NOTES for Joh 11:1-45

The Savior's reaction to the news of Lazarus's illness and death shows well what the Way is. But not only the Way with a capital letter, the Way of the Messiah; every spiritual path of an ordinary person is subject to the same laws. And the first condition of the way is the quality of life. Of existence. Of being. The Savior's words about Lazarus's illness, which is "not unto death, but for the glory of God," at first glance seem strange at the very least: after all, Lazarus did die.

Of course, one could say: Jesus knew in advance that He would raise His dead friend. But that would be only part of the answer. The point is not that He knows the past and future in all fullness. The point is how He knows them. How He sees. And this, in turn, is determined precisely by that same quality of existence.

Where do we live: in the fallen world, where space, time, and chains of cause and effect are absolute reality? Or in the Kingdom, where all this is relative, where even causal links are reversible, and where the past can therefore become as if it had never existed at all? This determines the quality of our life. And the possibility of the way as well. Jesus stands on the Way from His very birth: after all, the fullness of His communion with His Heavenly Father was absolute from the very beginning of His Way. We ordinary people still need to set out on the way, if, of course, we want to reach that Kingdom which the Savior promises us and enter it.

But the very possibility of the way is connected with our spiritual state. It is this state that determines the quality of our life. And what we are able to see. The glory of God can be seen only from the Kingdom. If we have no relation to the Kingdom, all we will see is death. Christianity is the life of the Kingdom. But in our earthly life, life in a world where the Kingdom has not yet opened to the end and in fullness, abiding in the Kingdom becomes the way of the Kingdom. That very way on which, if one walks it to the end, one can see the glory of God. And meet Christ returning in glory.

Martha went out to meet Christ, while Mary remained at home. When Martha and Mary are compared, they are often contrasted as embodiments of practicality and spirituality, although Martha too is open to the Teacher’s words, and Mary is capable of being active. This time, Martha’s qualities were manifested not only in household cares, but also in the steps she took toward Christ, which cannot be separated from her ability to listen to Him and assimilate what she heard.

Christ does not even enter the house; He goes straight to the tomb. Here the Gospel has preserved a unique testimony for us: Jesus wept. This alone is enough to understand how incompatible His image is with that of a celestial being capable of sending Lazarus to his death in order to demonstrate His own power. No, He does not want people to die; He grieves over their fate and therefore intends to free us from enslavement to evil.

He asks the people gathered at the tomb to roll away the stone. Christ, who is able to raise the dead, could have managed it Himself, but that would not have benefited the people: we cannot raise the dead, but He is not obliged to do for us what lies within our power. Genuine hope in God must not be confused with the mentality of Emelya lying on his stove.

Lazarus was a friend of Christ, and He loved him very much. Yet Jesus allowed him to pass through the experience of death. He allowed it deliberately, because, of course, He could have come while Lazarus was still ill. The experience of death is something very important. In the story of Lazarus's family we see his sisters more, while Lazarus is as if silent, but we know the main thing about him: Jesus loved him and allowed him to die.

Very often, when we love someone who is seriously ill, we pray fiercely for his healing. Once a young woman had a father she loved beyond memory who was very seriously ill. She spoke about him with a very wise person, saying that she was asking for a cross for herself, since the Lord had not heard her prayers, which had already gone on for almost two years, so that at least from the cross she could pray for him and then He would hear and heal the sufferer. And the wise person answered her: what are you praying for, surely for healing; pray instead that God's will be done.

This is exactly what the story of the raising of Lazarus is about. Even the one He loves, perhaps such people in a special way, the Lord leads through the hardest experience: sometimes it is the experience of actual physical death, sometimes simply a particular cross, so that God's grace and God's glory may be revealed in them, for in them it is revealed with astonishing radiance.

Many of us know this situation: someone close to us has died, and friends come to express their condolences. They say, “We grieve with you,” or “We will all end up there,” in one way or another acquiescing to death and accepting its finality. Jesus' words are strikingly different. He speaks of resurrection, of victory over death. He speaks of Himself as the bearer of a life for which death is not the end. More than that, He can give such life to others.

