Canter Bridge

Though the Johannine Jesus’ response to news of Lazarus’ illness suggests a startling conflict of emotions, the equanimity of his conversation with Martha and Mary hews to a more placid line. I find the whole picture anything but posed and ungenuine. If Jesus is the person the Fourth Gospel has been suggesting, one might almost anticipate such experience and behavior in the context of the sickness and death of ‘the one whom (Jesus) loves’.

Deep friendship is the backdrop of this story. Those who have known this gift understand something of its potency, something of the forcefulness one confronts when its riches have been invaded by the contrary force of death.

Jesus’ conversation with a bereaved sister shapes a context for a startling reflection upon biblical hope assumed into the person of Jesus himself:

Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘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. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’

Jesus takes in hand a potent declaration of conventional hope in divine vindication ‘at the resurrection’. He then makes the most audacious claim that this hope finds its realization in him.

It is not immediately apparent what he means. A quick response might go something like this: In the face of his imminent confrontation with death via the circumstances of Lazarus’ demise, Jesus announces that he himself is the agent by which YHWH will realize the hope of national—and even personal—resurrection.

Yet on further reflection, Jesus appears to say more. He does not so much announce his agency in the enactment of a future-oriented home. To the contrary, he subsumes the expectation of resurrection into his own purpose and announces that he is that hope and more.

The ontology of the claim is challenging, indeed almost inscrutable. What is clear is the central position Jesus is taking in Jewish hope of experiencing the resurrection. If Jesus words are to be taken as true, that hope now pivots upon belief in Jesus. The ontological I am (the resurrection and the life) seems to exclude mere agency. Jesus assumes the story into himself, relativizes the details of expectation, and places himself at the center of life’s persistence beyond death through the hoped-for experience of resurrection.

In this light, Mary’s response seems almost a step backward toward conventions that might have seemed perfectly sane before this conversation.

Perhaps the conversation has only begun.