing as chat GPT is today, and it it is amazing if you use it. Uh increasingly increasing number of people are using it as their wonderful counselor to commune with every day and tell them that assure them that life is okay. But as phenomenal as it is right now, in a couple of years, if predictions are borne out, the AI of today is just going to seem like dialup internet. And if someone doesn’t want to spend any time at all thinking about end of life or death, there’ll be lots of options available to fill their minds and their time. But our distractions won’t go on forever. Eventually, it’s going to catch up to us. Ultimately, death remains as much problem for us in the 21st century as it did for those in the first century. And if there is someone around who can take death on or even reverse it for us, that someone would be very definitely worth knowing. So in our passage that someone is striding toward the tomb of his friend and he’s heedless of the warnings of his disciples. They say don’t go back to the suburbs of Jerusalem. That danger lurks there and and your presence won’t go unnoticed. But Jesus goes anyway. Upon arrival, Jesus finds out that his friend’s been dead for 4 days. Funeral been held. All the egg salad sandwiches and the crackers and pickles and cheese. It’s all been it’s all gone. good number of people are still hanging around with Mary and Martha to comfort them. And Martha learns that Jesus had come. She rushes out to meet him, finds him and says,”Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” Now, she goes on, she says, “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” And in reply, Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” And Martha took that as kind of the preacher talk that well-meaning people use to comfort all the people who are bererieved. You know, we say it. We say, “Oh, he’s in a better place. You’ll see him again someday. He’s waiting for you in heaven.” And those aren’t incorrect statements. They they can bring some comfort to people who are mourning. But that’s not what Jesus was saying to Martha. Martha held to the general popular Jewish belief that in the future, at the end of days, there’d be a general resurrection from the dead. So she says to Jesus, “Yeah, yeah, I know my brother will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” But she doesn’t try to conceal her disappointment with Jesus. Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died. But Jesus hadn’t said what he said to console Martha. He didn’t aim to comfort her. He said it to challenge her and to teach her and to cause her to wrestle against logic, to wrestle with her faith. Jesus went on, “I’m the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Jesus was telling her, Martha, I’m not here to give you platitudes about seeing your brother someday again. The resurrection, it’s not merely a future phenomenon or event. The resurrection is standing right in front of you right now. Resurrection is not a promise. It’s a person. And I am the resurrection and the life standing before you right now in real time. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Jesus then challenged her directly. Says, Martha, do you believe this? Martha, do you know that I have the power over life and death right here, right now? I’m not interested in whether you have an abstract belief in the resurrection. Do you have personal belief in me who can make it happen? And we can picture Martha at that point kind of struggling and ramping up her faith. and she gasps in reply, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you’re the Christ, the son of God, who was to come into the world.” In other words, yes, I do believe that you can do anything. It’s almost like the guy who said, “I believe, Jesus. Help my unbelief.” So, that’s a high point. That’s a theological mountain peak when Jesus says, “I’m the resurrection and the life.” That’s about as high as we can climb in our perspective of Jesus. But what happened next, I think might be even more needful for you and I, more needful for us to experience of Jesus. Because Martha stepped aside. Her sister Mary came running up to Jesus. She fell at his feet and she said the exact same thing to Jesus that her sister had said a moment ago. Said, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.” As a bit of an aside, there’s three occasions in the Gospels where we see this Mary of Bethany. And every time she’s mentioned, she’s always in the same posture. Whether she’s sitting and listening to Jesus teach or later anointing Jesus with perfume, we’ll read about that next week, or here near the tomb of her dead brother, Mary is found all three times right at the feet of Jesus. It’s like it was her favorite place in the world to be. And on that day, she fell at his feet, said the exact same thing her sister had. But Jesus’ response to her is very different. With Martha, Jesus taught and challenged and he drew deeply from a reservoir of faith that Martha probably didn’t even know she had. But with Mary, we have Jesus saying nothing. We read that when Jesus saw her weeping and all the other mourers around her, he was deeply moved and troubled. Verse 35, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. Now Jesus knew that in a couple of moments time he was going to turn that whole funeral into a party. He had told his disciples, “Lazarus is dead. I’m going down to wake him up.” Jesus knew how deliriously happy everyone was going to be in a few moments. So why then did he weep? I think it’s because he has bound his heart so much to people like us. He lives in deeper sympathies with our struggles and our sadness than anyone else, including our spouse