“When all hope is gone”
Meditation – Bulletin, Sunday April 10, 2011
“When all hope is gone”
I’m sure that all of us have been in the same ‘spot’. We have heard a snippet of a conversation, just a passing remark, and it bugs us. It bugs us because we yearn to know the rest of what was said. And, if you are like me, your mind works overtime to fill in, to reconstruct, what it imagines (yes, that is right, it is only imaginary) to be the rest of the story. I find that the same thing happens with my family research. Right now I am struggling with details concerning the vicar of a particular church in England. Was he John, James or George, and was he a Stonhouse or a Stonehouse? As well as you might imagine, my mind is working overtime.
Surprising as it may seem, Biblical scholars and pastors do the very same thing with the Scriptures. They try to fill in the blanks and bring disparate information together to make more sense of the story. Today’s story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11: 1-45) is a good case in point.
What we do know from John’s account was that he lived, along with his two sisters, Martha and Mary, in Bethany. This village was some three kilometers away from Jerusalem on the other side of the Mount of Olives. We know from other accounts that it was a place of safety, a haven, for Jesus, a place where He knew He was among friends and could relax and feel comfortable in their presence. Nevertheless, it does appear to be a somewhat singular, a somewhat unusual household: three grown adults, all seemingly single and unattached, living together. That in itself would have been highly unusual for Jesus’ day.
This is where the Scriptural skullduggery comes in. John, only few verses later (John 12: 1-8), tells how Mary went and anointed Jesus with very expensive perfume. Matthew and Mark’s gospels have similar stories, also set in Bethany and in exactly the same time frame and situation, but with a couple of differences. These accounts do not give the name of the woman. However, they do say that is was the home of Simon the leper. Hah ha, say the scholars. That missing piece completes the picture. The three older siblings had stayed home to care for their ailing father, and now, with the father either deceased or ‘closeted’ elsewhere (as was normal for those with a skin disease), were on their own.
This explains many things, even apart from the oddity of these three adults being together. It explains the total sense of loss, the bereavement, the bereftness of these two sisters. Both of them were probably too old to get married and have husbands to support them. Failing that, in a world where there were no social systems or pensions of any sort, it was up to their male relatives to provide for them. And alas, with the death of Lazarus, even that possibility was gone. No wonder there was such an upsurge of sympathy toward them. With the death of Lazarus, their world had fallen apart. With his death, there was literally the death of all hope.
Jesus would have known and understood all this, and would have known what His intervention, His raising of Lazarus, would mean to them. It was a restoration of not only hope, but also of life and future and possibility and identity.
I like to think that this is exactly what Jesus does for each of us. Each of us encounters, in our own private worlds, times of loss, times when hope and future seem to evaporate. And here, as with these three friends from Bethany, Jesus enters the picture and changes everything. It may not be a literal restoration to life, but is often something just as powerful and freeing and life changing. And, as Jesus said to the sorrowing Martha, if we will but believe (have faith in Him), we will see the glory of the Lord, God’s incredible power at work in our lives.
Yours, with that same loving, wonder working, gracious Lord, Michael.