Podcast 2.06 Stories of Death and Resurrection

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Resources mentioned in this episode:
A Praying Life, by Paul Miller
A Loving Life, by Paul Miller
Podcast interviews by Jamie Winship of Identity Exchange

Transcript

Episode 2.06
Stories of Death and Resurrection

(Musical intro)

Intro: Welcome to the Encounter Jesus podcast, also known as the ‘feel like Jesus is hugging you today’ podcast. I’m Elizabeth Ellynshaw, and we’ve been talking about my favorite Bible character, Mary of Bethany, and her courage to sit at Jesus’ feet and stay there, even when she was criticized, even when it wasn’t considered acceptable for women to sit at the feet of a Rabbi-teacher. We talked about the lessons we can learn from her courage to listen to His voice and her consistency to in every story meet Him in her special place at His feet. And today I want to transition from this first story, where we find Mary listening at the feet of Jesus, to the second story, where we find her weeping at His feet because her brother Lazarus just died four days ago. You and I know that she will end up in the third story, worshiping at Jesus’ feet and pouring out her perfume on Him to thank Him because He has raised her brother from the dead. But Mary doesn’t know that. Mary doesn’t know that Jesus is about to raise her brother from the dead. Mary doesn’t know that she is in the middle of a death-and-resurrection story. Mary only knows that she asked Jesus for help and He didn’t come.

This deeply emotional story is a study in when deep intimacy with Jesus is disappointed. When Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations, even the confident expectations of someone who really trusted Him and believed in Him, who was really close to Him. Mary and Martha sent Jesus a one sentence message: Lord, the one You love is sick. They didn’t even write, ‘Please heal him,’ or ‘please come back and heal him,’ or ‘please heal him from where You are.’  They just said, ‘the one you love is sick.’ They knew that Jesus loved them. They knew that Jesus loved Lazarus. They had seen Jesus heal all kinds of blind and lame and sick people, anyone who came to Him and asked. How much more would He heal His close friend? They had complete confidence, full trust and faith and expectation.

Jesus’ disciple John was there that day, and to John at the time, it must have been as confusing as to anyone else. Why did Jesus not do anything when He received that message that was so full of trust? But after the whole story played out, and John had several decades to think about it, John came to a conclusion. The reason that Jesus had stayed where He was and let Lazarus fully die before He responded to the summons was BECAUSE He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. And so when John wrote the story down for you and me, he wrote, ‘Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that Lazarus was ill, He stayed two days longer in the place where He was.’

Now what kind of love is that? I am sure it was not the kind of love that Mary and Martha wanted. Jesus was motivated by His love for them to do exactly the opposite of how they expected He would show His love for them. The sisters expected Jesus to show His love by healing Lazarus so that he would not die, and Jesus instead showed His love by allowing Lazarus to fully die and lie in the grave for four days as proof that he sure was really dead and then raise him back to life. Jesus showed His love for these siblings, His three close friends, by trusting them with a death and resurrection story. They trusted Him, and He trusted them too. He didn’t choose just anybody to be dead for four days and then resurrected. He chose somebody whose deep trust in Him could handle it and pass the test. He trusted them with a story that looked just like His own story would, a story of death and resurrection.

By the end of this story, a whole big group of people who had been opposed to Jesus would come to put their faith in Him, because they had they had seen Him weep with Mary over Lazarus and then raise Lazarus from the dead. People would be saved, God would be glorified, their faith would be strengthened, all the good things would happen. It would be worth it in the end. But just like Jesus’ own death and resurrection, it felt absolutely horrible in the middle.

This is the story of how Mary became Mary. This is the story of how her intimacy with Jesus went about a hundred feet deeper into the core of the earth, how she began to understand Him and why He was really here. Mary would emerge from this excruciating story ready to accept the fact that Jesus needed to die too, ready to anoint Him for burial before He died, when almost none of His other friends got it, when they all was opposing His death and refusing to understand. Mary would emerge from this story more deeply understanding Jesus and able to be His friend because He had trusted her with a death and resurrection story like His own, and she had trusted Him long enough to come out the other side, no matter how much anger, fear, and confusion she sobbed out on His feet in the middle.

And in her story, we discover two sides of God that we desperately need. A God who weeps with us AND a God who raises the dead. He isn’t one or the other. A God who just weeps with us has love but not power. A God who just raises the dead reverses our suffering, but we miss how much He cares. But Jesus sobbed with Mary as if He didn’t know Lazarus would be laughing and hugging her in fifteen minutes, even though He did. And Jesus enters into our pain too, as fully as if He couldn’t see how utterly happy we will be when He makes all things right forever. And then, Jesus took hold of the eschaton and pulled it into the Now. He grabbed hold of the future kingdom of heaven where all the dead rise and death is no more, and He pulled it into this moment of the story where He and Mary were sobbing together. And the stone table cracked, and death itself began working backwards.

