Biblical literacy in the United States is in trouble.  People who study such things cite ample evidence that it is so:

“The Bible in America is a massive industry ($2.5 billion) yet it is the best seller few read and fewer understand. The Bible has become a moving target. One can strip it down, twist it, misread it, add to it, supplement it, and even overrule it, and, unfortunately, 95 percent of the congregation will not realize it. Why? Because Americans no longer know the Bible. The evidence is overpowering that contemporary Christianity is Bible-ish, at best, and at worst, in some cases, Bible-less. The American Bible Society releases an annual State of the Bible report and their research is persuasive in understanding the declining influence of the Bible in America. Everyone has an opinion about the Bible. Politicians attempt to use the Bible, Grammy-award winners quote it and Hollywood has portrayed it on the big screen. Yet one problem remains: most are oblivious to the Bible’s basic content, meaning, and message. Across the pond, the results are even more dramatic: one-third of British parents thought Harry Potter was a thematic plotline derived from the Bible.” (Jeremiah J. Johnston, Fox News)

George Barna, a renowned researcher and compiler of statistics about the church, reports the following about the beliefs of churchgoing American Protestant denominational members:

·         Only 35% of mainline Protestant church members believe Jesus was sinless.

·         Only 34% believe the Bible is totally accurate.

·         Only 27% agree that works do not merit salvation, only faith does.

·         Only 20% believe that Satan is real.

Don’t assume it’s any better among Roman Catholics, either.  That denomination, too, is rife with people who will identify as Catholic but when pressed will admit they aren’t “practicing.”

Why bring this up during Holy Week?  Because I wonder if the average U.S. citizen has any working knowledge of what the expression “Holy Week” means, or what four important events in the life of Christ happened that week.  The events of Holy Week are the very heart of the Christian faith.  If a person does not know what happened on Good Friday and Easter that person simply cannot authentically claim to be a follower of Christ. 

I’m not going to suggest any sweeping new programs to change that national trend toward the spiritual oblivion of total Biblical illiteracy.  I am going to flat-out tell you that there is only way to avoid it on a personal level:  study the Bible, read the Bible, get familiar with what’s in the Bible.  That only happens if you make the personal commitment to be in the Word of God.  So here are some concrete steps that you can take to do that:

1.      Does your church respect the Bible as the Word of God, every word of it breathed into the Bible writers by God, and true in all that it says?  If it doesn’t, you need to move on to one that does. You aren’t going to get to know what’s in the Bible from someone who has already rejected it.

2.      Don’t buy into the oft-repeated statement that the Bible is a dark book that is hard to understand and can be interpreted in lots of different ways.  God wasn’t playing games like that when he guided the Bible writers to write what they did.  He actually intended to communicate really important things to us in that book.  So there’s no need to try to imagine all kinds of fanciful hidden meanings.  Let it say what it says.

3.      Choose a good readable translation. For my money, you may want to watch this year for a new one coming out, the English Heritage Version.  New Testament and Psalms will be out this year some time.  The entire Bible will be ready next year.  If you want to know more about it and where to get it visit www.facebook.com/wartburgproject or www.wartburgproject.org.  Until then, a paperback New International Version or English Standard Version will do.

4.      Start with one of the gospels.  Mark is the shortest, so maybe start there.  When you’re done, read Matthew or Luke.  When you’re done there, move on to John.  That will give you a well-rounded grasp on the basic facts about the life of Jesus.  After that, email me and I’ll give you some suggestions.

5.      Jettison the idea that church is about an hour.  Make it a two-hour commitment:  an hour of worship and the Bible class that is typically offered either before or after.  Or maybe do the hour of worship on one day and take advantage of a midweek Bible class.  Where you do both is important. See #1 above.

6.      Stay with it.  Ask your questions.  Ask God to open our mind and heart, and ask him to send the Holy Spirit to work.  He will.

This is important for you and for your family.  If you are a parent, you are the most influential teacher your child is ever going to have.  Let them see you setting a personal and family culture that says that growing in the Word of God is important. 