and our parents and our siblings and our closest friends. Compared to Jesus, the son of God, we’re just like specks of dust. But when we hurt, we create grief in the life of the creator of the cosmos. Just think about that for a moment. No other religion dares say anything of the sort. No other religion would dare to grant their God the level of sensitivity and compassion that would say when we hurt, he hurts. You know, we weep over the loss of uh those we love most that are most valuable to us. Jesus weeping with Mary and the other mourers at the tomb of Lazarus mean tells us a great deal about how much Jesus values us. With Martha, Jesus resisted her sorrow and he challenged her to hope and he forced her faith to flow uphill. With Martha, he presented himself as God. But with Mary, he’s showing himself to be utterly human. His love for her and that family, it sucked Jesus under. It stripped him of his composure and it left him speechless. Have you ever considered that your pain and your hurt might cause the God of the universe to lose his composure and weep for you? That’s quite a thought that we who are made in the image of God, we lose our composure when those we love are hurting most. Must mean that God’s never stoic or impassive when he sees us suffering. This is the same God who Zephaniah 3:17 says takes so much delight in us that he rejoices and he sings over us. How does he feel then when we’re sad? Every parent knows that we tie our emotions to our children. And someone has said that a parent can only be as happy as their least happy child. I I don’t know if that’s completely true, but it’s worth thinking about. And in turn, God has linked his emotions to the well-being of his children so much that even when he knows he’s about to turn their mourning into joy, Jesus still loses his composure in the climate of sorrow that’s around him. Ah, some of us Christians, we’re we’re a little more of the thinking and the theological persuasion. We love direct truth. And we may not be the most empathetic or compassionate of people. Other Christians, they’re super empathetic and compassionate. Might be softer on truth and quicker to feel emotion. But really, truth without tears won’t help anyone any more than tears without truth will. We do need both. We can’t just emphasize the deity of Christ at the expense of his humanity or vice versa. We need Jesus’ ministry to Martha challenging her as much as we need his ministry to Mary. We need him to challenge our faith and force us to to work our faith uphill. And we need need him to just weep over us and say nothing. So Jesus stands this morning ready to do both what whatever we need at this moment in our lives. He interacts with these sisters in front of the tomb. See his highness, his humanity, his truth and his tears. one more aspect of Jesus that needs to come out and that’s his rage. You know, there’s a Greek word that’s used in the original writing of John’s gospel. It shows up in verses 33 and 38 in our passage. English translators, they have a bit of a quandry with this word. In the New International Version that I use quite a bit. It says in verse 33 that Jesus was deeply moved in spirit. And again in verse 38 in front of the tomb, it says that Jesus was deeply moved. And that term translated deeply moved. And you don’t have to be a Greek scholar to know this. You just have to see all the uses of it in the Greek language. It means to snort in anger. And it’s often used of animals like horses snorting in anger. When it is used to describe people uh like in Mark 14 25, it has the same meaning because there there’s a group of men sitting around the room and they’re snorting at Mary for her recklessness and wasting all of her perfume on Jesus. means they were outraged, they were indignant, they were furious, they were full of anger. So translations would soften this word to mean just deeply moved might be doing us a bit of a disservice. There’s really no linguistic justification for that. Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the New Testament, the message, I think it comes closer to the mark when he translates the phrase to mean that Jesus was deeply angry and at the tomb he was quaking with rage. So then how and why in that context outside the tomb of Lazarus was Jesus enraged. Uh what was he mad at? Who was he mad at? Wasn’t mad at Mary or Martha. He wasn’t mad at the crown of mourners. Wasn’t mad at the disciples. But he was terribly angry at the enemy he was about to confront, the enemy of death. Theologian BB Warfield writes that Jesus advances to the tomb not weak and sniveling, but as a champion preparing for conflict. The same death that triggered his grief also triggered his outrage. Death is our enemy. It comes to unnaturally terminate the lives of people God has created in whom he has placed eternity. And as our our enemy became Jesus’ enemy and people, you know, people we’ve seen them when they passed away, they might look very peaceful the first few moments they pass away, but give them a few days and you see how waxy and colorless they get and and how death mocks all the efforts of the embombers and the morticians. Puts people on display as a bit of a perverted replica of what they once were. When Jesus told people to take away the stone from Lazarus’s tomb, Martha said, “It’s not a good idea. It’s been four days. He’s going to be pretty gy. I think we can still do what we need to do here, but let’s not expose ourselves to this odor.” Because death makes compost of our bodies. Death mocks bodies that were once warm and live and fit and flexible. But Jesus can wind back even compost. Jesus reminded