5th Sunday Lent, A March 26, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
“Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?” Yes. The answer to that question and others like it is yes. “Can’t God just stop people from suffering? Isn’t He all powerful? Couldn’t he heal all cancer, stop all violence, save all children?” Yes, he could do those things just as he could have simply prevented Lazarus from dying.
Not only did Jesus not prevent Lazarus’ death, he didn’t even hurry. “He remained for two days” after hearing that Lazarus was ill. Nothing Jesus does is on accident. This is not a case of forgetfulness, laziness, and definitely not because he doesn’t love Lazarus.
So yes, Jesus allows Lazarus to die. But why? We tend to notice when Jesus says, “this illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” To our ears, that probably sounds a lot like “everything happens for a reason” and it is a very similar idea, but there is an important difference – the cause.
When people say “everything happens for a reason,” they tend to imagine God sending us difficult moments and suffering in order to give us some important lesson or prepare us for some mission. And this idea isn’t too bad if what you’re suffering isn’t too bad: loss of a job, some serious but not life-threatening injury, social rejection… that sort of thing. But when you tell a mother of a 4 year old with brain cancer that “everything happens for a reason” and “God has a plan,” she’s likely to hear “God gave my kid cancer.” Unless she has an unusually strong faith, that’s going to give her the impression that God has a very cruel and unusual idea of what “love” means.
So what does Jesus mean by saying this is for glory? He did not mean, “God made Lazarus die so he could show off.” When scripture says it “is for the glory of God,” the word there in Greek means more than our word “for.” There’s a connotation of “over and above.” You could paraphrase it, “the final purpose of this illness is not death, but beyond that to the glory of God.” Illness is not God’s doing. The book of Wisdom tells us that God did not create death, but that the devil’s envy brought death to the world. The devil thinks that illness is meant for death. God, who really is more all-powerful than we can even imagine, steps into the devil’s design and overcomes it from inside. Transcending the fallen world seen in this deadly illness, God implants his glory.
To be precise, God allows suffering and disease and all kinds of disasters. He does not cause them directly, zapping people because he needs them to suffer in order to make them love him. Yet, even though these terrible things happen, God works through them for the destiny of life and glory. Jesus knows this… he is the invasion of God’s glory into a fallen world. He is so confident of this that he need not hurry, rushing with anxiety to overcome every tragedy he sees. It’s why he waits two days here, why he refuses the devil’s temptations in the beginning, why he doesn’t let anyone kill him earlier in his mission. It’s why there are far more people he does not heal than those he does.
Jesus patiently follows the plan of God, who passionately rewrites our sorrows into glory in a design only He understands. I say “passionately” in the older sense of the word – suffering – the same meaning as in the “passion and death of Jesus on the cross.” Now, just because God is taking his time revealing the glory he has implanted into our suffering does not mean he does not care. He truly suffers with us while patiently working toward that higher purpose. That’s why John gives us the shortest and possibly most poignant verse in the entire bible: John 11:35 “Jesus wept.” He feels our suffering even more than we do.
Could God have prevented all suffering for us and thus for Jesus? Yes, but only if he had prevented both angels and human beings from having real freedom. If we never had a choice, we could not have rejected him and so allowed the cold darkness of evil into God’s design. Once freedom is permitted and evil chosen, however, the consequences of that evil play affect the whole universe. Couldn’t God simply wave away those consequences, though? Yes, but that would basically mean that the freedom of men and angels is an illusion. And God wants our freedom to really matter.
Well then, can God heal this or that sick person, prevent this or that disaster? Yes, and he often does, as the Jews who saw Jesus knew full well. What’s hard for us to accept is that whether God does a miracle or not, either decision is made for the exact same reason: love and glory. Faith that moves mountains isn’t just faith that gets what it wants. It is faith that accepts both healing and suffering with the same confidence in God’s goodness, trusting that each of them are reflections of that same deeper plan of love and glory.
Two weeks ago, the story of the Samaritan woman was an invitation to be loved out of our sins and illusions into the truth. Last week, the healing of the man born blind was an invitation to let that truth show us our sins and to reveal to us God’s plan for overcoming evil. This week leans into that overcoming of evil though the visceral display of Jesus’ love. Jesus weeps for the man he allowed to die even as he plans to raise him from the dead. He weeps for those of us who he allows to suffer even while he implants his glory into that very suffering.
What is the invitation this week? See God’s glory in your suffering. Not just remembering that suffering goes away in the end. That hope-filled far-sightedness is essential, but it is not all. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, which we will live through next week, is not just Jesus gritting his teeth and looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. It is his genuine embrace of the cross as the means by which God’s glory infiltrates all suffering and rewrites it for a design the devil never saw coming. He rose from the dead not despite the cross, but because of it.
We don’t have to enjoy suffering and death – we really shouldn’t – but we are called to accept it with the confidence that even in the midst of suffering, God is with us, that he loves us, and that this too is for our glory. To believe that, even if right now it looks we are dying and will die, “everyone who lives and believes in [Him] will never die.”