Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John. Glory to you, O Lord. The sisters of Lazarus sent word to Jesus saying, master, the one you love is ill.
When Jesus heard this, he said, this illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God that the Son of God may be glorified through it.
Now, Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was. Then after this, he said to his disciples, let us go back to Judea.
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, but Mary sat at home.
Martha said to Jesus, lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.
Jesus said to her, your brother will rise.
Martha said, I know he will rise in the resurrection. On the last day, Jesus told her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live. And everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?
She said to him, yes, Lord, I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.
He became perturbed and deeply troubled and said, where have you laid him?
They said to him, sir, come and see.
And Jesus wept. So the Jews said, see how he loved him.
But some of them said, could not the one who have opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?
So Jesus, perturbed again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it.
Jesus said, take away the stone.
Martha, the dead man's sister, said to him, lord, by now there will be a stench. He has been dead for four days.
Jesus said to her, did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?
So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me. But because of the crowd here, I have said this that they may believe that you sent me.
And when he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, lazarus, come out.
The dead man came out tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.
So Jesus said to them, untie him and let him go.
Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him, the Gospel of the Lord.
It is always good when we read any scripture, but particularly the Gospels, to understand at first who the original audience was that it was written for. Now we believe that the Scripture is living, so it still speaks to us today, but we can get a better insight if we think who it was originally written for. And John's Gospel was written for a people that was facing fierce persecution.
And because of that, John's Gospel is geared in what is commonly referred to as a high Christology, where Jesus is very much divine, while de emphasizing his human nature.
So he always knows what's going to happen. He always is in control.
And he seems like he's just doing things, at least in my opinion, to make an impression upon us without fully living out his humanity. Now, that's not a bad thing because it would be very encouraging to people who are struggling because it tells them God's in charge.
But in this particular passage of John's Gospel, the raising of Lazarus, we see both things at work. We see that Jesus, who is totally in control, who says things so people can learn from them, but we also see the human side of Jesus just a little bit.
And if we could all speak ancient Greek, and I know there's only probably 10 or 20 of you that can do that, we would have an even better insight into that human nature.
Because in English, the word gets translated as perturbed.
But I really think that is a poor translation because I get perturbed driving on Eastman. Right. I mean, that's not what's really going on here. And if we used some of our own idiom, we might get a better insight into it. I think a better word would be maybe like just in shock or deeply troubled or kicked in the gut.
Doing that, we would have a better understanding of what's going on here for him.
And notice it's said two different times. The first time is that he's seeing his friends grieve and he's grieving as well, because he loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus. His humanity is bursting forth.
And in the second time, where it says he is perturbed, we see him scared because he's also recognized that his life is getting pretty close to an end.
He's been saying things and doing things that have put the people who are in power on edge.
He's been going against the establishment. He's been speaking truth when the powerful don't want to hear truth.
And he knows the end is approaching and he's scared and he's troubled.
And in both these instances, that human part of Jesus, remember, we believe he's fully human in all things but sin.
It's there now for us now, believing that the scriptures are truly still alive. What are we supposed to glean from that?
That we have a God that fully understands our humanity.
A God that is experienced in Christ, all of those emotions and struggles, sorrows and even joys that we face.
So when we're grieving, we know that our God can understand us because he's walked in our shoes.
When we're struggling, when we're scared, when we're deeply troubled, we have a God in Christ who can understand what that is.
We have a God who can understand what it means to love as he did for Martha, Mary and Lazarus.
We also have a God that can understand what it's like to feel alone and forgotten.
We have a God that knows what it's like to be betrayed by people. He thought he could trust all of the things that we can experience in our life.
He did.
So the humanity of Jesus makes it much easier for me, and my guess is for you as well, in our spirituality, in our prayer, because it's a lot easier talking with someone who understands us, because he's walked in our shoes and we believe Jesus has done that.
So if you've ever get to a point where you can't figure out if anybody cares or anybody's listening, you know for sure, at least one person is, and that's Jesus Christ.
And he can relate to what you're going through and he can give you strength.
