What God can and cannot do or why Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a bit overrated.

 

"Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying." - Jesus according to St. John

 

He died again.   For all the layers of depth and high Christology the gospel of John has to offer, the story of Lazarus is the hardest for me to wrap my head around. This week the lectionary had us read the entire 11th chapter of the John's gospel.  All 45 verses.  I am one of those types who loves the high church tradition of standing to read the gospel and raising the gospel over our heads and processing with it.  I love the blessing of it with incense and the crucifer going before it.  But I will admit, that last evening at church, after I had helped Vance build a fire pit, painted two rooms and did six hours of yard work, I could have done with Readers Digest condensed version.   I could have just had verse 25 read and be done with it.  As usual my mind was wandering, I was fidgeting, I was thinking about dinner and how much I was missing meat and wine and thanking God that he has not called me to be Orthodox yet.  (Not only would the Great Lent be impossible for me, their faithful stand for the entire liturgy which takes 2 hours).   It takes a long time to read that story.  And it was not entirely lost on me and my very tired body that perhaps the Church fathers knew what they were doing when they insisted on reading the entire chapter.  There is some good stuff in that story, but to me the raising of the dead is a bit overrated.  

Was it impressive that Jesus raised him from the dead 4 days after he was in the tomb?
Absolutely. It's been a while since I raised a guy from the dead.
Like forever a while. Like I'll never be able to touch that a while. So yea, that was one of the greatest miracles the world has ever seen. Mind blowing amazing.

But we have to remember, it's important to remember, that Lazarus died again.

There was another funeral. His friends and family all wept again but this time there was no coming back from the grave.

The story isn’t even about Lazarus. I mean, Lazarus does very little in this story. He gets sick, he dies, and then he stumbles out of a tomb. Lazarus is just a supporting actor in this story. In fact, if this were a movie, Lazarus would have a very short, walk-on part. He doesn’t even have any lines! People talk about him, but only Jesus speaks to him, and Lazarus isn’t on screen when He does.

So what is the story really about?  Is this a story about the omnipotence of God? I don’t know because I really don’t know if God can make a four-sided triangle.  I don’t know if God can make a rock so heavy he can’t move.  I don’t really know if God knows the future or not.  I tend to think not because of free will and I tend to think a four-sided triangle is a square. And even in this story, God didn’t move the rock.  People did.  So maybe there are rocks too heavy for even God to move. So maybe getting up from dead isn't even the point. 
All of these questions speak to our fascination with the extent of God’s power, specifically whether or not God can do the impossible.

"For many of us, though we speak of love and grace and forgiveness, it is the ability to do the impossible that, in our minds, truly makes God, God. So, when we are faced with a situation in which God seems incapable of doing something we panic, worried that that inability somehow diminishes God’s divinity. "(shamelessly stole this quote from a guy named Zak Brown).

And if we are truly honest, we don’t like a God that makes rocks that he can’t move.
Most of us want Jesus to show up and pull a raising the dead.  We certainly don’t want him to be late and we certainly don’t want the funeral to have already taken place and we certainly don’t want to have to grieve.  So why did Jesus take his own sweet time in getting to Bethany? 

In one of my favorite books, The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis writes about the limits of God’s power. In a scene towards the end of the book, Eustace, Jill, Tirian, and the Pevensie children are standing alongside Aslan in the new Narnia looking on at a group of dwarfs who believe they are stuck inside a dark barn. Frustrated that the dwarfs can’t see their true beautiful surroundings, Lucy begs Aslan to do something to make the dwarfs see the reality of their situation.  

Aslan replies to Lucy saying, “Dearest, I will show you what I can and what I cannot do.”
Giving in to Lucy’s request, Aslan walks up to the dwarves, shakes his mane, and instantly a magnificent feast appears in the dwarfs’ laps.

But they can’t see it for what it really is. They think someone is simply hiding in the barn with them making lion sounds in order to scare them. They know there’s food in their laps, but they give no thought to where it came from, instead greedily fighting over it.  Aslan says, “You see, they will not let us help them…their prison is only in their mind and yet they are in that prison and so afraid of being taking in out.”

The point I think C.S. Lewis is trying to make here is that there are some things God simply can’t do and that’s ok. 

I also think Lewis is trying to make us see that most of the time we have to participate in our own miracles as well as the miracles of others.  Lucy and her siblings wanted to help the dwarfs, but the dwarfs would not allow them to. 

It is interesting to me that Jesus didn’t move the rock.  He told others to do it.  Lazarus also needed help removing all those bandages.  Lazarus didn’t just walk out of that tomb without the help of others.
 
God is not a superhero, and as long as we think of God in that way we miss out on the truly incredible things God is trying to do in and through us.  In the end, I think our fear that there may be things God cannot do, says much more about us then it does about God.  We like the God who shows up and makes the dead live again, not the God who shows up on a cross, rejected as a failure.  We want the resurrection, but we don’t want the path it takes to get there.  We don’t want to die. But sooner or later we all realize that we are going to die.  I know this seems like gloomy news… but really it is good news.  I think the real reason it took Jesus so long to get to Bethany was to show us what faith and real trust looked like. (And there is the part of me that believes in the humanity of Jesus, that believes that Jesus was seeing if God really did raise the dead or not.  After all, Jesus was depending on the same power that raised Lazarus to raise him as well. And I am not entirely convinced that Jesus knew the story ended well for him. And perhaps this is why God has not called me to a more Orthodox faith.  Obviously, I did not give up snarkiness for Lent).  Jesus did come to bring the dead back to life, but the real miracle in all of this is the gift of faith.  The ultimate test of our faith is that God is on the other side of that rock.  Sometimes we have to move the rock and sometimes we have to wait for someone to move it for us.  The miracle is in the waiting.