I’m with the apostle Paul on this subject.  He wrote to the young pastor Timothy, “...God ...wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”  (1 Timothy 2:3)  There’s no better time than Holy Week to make the personal commitment to do what you have to do to get that knowledge.  If you want some help, that’s what we’re here for.

Pastor Dan Simons
Ascension Lutheran Church,
Macomb Township Michigan

17When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.

18Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away. 19Many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning their brother.

20When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him, while Mary was sitting in the house.

21Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.”

23Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

24Martha replied, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the Last Day.”

25Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even if he dies. 26And whoever lives and believes in me will never perish. Do you believe this?”

27“Yes, Lord,” she told him. “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

38Jesus was deeply moved again as he came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39“Take away the stone,” he said.

Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, because it has been four days.”

40Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” 41So they took away the stone.

Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. 42I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

44The man who had died came out with his feet and his hands bound with strips of linen and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus told them, “Loose him and let him go.”

45Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him.  (John 11:17-27, 38-45)

It’s been said that every Sunday is a little Easter.  And that’s certainly true, isn’t it?  Every Sunday we talk about Jesus and to Jesus in the present tense, not the past tense.  Every Sunday, we gather in the name of and in the presence of Jesus who lives.  Every Sunday we hear about our sins atoned for and forgiven, and every Sunday we hear about our victory over death.  Every Sunday we affirm that’s always Easter when we confess the belief in the resurrection from the dead.  Even in the solemn Lenten season, the Sundays occur in lent, but they are not of it.  And this past Sunday was an especially clear celebration of life over death.

All of us have had our close brushes with death.  We may tell stories about how we cheated death:  a close call of a accident, a very serious illness from which we recovered, or a diagnosis that turned out to be less dire than we feared.  Each one a story about how death doesn’t always gain the upper hand until, of course, one day it does.

That’s what makes this account in John’s gospel such powerful comfort.  Here is the account of Jesus did not merely cheat death, he confronted in broad daylight, made a frontal assault on the grave, and came away with a powerfully clear and wonderfully comforting victory.  So let’s go to this funeral service in Bethany, just outside Jerusalem, and see Jesus:  Grave Robber in Broad Daylight!  

Jesus robbed the grave of Lazarus because he can.  Being a Christian does not make you immune to death, neither your own nor that of your loved ones.  Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary, were Christians.  They were also close friends of Jesus.  He was a guest in their home on a number of occasions, and in this chapter of John we see Jesus weeping at the death of his friend, Lazarus.  When last we saw Martha (Luke 10) she was distracted by many things and complaining that she was doing all the work.  Mary was sitting at Jesus’ feet, listening.  Martha must have been listening, too, ever since because she is such a different mind and priority here!  Here she can’t wait for Jesus to come with his comforting presence, so she rushes out to meet him.  What a valuable thing she had learned! – when trouble comes, especially the trouble that is death, the best place to be is as close to Jesus as possible.  

Why?  Let Martha explain in the things that she says!

• “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” – Confidence in his compassion because she knew what Jesus’ position on death is:  “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  (John 10:10); “He who has the Son has life.” (1 John 5:12)

• “But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.”  - Confidence in his power because she knew who Jesus is:  “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

·         “I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the Last Day.” – Confessing her faith in the resurrection on the Last Day.  She knew that from the Old Testament promises God had given:  “My heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body will also rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay.”  (Psalm 16:9-10)  David spoke those words of Jesus, and Martha had surely learned that from Jesus, but he had also taught her that Jesus was the first-fruit of all who believed in him:  “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:20)  She had learned it from Job, too:  “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another.  How my heart yearns within me!”  (Job 19:25-27)

·         “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, because it has been four days.”  And yet she was rooted in the reality of what death meant in this fallen world.  Even as she knew that her dear brother lived on in heaven and would live again physically in the resurrection, she properly assessed that death stinks.  It is a wonderfully poignant scene we see a chapter later as John describes a dinner Mary and Martha gave in Jesus’ honor.  Martha was serving the one who had come to serve and to give his life as a ransom for sinners.  Mary broke open the seal on a jar of expensive perfume that had been saved for Jesus’ burial and anointed him with it.  As that scent filled the room, it was a powerful reminder not only that the sins of the world would be the reason for Jesus’ death, but that what he would accomplish in his death and resurrection would change the way that death smells.

