NOTES for Joh 11:21-22

Martha went out to meet Christ, while Mary remained at home. When Martha and Mary are compared, they are often contrasted as embodiments of practicality and spirituality, although Martha too is open to the Teacher’s words, and Mary is capable of being active. This time, Martha’s qualities were manifested not only in household cares, but also in the steps she took toward Christ, which cannot be separated from her ability to listen to Him and assimilate what she heard.

Christ does not even enter the house; He goes straight to the tomb. Here the Gospel has preserved a unique testimony for us: Jesus wept. This alone is enough to understand how incompatible His image is with that of a celestial being capable of sending Lazarus to his death in order to demonstrate His own power. No, He does not want people to die; He grieves over their fate and therefore intends to free us from enslavement to evil.

He asks the people gathered at the tomb to roll away the stone. Christ, who is able to raise the dead, could have managed it Himself, but that would not have benefited the people: we cannot raise the dead, but He is not obliged to do for us what lies within our power. Genuine hope in God must not be confused with the mentality of Emelya lying on his stove.

Death puts many things in their place. It cannot be deceived, it cannot be laughed off, before it all are equal, and no one can escape it. Therefore it is not surprising that a person compares the most serious and important things in strength with death - a worthy comparison: "love is strong as death" (Song 8:6). Religious faith, as the most serious content of many people's lives, has more than once been set alongside death; thousands of martyrs chose to die rather than renounce their faith.

So death is a kind of boundary at which the final testing of faith takes place. This is not necessarily one's own death - Lazarus's sisters faced this test just as he himself did. They kept faith, but not to the end. There will be a resurrection of the dead, but not now, Martha thinks.

That is why these words sound strange to her: "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live." And victory over death takes place, even before the final triumph of Pascha, and before we ourselves can be convinced by experience that love is stronger than death.

Today's reading gives us another testimony to the triumph of the Kingdom that Jesus brought into the world. In every age and among all peoples without exception, death's triumph over life has been perceived as something unjust and contrary to what ought to be. Attempts to regard death like a Stoic or a natural philosopher, viewing it with philosophical calm and accepting it as something regular and inevitable, and therefore normal, have generally failed. At the moment of coming face to face with death, it still inspires only horror and revulsion. Other feelings connected with the causes and circumstances of a death are often mixed with these, of course, but those feelings have nothing to do with death itself: their source is precisely those causes and circumstances, not the fact of dying.

The Bible explains this attitude toward death: death entered the world as a consequence of the Fall. It is part of the world's evil, which must inevitably disappear once the world, transformed by God's power, becomes part of the Kingdom. By weeping when He sees those who mourn (vv. 32-36), Jesus confirms that death is not an imagined tragedy of human life but a real one.

This, of course, is not the end: resurrection, Judgment, and the Kingdom lie ahead. In Gospel times every believing Jew knew about the resurrection (vv. 23-24), yet death still remained a state contrary to human nature; it contradicted God's design for human beings and their destiny. The Kingdom therefore proves incompatible with death.

It is no accident that Jesus says He Himself is the resurrection (vv. 25-26): He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and death retreats before the Kingdom. Of course, a return to one's former life, not yet transformed by God's power, in the former world, which has not yet become part of the Kingdom, can hardly be considered the end of the journey. This is not yet the resurrection that believing Jews awaited. But death and the Kingdom are incompatible, and so even someone not yet fully transformed finds in the Kingdom the fullness of life available to him.

No one can contain more life than he is able to contain, but in touching the fullness of God's life, each person receives the measure of life available to him. Lazarus had not yet reached complete transformation, but he was entirely capable of living the life that every healthy person lives in our still not fully transformed world. He receives the fullness possible for him as he comes out into God's light from the tomb in which he was buried (vv. 38-44). Then everyone could see plainly that the Kingdom had truly entered the world and, with it, so had the resurrection that until then was thought to lie only in the future.

One might think that so vivid a demonstration would have melted and converted every heart, but apparently nothing of the kind happened. Some truly came to believe (vv. 45-46), while others became even more firmly opposed to Christ and the Kingdom. But the evidence was too plain, and those who rejected the Kingdom were left with no choice, in the logic of their persistent rejection, but to conclude that they had to rid themselves of the One who brought the Kingdom into the world (vv. 47-53). Thus rejection of the Kingdom leads the Savior of the world, sent by God, to the cross.

"Today Bethany, rejoicing in the rising of Lazarus, foretells the Resurrection of Christ the Giver of Life..." It is often said that there is, so to speak, this "artistry" in the Gospel: spokesman-figures like John the Baptist, and paired events such as the raising of Lazarus, meant to set off the main event; in other words, everything follows the laws of literary texts. But this is deeply wrong. It can be seen fully only with the eyes of the heart, but still let us try to notice some very concrete details. Christ rose on the third day. The Lord raised Lazarus on the fourth.

Why is the fourth day mentioned? It turns out that there is a reason quite concretely conditioned by culture. Let us turn to David Stern's book, "Jewish New Testament Commentary," p. 269: "Before medicine learned to distinguish coma from death, people were sometimes mistakenly buried alive. Jewish burial customs tried to rule out every possibility of such a terrible mistake. According to a post-Talmudic tractate compiled in the eighth century (by the Jewish calendar, our note), 'we go out to the cemetery and check the dead for three days, and we do not fear being suspected of walking in the ways of the Amorites (that is, in superstitious rites). Once a buried man was checked and found to be alive; he lived another 25 years and then died. Another such man lived, and five children were born to him before he died' (Semachot 8:1)."

And the fact that four days had passed means something very simple: the time for the prescribed ritual checking had already expired. Lazarus was truly dead. Whether the Lord could have been in Bethany before that time or not, whether He deliberately waited or not, is not a question for our mind. That is how it was. There is not a trace here of artistry, symbolism of numbers, coincidences, multiples, and so on, the kind always found in "mystagogical" literature. There is only the living fabric of life.