Sunday’s Readings: Passion Sunday

Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

THIS is the third Sunday in a row wherein John’s Gospel reveals something about divine truth through Jesus’s interactions with women. Two weeks ago, it was a Samaritan woman. Then, last week, got here the commendation of his mother and the beloved disciple to at least one one other’s care.

I’m so used to pondering of Luke because the Evangelist who puts women at the guts of the story that I even have previously missed this as a feature of John’s Gospel. In a fortnight’s time, one other woman will come to the fore, when Mary Magdalene encounters someone whom she supposes to be a gardener. And so the resurrection might be disclosed.

For this week, though, the ladies on the centre of events are Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. Or should that be Martha and Mary? The desire of some scholars to detect incongruities within the Gospels, where most readers happily and fruitfully take the text at face value, could be infuriating. We wouldn’t routinely detect different stages of composition, or different sources being combined, simply because verse 1 refers to “Mary and her sister Martha”, while verse 5 says that Jesus “loved Martha and her sister”.

But, in John 11, there really is a case to be made that variant versions of the story are detectable. This is a recurring type of scriptural puzzle, akin to the 2 creation stories, and the 2 flood narratives, in Genesis. Here, we would ask why Martha is convinced that Jesus might help her brother (verse 22), yet fears to open the tomb due to smell (verse 39). In verse 17, Jesus has arrived in Bethany, but, in verse 20, he remains to be on his way. Other examples have been identified, but that is enough to provide the concept.

It is thing to choose up on such puzzles and questions in John’s Gospel (and the opposite Gospels, for that matter). But not because we can’t be proper Christians without noticing them. They matter because they confirm how Christian belief in gospel truth is ready on a secure foundation. We don’t promise those recent to faith that Christian belief is a sealed unit, preserved from all error or flaws within the detail. The truth of scripture is proclaimed by fallible “tongues of mortals” in addition to those “of angels” (1 Corinthians 13.2).

In John 11, two sources can have been combined, or the Evangelist can have shaped his source material to see events from different angles, side by side. No hypothesis of the story’s genesis will satisfy sceptics and believers alike. Some will at all times hold that Lazarus only “seemed” to have died, or that his raising up was fictitious. One scholar writes: “The Lazarus episode will not be history reported but theology dramatised.” As it happens, I disagree — but Christian faith has room enough for each of us.

Read now in worship, John 11 is a preparation for Easter Day, once we shall have fun an infinitely greater resurrection. And, on that day, “the primary of days”, we could have larger, holier things to take into consideration than scholarly jots and tittles. Now, on this Passion Sunday (one other name for the fifth Sunday in Lent), we will do the scriptural spadework (reflecting on the raising of Lazarus), which is able to allow us to see more clearly once we come to the Lord’s resurrection.

As encouragement that scepticism and faith should not necessarily at odds with each other, I notice that the identical scholar who describes the raising of Lazarus as “theology” reasonably than “history” also comments, perceptively, that the miracles in John “form a series that’s arranged in ascending order, in order that the post-mortem raising of dead Lazarus forms the culmination and completion”. He also helpfully notes that the raising of Lazarus is on the centre, a pivot for the entire Gospel.

Why is the miraculous raising of Lazarus neither only a fact of history nor a pious fiction to encourage the credulous? Because it is really a prophecy of the long run of the religion: Lazarus was dead and decaying, dust returning to dust. The intervention of Jesus raised him from this death, to the life that’s shared by all who love the Lord. Jesus called the dead man by name, “Lazarus, come out.” He calls us, too, by name, raising us up, in baptism, from the death of sin to the lifetime of righteousness (1 Peter 2.24).