(Musical transition)

Prayer: Father, as we come to you in the middle of the stories of life, death, and resurrection that You are writing in our lives, let this story of Mary, blinded with tears at Your feet, touch us and give us permission to be real with You and share our tears with You so You can weep with us and carry us forward into the resurrection. We trust You. Meet us where we are and show us Jesus, that He may be glorified. In His name, amen.

Content: I first picked up the phrase, “God loves to write death and resurrection stories” from Paul Miller, the author of a wonderful book called The Praying Life. In another beautiful book he wrote on the story of Ruth, A Loving Life, he explains that every relationship we have, every friendship, every human love, goes through the three stages of life, death, and resurrection. He compares it to the curve of a capital letter J, that starts out in the middle, then goes down, and then finally rises up higher than it ever was in the beginning. He explains that every relationship starts out in the life stage, where we like each other and see what is good in each other, but then if we know each other long enough and get close enough, we will go down into the death stage where we see each other’s flaws and failures and get hurt and disappointed and experience conflict and pain. And then we can either pull back from the relationship and let it stay dead, or if we stick it out into the resurrection stage of reconciliation and forgiveness, we will be closer than ever before, much closer and feeling much safer with each other, much more known and trusted and accepted, then we were before we went through our process of disappointment and ‘death.’ I’m not saying this works every time, because it takes both people to be willing and ready for a reconciliation and a resurrection, but we can choose to be ready for it.

And not just in relationships but in any form of trial. I love to listen to the God-stories and testimonies of Christian speaker Jamie Winship, who worked in first police work and then international counter terrorism with the help of God and miracles and sometimes even angel body guards appearing when needed, and he refers to this life death and resurrection process as order, disorder, and reorder. He points out that that is the pattern that the plots of all stories take in the study of literature, order, disorder, and reorder, and says that is the way God brings any kind of transformation into our lives. Order, disorder, reorder. Life, death, resurrection. I, like Mary, have experienced the love of Jesus that allows things I never wanted Him to allow and then uses them to take me to a so much better place than I was in before I suffered. That’s the pattern, over and over again. I don’t want it, I don’t like it, and I don’t think I would ever choose it if He didn’t choose it for me. But when, like Mary, I come out the resurrection side and see how much better His plans for me were than I ever dreamed, I understand that it was worth it.

Sometimes I wish Jesus didn’t love me the way He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Sometimes I wish He didn’t trust me with opportunities to experience death-like disappointments in my life so that I can experience a resurrection beyond my wildest dreams. And at the end of the story, I know I’ll be grateful for the places He didn’t let me choose. He didn’t make Mary, Martha, and Lazarus the offer of a death and resurrection instead of a healing and ask them to read the fine print and sign on the dotted line. He just quietly waited where He was for two more days, knowing how much it would cost them, how hurt and angry they would probably be, and how it would ultimately be the best way He could possibly show them the depths of His love.

So if you are in a story of death, of pain, of God not seeming to respond to you, of a healing that hasn’t come, of a prayer that hasn’t been answered, of a disappointment that makes you feel angry with Jesus, of a loss that looks too late to ever be restored, of needing a safe place to cry, then I invite you to let this story touch you gently like the wings of a mother bird fluttering over you, just barely touching you, letting you feel the softness, the gentle breeze, the tender touch of a God who understands. I invite you to feel the hug that Mary after the end of this story would give you as she said, ‘I know what it feels like. I remember what it felt like in the middle, before we knew that He would raise the dead, and how He wept with me. It was all worth it. You can get through this. I have met a God who wept with me and who brought me all the way to resurrection.”

(Musical transition)

Question: Today I invite you to meet Jesus at His feet and ask Him to help you identify where you might find yourself in this gift of a story. Are you in the life stage, where you are enjoying life with Jesus and it all makes sense? Are you in the dying stage, where you keep expecting Him to change something, but the change hasn’t come? Are you in the death stage, where Jesus has disappointed your expectations of what His love would do to save you from suffering, where you’ve lost something that looks like it can never be restored? Or are you in the just before resurrection stage where God is asking you to do something as brave and crazy as open up the rotting tomb and let Him at it? And wherever you find yourself, when Jesus shows up in your story, how do you want to respond to Him? Do you want to ask Him a question to His face, like Martha did, or sob it all out on His feet, like Mary did? Jesus responded really well to both. Either way, I am smuggling you two truths from Mary and her encounter with the God who weeps with us and then raises the dead. I am passing them to you like two crumbled slips of paper pressed into the palm of your hand as I walk by. Keep them. Read them. Cling to them. Believe them. Go weep and roar at the feet of Jesus because they are true. One says, “Jesus is here,” and the other says, “This is not the end.”

(Musical Outro)