While Martha is confessing all of this, Mary is at home grieving with guests, but grieving with hope!  She knew and believed all of those things about Jesus, too. After all, she had long been sitting at his feet and hanging on his words.  She knew the truth about what Jesus had come to do to death.  So in the midst of all that mourning, there was hope that lived in her heart – light in the midst of that darkness.

Death is still dark and it still stinks, doesn’t it?  No matter who you are or how much you love your loved ones, it keeps coming.  In the space of five weeks it took both of my parents and a dear friend.  Whom have you lost, and the loss still hurts?   It is no respecter of age either.  I have conducted a funeral service for lady who had celebrated her 100th birthday, and I have ridden to the cemetery in a funeral home car with the casket of a baby riding in the backseat.  I have conducted funerals for people who passed quietly in their sleep, for people ravaged by illness and time, and even for a murder victim.  And it just keeps coming.  Each death reminds us of the ugliness of sin and the damage it has inflicted on the world – damage that we will live with until, as Paul reminded us today in our 2nd reading, the Last Day when all will be released from it.  Remember what he said? – “17Now if we are children, we are also heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, since we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him. 18For I conclude that our sufferings at the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed to us. 19In fact, creation is waiting with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed.”

Jesus felt that loss and the yearning for the final victory.  I’m sure Lazarus, in his last days, experienced both loss and hope, too.  Martha and Mary did, too.  So have I, and so have you.  The loss we feel – and the fear of death – is no different than what this little family in our text experienced.  Our comfort remains exactly the same as theirs, because the things we know about Jesus are exactly as Martha confessed.  Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior.  He can do anything, even exercising power over death itself.  Because of his victory, our loved ones who have fallen asleep in Jesus will rise again. 

But we would know none of those facts if Jesus had not both said them and showed them.  At Lazarus’ funeral Jesus was not just thinking about confirming Martha’s confession or healing her broken heart or restoring her brother to her.  He was thinking about everyone there and everyone here and everyone ever since and everyone always.  Jesus was about to rob the grave in broad daylight because he could, yes, but also because we need to know he has!

As we watch this incident unfold, there is so much about it that tells us Jesus was going do to something extraordinary to make a very important truth undeniably clear:  he has power over death.  Earlier in this chapter we hear about the sisters sending word to Jesus to come quickly, Lazarus was sick.  Here’s how Jesus responded:  “‘This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’ 5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, 7 and then he said to his disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.’

By the time he got to Bethany, Lazarus was dead – for four days.  By Martha’s own statement, we know that the natural processes of decomposition were already four days along.  In response to Martha’s confession of confidence in the resurrection on the Last Day, Jesus declared the truth that was at the very heart of what he was about to do:  “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even if he dies. 26And whoever lives and believes in me will never perish.”  Let’s come back to that statement in moment, because there are some really important truths and promises packed into Jesus’ words.  But now, let’s move on to the miracle!

Can I point to you that when Jesus arrived at the tomb he was “deeply moved” again?  His enemy, death, the one he had come to destroy, had claimed his dear friend.  If Jesus was grieved by that, if Jesus shed tears over that - even though he was about to destroy death and bring immortality to light – should it surprise us that we grieve and shed tears?  What a beautiful thing it is that Jesus knows what that sense of loss and that grief are like!  Who better to turn to when we lose a love one?

But then he is there, standing outside the tomb.  And he does what he always did – he prays:  “Father, I thank you that you heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.”  Apparently, Jesus had prayed to his Father to stand with him as he undid this death.  He was going to do this miracle not just Lazarus’ sake, and not just for the sake of Mary and Martha. He was going to do this miracle for the benefit of all those there that day and everyone ever since.  This was going to be a very clear, unmistakable, broad daylight, right-in-front-of-everyone miracle to demonstrate that Jesus is exactly who Martha confessed him to be:  “the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”  He was the Head Crusher promised to Adam and Eve, the Redeemer in whom Job put his hope, the Great Light that was to dawn on those walking in darkness and living in the land of the shadow of death- just as God had foretold through Isaiah.