Then comes the most important question: “Believest thou this?” For each person to whom this question is addressed, the moment of decisive choice now arrives—the choice of faith. Reason cannot help, because it has nothing to do where there is no information. An adventurous temperament cannot help, because both answers are equally risky. This choice can be made only by the human heart, the center of a person's free will and his capacity for love and trust without any proof. This question is now put to every one of us: “Believest thou this?”

Jesus' raising of Lazarus is described in unusual detail. The evangelist seems deliberately to set it apart from other miraculous events like it, whether healings or raisings. What is described here is indeed something extraordinary. Even the raising of Jairus's daughter was not like the raising of Lazarus. There, death had still only just touched a person. Here, its complete and obvious triumph has already occurred. So complete that people even want to stop Jesus when He is about to enter the tomb, because it is already too late and useless. Nothing can be done anymore, and entering the tomb means becoming unclean, in this case with no need at all.

But He knows what He is doing. He knows what He lives by and what He carries within Himself. And He knows that the Kingdom is stronger than death, that there in the Kingdom there is simply no place for death. And Lazarus, coming into contact with the Kingdom, rises. Death retreats, just as it will in due time retreat from Him Himself on the day of His Resurrection. Here everything depends on the life by which a person lives. If it is the life of the Kingdom, to the end and in fullness, then there is no death for that person. If it is the life of the old world, not yet transformed by the breath of God, then death is inevitable. So it is with Lazarus: he lost the life of this world that he had. Death conquered, as it always conquers what this world calls life but what in fact turns out to be something between life in its fullness and death. But Jesus brought him another life, the life by which He Himself lives. In this life there is no place for death, and Lazarus rises. He returns to life.

Of course, not to the fullness of the life of the Kingdom that the Savior carries within Himself. Death retreats before the Kingdom, but a person contains only as much life as he is able to contain. Lazarus returned to that relative fullness of earthly life that was accessible to him, and in that sense he remained the same. Even contact with the Kingdom does not change a person by itself, without that person's participation. But the experience of such contact remains with a person forever. In this sense, Lazarus certainly changed and could no longer become what he had been before. The evangelist tells us nothing about this man's later fate. What happened to him afterward, after the Resurrection and after Pentecost, can only be wondered about. But what is said is enough to understand: the Kingdom truly entered the world. Not yet in all its fullness, but finally and irreversibly.

The raising of Lazarus is for us first of all an "assurance of the coming general resurrection." Raising Lazarus, the Lord gives us proof that the terrible lot of mortal humanity is changed as a result of His victory on the Cross. And we can believe that the gift of His grace from the Cross of Golgotha is given to all and to each, that our death loses its irrevocability before the face of Christ. Reading Isaiah's prophecy in Nazareth, the Lord says that He has come "to set the oppressed free." Today we see that this is not a metaphor, that He truly frees the age-old prisoners of hell: us. Therefore Christians, meeting Christ who has come for us into this terrible world, sing Him a song of praise.

Today's reading gives us another testimony to the triumph of the Kingdom that Jesus brought into the world. In every age and among all peoples without exception, death's triumph over life has been perceived as something unjust and contrary to what ought to be. Attempts to regard death like a Stoic or a natural philosopher, viewing it with philosophical calm and accepting it as something regular and inevitable, and therefore normal, have generally failed. At the moment of coming face to face with death, it still inspires only horror and revulsion. Other feelings connected with the causes and circumstances of a death are often mixed with these, of course, but those feelings have nothing to do with death itself: their source is precisely those causes and circumstances, not the fact of dying.

The Bible explains this attitude toward death: death entered the world as a consequence of the Fall. It is part of the world's evil, which must inevitably disappear once the world, transformed by God's power, becomes part of the Kingdom. By weeping when He sees those who mourn (vv. 32-36), Jesus confirms that death is not an imagined tragedy of human life but a real one.