Martha, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God, Lazarus, come out?” There was some kind of stirring or reassembling going on inside the tomb and all the bugs and the microorganisms that had been feeding on Lazarus had to stop. And from the darkness into the sunlight either hopped or shuffled Lazarus, looking like a mummy wrapped in strips of cloth and with a cloth around his face and Jesus ordered him to be set free from his grave clothes. Jesus was no stoic in dealing with death. He was furious with it. Evil, suffering, and death. It shouldn’t be here. It’s the human condition as a result of human sin. And sin gave the death sentence to the human race. We deserve it. How can Jesus do anything about the death sentence when it’s exactly what we deserve for the way that we’ve offended our Lord and our creator? Well, here we see Jesus fighting for us hand-to-hand combat with death for his friend Lazarus. By extension, he’s fighting for all of us. And the reason this seventh and final sign in the gospel is so climactic is that in calling Lazarus out of the tomb, Jesus knew he was signing his own death warrant. Breaking up the funeral of Lazarus, Jesus was guaranteeing his own funeral. The only way to get Lazarus out of the grave was for Jesus to enter the grave himself. To deliver any of us from the jaws of death, Jesus was going to have to have the jaws of death clamp down on him. Because raising Lazarus from the dead, that was a tipping point. That was a bridge too far for the religious leaders, the enemies of Jesus. We read in verse 47, when they heard about the raising of Lazarus, the chief priests and the Pharisees, the religious pubs in Jerusalem, they called a meeting of their council, the Jewish Sanhedrin. What are we accomplishing? They asked. Here’s this man. He’s performing so many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone’s going to believe in him. The Romans will come. They’ll take away both our place and our nation. And Caiaphas, the high priest, he might have been the clearest thinker of them all. He spoke up and says, “You don’t know anything. You don’t realize it’s better for one man to die than for the people uh for the people than that the whole nation perish.” And says, “From that day on, they they put the wheels in motion for the final solution.” And prior to that, we’ve seen various spontaneous outbursts and aggressions against Jesus in the temple courts. But now, the plot was formal. It was official. It involved the highest echelons of religious hierarchy. Bureaucracy of murder was now stamped and certified. And we read in the next chapter, they weren’t going to leave any loose ends. They planned on killing Lazarus as well because a walking, talking, resuscitated dead man. Worst kind of PR that they could have imagined. So, you know, Caiaphas, the high priest, and Jesus both agreed on one thing, and that was that Jesus’ death needed to be substitutionary. Caiaphas recognized that Jesus needed to be killed as a substitute to preserve the nation. Either Jesus dies or the nation dies. And Jesus knew that he had to he had to die as a substitute so that death wouldn’t have the last laugh on any of us. Either Jesus dies or all of humanity dies without hope and without forgiveness, without any opportunity to be reconciled with our creator. Jesus knew that only his sinless sacrifice on the cross absorbing our debt would enable him to offer us the resurrection and the life enable him to call us. He says, “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. Everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.” So, it’s a beautiful passage this morning showing us how we need the truth of Jesus. We need the tears of Jesus. We need the rage of Jesus combating the enemy of death on our behalf and doing it so successfully that in 1 Corinthians 15 we are invited not to fear death but to jeer it. We have this slogan given us to use whenever we need it. Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, O death is your sting? You know, in one of the Cohen brother movies, it’s a western. It’s entitled The Ballad of Buster Scrugs. There’s one character played by James Franco. He robs a bank. He doesn’t get away with it. He’s sentenced to be hanged. But just as his horse goes out from under him and he begins swinging by his neck, a benefactor rescues him in the nick of time. And later though, Franco gets caught up in another crime and he’s sentenced to hang once again. So on the gallows alongside fellow criminals, Franco turns to the man next to him who’s weeping in fear and sorrow. calmly gives him a knowing look and says to him, “hm, first time and then they all drop to their deaths.” So, yeah, I wonder how Lazarus felt. I don’t know how long later, presumably after his friend Jesus had died, been crucified, and raised from the dead. Lazarus found himself on his deathbed once again. And he says, “Oh, this again.” And he feels his his his soul leaving his body, but there’s no fear. He’s been here before. He knows Jesus is his re resurrection and his life. He’s going to wake up in the presence of his friend and his savior. That’s the assurance that we want to take away from this passage this morning for us as well. So, some things that we can take to Jesus in prayer this morning. Just take a couple of moments. You might want to confess to Jesus how desperately you need him to be your resurrection and your life. Might want to thank Jesus that he gives you both his truth and his tears, his compassion for you. And praise God that he’s defeated death on our behalf and that death has no ultimate victory or sting to inflict us with. So take a couple moments. This is your time with God. and I’ll close us off.