And then he did it – in broad daylight – he robbed that grave of its victim.  He stepped up confidently to the tomb and told them to remove the stone.  “...he shouted with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The man who had died came out with his feet and his hands bound with strips of linen and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus told them, ‘Loose him and let him go.’”  Jesus called him to life because that’s what God can do.  With the same power that once breathed into lifeless clay the breath of life in Eden, he now calls for life again.  When God speaks, what he says happens.  Every time.  The last line of our text tells us that what Jesus wanted to happen that day happened:  “Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what Jesus did believed in him.”  He actually performed many resurrections that day, didn’t he?  One was physical – that’s Lazarus’.  But many were raised from the spiritual death of unbelief to living faith in Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”  Jesus so wanted that to happen because to trust in him as Savior brings eternal life and relegates physical death into nothing more than a gate through which the soul steps into garden of God’s glory, nothing more than a temporary sleep of the physical body.  Jesus wanted those people to have that.  It was his whole purpose in coming into the world – he said so:  “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”  (John 10:10); “He who has the Son has life.” (1 John 5:12)  And there, outside Lazarus’ suddenly, wonderfully empty tomb, all those who came to faith in Jesus had Jesus and life and had it to the full!

Dare I say it? – those were the most important resurrections that day.  Once a person has been brought to faith in Jesus, death has been emptied of its sting and it has been handed a stinging defeat. This same divinely inspired author, John, recorded this in the last book he wrote, the last book of the Bible:  “This is the first resurrection.  Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection.  The second death [hell] has no power over them...” (Revelation 20:5-6)  That’s the resurrection Jesus has already given you.  It didn’t happen outside a tomb, but at the baptismal font or in the pages of Scripture.  You and I are here as walking, talking, “grave-clothes-off-let-him-go” followers of Jesus who follow him through life and one day will follow him from this life to that life that doesn’t end in heaven.

Now let’s go back to the words Jesus spoke to Martha – those words that sit right at the heart of this event:  “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even if he dies. 26And whoever lives and believes in me will never perish.”  Can we unpack to the truths in those words?  There is one sad truth there, surrounded by happy ones.  That sad truth is “he dies.”  We all will because that is still physical consequence of sin.  It has been since Adam and Eve brought sin and death into the world.  God told them and us it would be this way:  “”you must not eat form the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”  They did and so has everyone ever since for the same reason – sin.  Had not God intervened through his Son, that physical death – our physical death – would have been followed by an eternal dying and suffering in hell.  But Jesus has intervened.  He died that death – both of those deaths – for all of us.  And that’s why he can smother that sad phrase “he dies” with such comforting phrases.  Listen again! - “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even if he dies. 26And whoever lives and believes in me will never perish.”  

·         “I am the resurrection and the life.”  In chapter 5 of this same gospel Jesus put it this way:  “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent he has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”  By God’s own work in you and me through the life-giving gospel, we have crossed over from death to life.  As John put it in his first letter:  “He who has the Son has life.” (1 John 5:12)  

• “Whoever believes in me will live, even if he dies.”  That means what it says.  One day what happened to Lazarus will happen to you.  Jesus will return in glory on the Last Day and call our bodies from the grave and we will get them back, better than ever, free from sin and death, ready to live forever.  Jesus promised that, too, in John 5:  “Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out...”

• “...whoever lives and believes in me will never perish.”  When the day of death comes in this life, Jesus wants you and me to know that that won’t be the end of us.  The part of us that truly us – that knows Jesus and hopes and trusts and loves – that part of us will live forever and not die. 

We don’t know what happened to Lazarus after that day at the tomb.  It’s safe to say that one day he died again – perhaps old and full of years – and went home to heaven and was with his beloved Jesus again.  In time his sisters joined him there.  And one day, we will, too.  That’s because our Savior is a wonderfully compassionate and gracious and powerful grave robber in the best possible sense.  Happy Easter – every Sunday – every day!