Martha, Mary and Lazarus

In John 11 we read the account of Jesus raising Lazarus the brother of Martha and Mary from the dead.

Martha and Mary are no strangers to us. In Luke 10 we find Martha opening “her home” to Jesus for a meal and a teaching opportunity. It seems then that Martha must have been the oldest of the three siblings and my guess is that Lazarus was the youngest making Mary the middle child. Martha was more concerned for the practical matters of hospitality which demonstrates her maturity.

Of course all three of them were orphans… there is no mention of any parents and none of the three had any spouses. All they had in the world was each other.

There’s a closeness that occurs between siblings when they lose a parent and I suppose an even greater closeness when you lose both parents.

Undoubtedly they were familiar not only with sickness but also sickness that leads to death. When Martha and Mary’s little brother Lazarus got sick and every day got sicker the two sisters knew what the end would be.

The difference was of course that they believed in Jesus and had seen or heard of Jesus healing even the most gravely ill and even restoring life to the freshly dead.

So the sisters who only had one hope of saving their brother sent a tremendously understated message to Jesus that didn’t even mention their brother’s name… “the one that you love is ill.”

Of course Jesus had known Martha, Mary and Lazarus since the day he was born and the role they were destined to play in the proving of his deity. So he waited and waited until just the right time.

In the mean time the two sisters were agonizingly watching their little brother continue to slip into the arms of death… and still no Jesus. They bury Lazarus and still no Jesus. Could it be that Jesus didn’t even care?

Finally with Lazarus dead and buried Jesus arrives on the scene but it’s too late for Lazarus because four days into death all animal live has already begun to decompose and rot. The sisters meet individually with Jesus and professed their belief in him with the same words… “if you had only been here our brother would still be alive” and when Mary finished those words she broke into tears. And Jesus seeing those tears and knowing that he was going to give the sisters their brother back to them alive cried himself.

Here are a few things we need to remember…

Martha and Mary believed in Jesus but failed to understand just what all he could do. Sometimes that’s the case with us as well. Things happen to us in life and we just can’t understand why God would let those things happen or why he didn’t answer our prayers and we just want to give up because we feel that God has given up on us.

I love that Jesus was overcome with emotion and cried. It’s generally not easy for men to cry and the idea that our Lord, Savior and God could cry is very reassuring for me. Jesus could have responded to the two sisters in a very condescending way and with spiritual superiority to ridicule them for their weak faith but he didn’t.

I wish I could have been there to see the shock and joy in their faces and to see them turn from their brother Lazarus and fall at Jesus feet and just cry for happiness.

Jesus knows that maybe our faith isn’t what it should be yet but remember Jesus loves us and is patient with us and whatever struggles we have in this life will be quickly forgotten when we see him face to face in eternity.

And maybe on that day we’ll all cry for happiness together.