Our Bible readings tonight are resolutely upbeat, as indeed is appropriate to the Easter season. Hezekiah gives thanks for his miraculous recovery from a life-threatening illness. Lazarus is even brought back from the dead. Yet we know that life isn’t always like that. Many of us have reason to be profoundly grateful for the skills of doctors and surgeons who may have given us extra years of life, but we know that others are not so fortunate, however deep their faith or earnest the prayers which may have been offered for their recovery. Many of us will have encountered those whose plight is as desperate as that of the author of Psalm 88:
Wretched and close to death from my youth up … I am desperate. Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me. They surround me like a flood all day long; from all sides they close in on me. Darkness is now my only companion.
What then are we to make of these very different outcomes? If our prayers for healing, for ourselves or for others, seem to have fallen on deaf ears, is it perhaps because our faith is not strong enough? Could it be that the person we have prayed for is not good enough, or that we ourselves are not good enough to be heard? Or is it simply that the age of miracles has passed? Wonders may still happen in books for children, or indeed in Bible stories, but not in the modern rational, scientific world that we inhabit as grown-ups.
These are hard questions with which men and women of faith have wrestled for thousands of years, and there are no easy answers, though some of the more obvious nonsenses can be dismissed readily enough. Any notion of flinty-hearted divine punishment is utterly wrong and downright pernicious. We have seen the love of God in the person of Jesus our Lord, and we know that His love for us, and for those we bring to him in our prayers, is more than generous enough to forgive our weakness and inadequacy – or theirs – when we come to him in faith. But that still leaves plenty of questions unanswered? If our God still has the power to intervene, and the compassion which would surely move him to want to do so, why doesn’t he use it more often?
Is there anything in the Biblical accounts of the healing of Hezekiah or the raising of Lazarus that might help us to answer these questions? When Hezekiah fell sick, and was told by the prophet Isaiah that he should set his affairs in order since he would surely die, he turned his face to the wall, begged God to remember how he had tried to walk faithfully before Him, and wept bitterly. The passage read for our first lesson is a psalm expressing his penitence as well as his faith. Isaiah anointed him with a paste of figs, and when he asked for a sign that his prayer had been heard, the shadow on the palace sun-dial famously moved backwards to signify the turning back of his own life clock to give him 15 extra years. Whatever you may think about that sun-dial, the Assyrians went home, abandoning their siege of Jerusalem, and Hezekiah did recover, even if the historical record suggests that he may not have lived more than another five years or so. Whether it was five years or 15, any reprieve was strictly temporary, and we are left with unanswerable questions about why he was spared. Was he more deserving than others? Did God have a point to make?
The raising of Lazarus is equally temporary, but perhaps the reasons for his resuscitation are a little easier to understand. We know that Lazarus and his sisters were close friends of Jesus, so that his compassionate affection for all three of them is never in doubt. As soon as first Martha and then Mary reaches Jesus, they say exactly the same thing: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. They had sent word to Jesus when Lazarus was ill, hoping he would come, and when he died they must have used these words to one another, over and over again. If only Jesus had been here … And then Martha’s faith comes tumbling out amidst all her distress as she says … Even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask. Jesus responds: Your brother will rise again. You can almost hear the disappointment in Martha’s voice as she struggles to accept such distant consolation … I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day … One senses that she is looking to Jesus for something more than that, and now he does not disappoint her. The consolation Jesus offers her is not for the distant future, but for now. I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. What an astonishing assurance for Martha to take on board. How her heart must have leapt. Because Jesus is the very essence of resurrection and indeed of life itself, Lazarus will never really die, she will never die. Her heart is racing. But Jesus is asking her a question. Martha, do you believe this? Yes, Lord, I do. You are the Messiah, the Son of God. And away she runs to fetch her sister.
When the two sisters return, Mary greets Jesus with the same grief-laden words as Martha had used. Lord, if only you had been here … Jesus shares their grief, and weeps with them, as indeed he weeps with us when we too are overwhelmed by grief for the loss of those we love. He asks where they have laid him, and he goes with them to the tomb. John makes it sound as if Jesus knew from the start what he was going to do, lingered deliberately so as not to arrive until well after Lazarus had died, and then had no hesitation about resuscitating him. But I wonder whether it was as clearly planned as that. Jesus had resuscitated at least one other person – Jairus’ daughter – but she had only been dead for a very short while, so sceptical folk might choose to believe that she hadn’t really died at all. That option was not open here. Lazarus had been dead four days. Jesus had understood from the very outset of his ministry that he needed to take care not to use his powers to work miracles to excite the adulation of the crowds. In the past he had refused to act when he felt that his time had not yet come, but now, in response to the sisters’ profound faith in him, as well as his own deep compassion, he summons Lazarus from the tomb, knowing full well that this will ratchet up the opposition to him, as indeed it does. It is this miraculous action that causes some members of the Sanhedrin to fear that the all too likely enthusiasm of the crowd will provoke the heavy boots of the Roman occupying army, but Caiaphas advises that such an outcome can be averted by if they hand Jesus over to be put to death – to die for the people as he says more truly than he knows.
The Bible is in no doubt about God’s intervention in human affairs for the working out of his plan for the salvation of the world, even if the traces of his activity are always easier to see with the benefit of hindsight. As we read about Hezekiah or Lazarus we are invited to perceive that our own lives may be similarly used to carry forward God’s purposes, if we put our trust in Him and seek to act in accordance with our best understanding of his will for us. But John’s gospel takes us a huge step further than that as he tells us how Jesus understood himself and his destiny. I am the resurrection and I am life. Lazarus could be resuscitated because in his love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for him he had already been drawn into that eternal life in Jesus which was beyond the power of death, because it was and is part of the life which Jesus shares with God. When we take the hand that Jesus reaches out to us, the life that flows in us and through us – his life – is not a mere lengthening of our mortal lives, such as Hezekiah or Lazarus experienced, but a sharing in his eternal life that not only transforms our experience of sickness and health, life and death, but breathes immortal life into the real person that will one day become the fulfilment of God’s purpose in us.
Jesus said: I am the resurrection and I am life. Lord, lead us ever more fully into that life. Amen