The Resurrection at Bethany - Jesus Waits

When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. ‘Lord,’ Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died. John 11:20‭-‬21 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.20-21.NIVUK When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ John 11:32 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.32.NIVUK Waiting is a key concept in the Bible. It happens time and time again. God often asks people to wait, and often until their situation appears absolutely impossible. For example, Abraham was called by God and promised a huge number of descendants when he was seventy-five years old (Genesis 12:1-4). His wife Sarah gave birth to Isaac twenty-five years later, when she was ninety and he was a hundred years old (Genesis 21:1-5). Twenty-five years! Even elephants have a gestation period shorter than it took this promise to be born! And then there are the Israelites. It took them four hundred and thirty years to leave Egypt (Exodus 12:41), and Moses, the man God appointed as their leader, was eighty years old, having fled Egypt after committing murder and working as a nomadic shepherd in the desert for forty years (Exodus 7:7). Joseph had to wait. He spent at least two years in prison for a crime he did not commit, falsely accused of sexual assault by his master's wife (Genesis 41:1). David had to wait too. When Samuel anointed him as Saul's successor, he was just a boy (1 Samuel 16:11-13). When Saul eventually died in battle, David, after years of living on the run like an outlaw when God had called him to be king, spent a further seven years battling one of Saul's descendants (2 Samuel 2:8-3:12) before finally becoming king at the age of thirty (2 Samuel 5:4). The Israelites had to wait. Seventy long years in exile before God would make a way for them to return home (Jeremiah 25:11-12, 29:10; Daniel 9:1-2). The Jews have had to wait. Five thousand years before the Messiah came to redeem us all from our sins, and many are still waiting. I have absolutely no doubt that these long wait times caused pain and frustration for those who waited. However, this wait here was especially painful. Why? Because on a human level it seemed needless: Now a man named Lazarus was ill. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay ill, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) So the sisters sent word to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is ill.’ When he heard this, Jesus said, ‘This illness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’ Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed where he was two more days. John 11:1‭-‬6 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.1-6.NIVUK Twice a truth is stated in this passage. Jesus loved Lazarus. Mary and Martha, his sisters, knew it. John, who wrote these words, knew it. Jesus, of course, knew it. Yet when His dear friend was seriously ill, Jesus stayed away. He waited. There would seem to be justifiable reasons for staying away: So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.’ ‘But Rabbi,’ they said, ‘a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?’ John 11:6‭-‬8 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.6-8.NIVUK But look what Jesus said just one chapter earlier: ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. John 10:11 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.10.11.NIVUK So why didn't it seem like He was ready to make the supreme sacrifice for Lazarus? Jesus even knew that Lazarus had died: So then he told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead.' John 11:14 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.14.NIVUK And yet He skipped the funeral and by the time Jesus had arrived, Lazarus had already been in his tomb for four days! Why would He do that? In fact, why would anyone do that who claimed to be their friend? And that's just it. This wait of several days caused some of the Jews that came to visit Mary and Martha to doubt Jesus: Then the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’ John 11:36‭-‬37 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.36-37.NIVUK And this is exactly the point. Painful waiting can be made worse when we begin to question why we have to wait in the first place. After all, God is great. He is Sovereign. The One who defied the laws of entropy and physics and life and death in order to save us, well, can't He do it again to change our situation? Of course He can! Then why doesn't He? Because He has a higher purpose, as one of the most easily missed verses in this passage points out: So then he told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ John 11:14‭-‬15 NIVUK https://bible.com/bible/113/jhn.11.14-15.NIVUK This whole miracle was so that His followers would believe. But why is that so important? Look what happened after Lazarus was raised from the dead: the Jews were plotting to kill Jesus (John 11:45-54), and even Lazarus (John 12:9-11). Jesus' higher purpose was to show them exactly who He is - that He has complete power over life and death even when someone has been dead for several days - because this was critically important information they would need to know to survive persecution. Let me put it another way. When our daughter was small, we took her to a room where a woman she barely knew punctured her arm with a sharp instrument, making her cry out in pain, sometimes bleed a little, give her swelling and a slight fever and disturb her sleep. And we did it several times. We don't regret it. Not one bit. In fact, we would do it all over again. What am I talking about? Her inoculation shots. Despite what the lunatic conspiracy theorists will tell you, this painful step is absolutely necessary because the diseases they protect you from are way worse. For example, I had a full course of rabies shots before going to Romania. They weren't entirely pleasant. But the cure for rabies is injections in the stomach three times a day for a week with a massive needle. Either that or a horrible death. I'll take the discomfort of the rabies shot every time. If you've ever been a surgery when little children get their shots, it's not pleasant. I'm sure the little kid is completely confused at what's going on and struggles to understand why their parents, who say they love them, could allow this horrible thing to happen. And yet this pain is completely necessary. It prevents them from being sick with something far worse. Now I'm not at all minimising the pain of waiting. It can be completely gruelling. It can really hurt. And we see signs of that in this passage. The Bible doesn't shy away from that. It's open and its honest. But what if that pain is to shield us and protect us - to inoculate us, if you will - from something far worse? In the case of Mary, Martha, Lazarus and Jesus' followers, it could be the pain of not being able to bear up under trial. In our case we might never know. But surely the best approach is to be faithful in the wait? There are examples of what happens if we don't. The most spectacular example is Abraham. He, together with Sarah, became impatient after ten years of waiting and together they connived for him to have child with her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar (Genesis 16:1-3). The result of this illicit union was Ishmael (Genesis 16:15), the father of the Arab nations and the reason why there has been unrest in the Middle East for centuries. Waiting on the Lord is a key concept in the psalms (Psalms 27:14, 33:20, 37:7, 38:15, 119:116, 130:5-6) and in the prophets who saw the nation in trouble and longed with every fibre of their being for salvation (Isaiah 8:17, 26:8, 30:18, 51:5, 64:4; Lamentations 3:24-26; Hosea 12:6, Micah 7:7; Habakkuk 3:16; Zephaniah 3:8). Jesus asks the disciples to do it (Acts 1:4). The whole world is waiting for its salvation to be revealed (Romans 8:18-25). But that doesn't make it easy. Every ounce of angst in poems and songs comes from the absolute unrelenting agony of waiting and longing for something better to happen. And it hurts. It's incredibly painful. God knows. He really knows. Waiting on God is not passive. It is active. It is a verb. It is a battle that never ceases until the day when He fulfils our every longing. But friend, there us something you need to know: it's worth it. It's really worth it in the end. So what is my advice to you? I agree with the psalmist: Be strong. Take heart. Wait on the Lord. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. So after seeing that Jesus waits, we will now see that JESUS WEEPS.