This, of course, is not the end: resurrection, Judgment, and the Kingdom lie ahead. In Gospel times every believing Jew knew about the resurrection (vv. 23-24), yet death still remained a state contrary to human nature; it contradicted God's design for human beings and their destiny. The Kingdom therefore proves incompatible with death.

It is no accident that Jesus says He Himself is the resurrection (vv. 25-26): He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and death retreats before the Kingdom. Of course, a return to one's former life, not yet transformed by God's power, in the former world, which has not yet become part of the Kingdom, can hardly be considered the end of the journey. This is not yet the resurrection that believing Jews awaited. But death and the Kingdom are incompatible, and so even someone not yet fully transformed finds in the Kingdom the fullness of life available to him.

No one can contain more life than he is able to contain, but in touching the fullness of God's life, each person receives the measure of life available to him. Lazarus had not yet reached complete transformation, but he was entirely capable of living the life that every healthy person lives in our still not fully transformed world. He receives the fullness possible for him as he comes out into God's light from the tomb in which he was buried (vv. 38-44). Then everyone could see plainly that the Kingdom had truly entered the world and, with it, so had the resurrection that until then was thought to lie only in the future.

One might think that so vivid a demonstration would have melted and converted every heart, but apparently nothing of the kind happened. Some truly came to believe (vv. 45-46), while others became even more firmly opposed to Christ and the Kingdom. But the evidence was too plain, and those who rejected the Kingdom were left with no choice, in the logic of their persistent rejection, but to conclude that they had to rid themselves of the One who brought the Kingdom into the world (vv. 47-53). Thus rejection of the Kingdom leads the Savior of the world, sent by God, to the cross.

Death puts many things in their place. It cannot be deceived, it cannot be laughed off, before it all are equal, and no one can escape it. Therefore it is not surprising that a person compares the most serious and important things in strength with death - a worthy comparison: "love is strong as death" (Song 8:6). Religious faith, as the most serious content of many people's lives, has more than once been set alongside death; thousands of martyrs chose to die rather than renounce their faith.

So death is a kind of boundary at which the final testing of faith takes place. This is not necessarily one's own death - Lazarus's sisters faced this test just as he himself did. They kept faith, but not to the end. There will be a resurrection of the dead, but not now, Martha thinks.

That is why these words sound strange to her: "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live." And victory over death takes place, even before the final triumph of Pascha, and before we ourselves can be convinced by experience that love is stronger than death.

How comforting it is to hear the words of the prophet Ezekiel, especially when you realize that your heart is full of evil thoughts and your life of evil deeds. Through the prophet, the Lord says that the people will have one King, and therefore one will uniting a multitude of people. Finding a place in every heart, this will shall renew it, heal it, and cleanse it of sin. That heart will no longer defile itself with idols, abominations, and every kind of vice. The Lord also says that He will gather His people from everywhere, while in the Gospel of John we read that the sacrifice is offered not only for God's people, that is, for the Jews, but also for all of us, the scattered children of God. Jesus dies on the cross and rises again in order to gather into one all who live on earth and to widen the bounds of the "people of God." Moreover, the Lord promises to be our God forever; all that remains for us is to desire to become His sons, to cross the threshold into the "people of God," and to remain there forever.

Jesus performs an unprecedented miracle: the raising of Lazarus. This event, however, is perceived by people very differently: for some it becomes a sign of God's blessing, and for others, a dangerous manifestation of extremism. The Pharisees fear that this strange preacher from Judea, by His miracles, will attract the people to Himself and start an uprising that will be suppressed by the Romans, thereby putting an end to political freedom and religious life. Their earthly logic is entirely understandable: common sense suggests acting exactly as they did, sacrificing one person in the interests of the majority.

At times the Lord proposes that we do something that does not fit within generally accepted frameworks. His plan can appear insane to us, contradicting our ideas about the order of the world. It is hard for us to accept that His will can involve the disruption of familiar peace and quiet, the loss of what was achieved with hard labor, even death - and death on a cross. But precisely this "final" fall of Jesus, from the Pharisees' point of view, became salvation for the whole universe, because divine arithmetic differs from earthly arithmetic.