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| Image by Jonathan Shaw |
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A GREETING
O God, do not be far from me;
O my God, make haste to help me.
(Psalm 71:12)
A READING
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for 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 looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’
(John 11:37-44)
MUSIC
A MEDITATIVE VERSE
'See how he loved him!'
(John 11:36)
A POEM
What could I make of the grass
But a gate to the skies
Looking up
Clouds floating by
Like the shapes of the dead ones
As radiant as angels
And when I opened the earth
Their tombs were all empty
My mother and father
The first to speak
Come here son
O how we missed you
All I could do was weep
- "I Lazarus" by Stephen Rybicki
found on commonwealmagazine.org
VERSE OF THE DAY
The love with which you have loved me
may be in them, and I in them.
(John 17:26)
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| Image by Jonathan Shaw |
In today’s reading, the raising of Lazarus finally takes place and the man himself is restored. The miracle has witnesses and is indisputable. The very landscape has now shifted. Jesus’ call to “unbind Lazarus,” is in language that is more like a command to the gathered community. It is a call to set the man free who has been bound by death. We can hear it as a call to all of us to come together and try to set free those who are chained by injustice and oppression, who feel as if they are dying within their lives.
The identities of all of the Bethany figures have been debated by scholars in many different directions, as we have explored in brief on some of the pages. But regardless of who they all really were, it was the desire of the John writer, who may well have been Lazarus himself, to create the portrait of a family that was very much on the edges. With one foot in Jerusalem and one foot in the Galilee, they were willing to risk a very great deal to support Jesus whom they understood to be the messiah. Their Jewish identity, their capacity to embrace the Galileans, the individual roles that each one of them plays in the storytelling, especially in the story of the raising of Lazarus, all point to people of courage, trying to do the right thing in their own day and age.
They are also a family who experienced the profound challenges of catastrophic illness and death. Probably not just with Lazarus but also with their father (if we imagine that ‘Simon the Leper’ referred to in both the Mark 14 and Matthew 26 anointing stories, is their father). They experience something we all have known at some point in our lives, which is that feeling that God has deserted us, and/or that we cannot see or feel God’s presence anymore. What this story offers us is a chance to see the possibility that new life is always happening, no matter how much we doubt it. The profound will of God is to regenerate and create life, against all odds, and against all attempts by humankind to thwart it. Our God loves life, and wants us all to have it abundantly.
The family at Bethany disappear after the beginning of John 12 and Mary's anointing of Jesus. They are likely present in the events of Holy Week but not named specifically. They do not appear anywhere else in Acts, or the letters of Paul and the other epistles. Their story of the raising of Lazarus, however, which takes up an entire chapter in the Gospel of John, offers us a fragile but beautiful portrait of the human Jesus just before the events that led to his death.
Stories are the backbone of the bible and of our own lives of faith. What are the significant stories of your own journey, and how can you share them with others so that they too may be encouraged?
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A STORY OF ENDURANCE
The white-throated rail is a bird species that is native to Madagascar and the Seychelles Islands. A subspecies, known as the Aldabra rail colonized the small island of Aldabra in the Indian Ocean many hundreds of thousands of years ago. It evolved to become flightless, owing to the lack of predators. A climate event caused the island to be submerged under water wiping out all animal species on it, including the rail. When the land again emerged, once again the rail, which had continued to live on Madagascar, flew to Aldabra and inhabited it. Once again, it slowly became flightless and remains so to this day. The Aldabra rail lives only on Aldabra. For reasons not yet understood, it has only wanted to live on this island. Twice it came back from extinction, in a process known as 'iterative evolution,' when a species re-evolves from the same source population. It is now believed to be the last flightless bird in the Indian Ocean. Read more here.
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LC† Awakened by the Spirit is a project of Lutherans Connect, supported by the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and the Centre for Spirituality and Media at Martin Luther University College. To receive the devotions by email, write to lutheransconnect@gmail.com. The devotional pages are written and curated by Deacon Sherry Coman, with support and input from Pastor Steve Hoffard, Catherine Evenden and Henriette Thompson. Join us on Facebook, and on Twitter. Lutherans Connect invites you to make a donation to the Ministry by going to this link on the website of the ELCIC Eastern Synod and selecting "Lutherans Connect Devotionals" under "Fund". Devotions are always freely offered, however your donations help support the ongoing work.
Thank you and peace be with you!