The Resurrection and the Life by the Way of the Cross

If the Lord Jesus had been there, He surely could have done something; and of course His presence would have made a difference in the outcome. Given all the good that He had done for so many others beforehand, He certainly could have healed His friend Lazarus and spared his sisters the hurt and pain of his death. In truth, He could have taken care of everything and made it all better. As far as that goes, He would not have had to make the journey to be there in order to answer the call and to help. His Word alone would easily have healed Lazarus from whatever distance.

Jesus could have done any number of things that would have made a difference. But He didn’t. Instead, He deliberately chose to wait, to remain where He was until after His friend had died. He purposely lingered and allowed death to have its day, and only then did He go — putting Himself and His disciples at risk for no apparent reason. Yet, Jesus says that He is glad He wasn’t there.

So Lazarus has died, and that seems to confirm the inevitability of death. It puts Mary and Martha in the same position that many or most of you have found yourselves in. Your dearly departed is dead and buried, and you grieve and mourn for a time, but you also have to begin moving on. The relatives, neighbors, and friends come to sympathize and to share in your grief for a little while, and then they go home, and you return as best you can to what’s left of your life and your routines.

As a Christian, you hear and receive the comfort of the Gospel, the hope of the Resurrection on the Last Day. You know it and believe it, you confess it yourself, and you cling to it. But the words may or may not have any bearing on your feelings from one minute to the next. You want to rejoice and be happy that the one you love has gone to a better place — if, indeed, that person departed in the faith and hope of the Gospel — but whatever joy and peace that gives you must compete with the sadness and the emptiness that are left in the place where a person used to be.

Death is the culmination of sin, the definitive outcome of this “mortal life.” It is relentless and unstoppable. Whether you deny it, resist it, run away from it, or try to embrace it, you cannot escape it. Nor can you undo it when it comes. You cannot raise your family, friends, and loved ones from the grave; far less can you raise yourself. And that very futility, the finality of death and the grave, overshadows your entire life on earth. Your pace may be fast or slow, frantic or relaxed. You may be cautious or careless or tread a moderate path. But your flesh and blood, your heart, mind, and body are subject to death. You are dying even now. You are mortal. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Such are the wages of sin, the curse and consequences of sin, which is hostility toward God. You are mortal, weak, and dying, because you are conceived and born at enmity with God. You are turned away from Him, turned inward upon yourself, so that, instead of receiving the living and Life-giving Spirit of God, you are consumed by your own hunger and appetites. You breathe your own air until you are poisoned by its lack of oxygen and its stench of death.

Little wonder that you so often feel trapped and hopeless — and how foolish when you suppose that you can handle it, as though you could survive and get by on your own — for you are among those dried-up dead bones littering the desert down in the valley of the shadow of death. The death and burial of your mortal body, in time, will simply bring to a head what is already true of your flesh and blood, your skin and bones; for the havoc that sin wreaks throughout your life on earth, in all of your relationships, is already the aroma of that vast graveyard with all its hopeless despair.

But now, it is into that death valley that the Lord Jesus strides, in the footsteps of so many sons of Adam and daughters of Eve before Him. From the waters of His Baptism the Son of Man enters into the wilderness of sin and death, in order to take His stand in the midst of all those dried-up old bones. So has He come to find you there, just as He came to find Lazarus when he was four days gone, a rotting corpse stinking of death and decay.

Now it is that death itself suffers an intrusion, and its own violence is turned back upon its head, because Life Himself has entered in where He had no need to go. His own Love compels Him, nothing else. Here He befriends the whole world of sinful mortal men at their worst and most helpless. He does not intervene to spare His friends from the pain of death, but He approaches death in the Flesh, in order to reconcile the world to His God and Father. He invades the tomb in order to empty it, to raise the dead and give them Life and bring them to God in faith and love.

Of course, it is not the death and resurrection of Lazarus that accomplishes this great salvation, but this Sign of Christ points to the Glory of His Cross, to His own death, and to His Resurrection from the dead. Not only do these events in Bethany foreshow the Lord’s imminent dying and rising in nearby Jerusalem, but His raising of Lazarus from the dead is the last straw, the catalyst that prompts the Jewish leaders to plot His death. That is how the fallen world reacts and responds to its invasion by the Light and Life of God in Christ Jesus. Yet, this wickedness and evil intent must serve the plans and purposes of God, who moves deliberately to the Cross. No one takes His Life from Him, but He lays it down willingly, in Love, and so shall He also take it up again.

Not that it’s easy or painless for Jesus. Not at all. He is moved in the depths of His being. He has genuine compassion; that is to say, He actually shares your suffering and pain. He cries because He, too, is sad. There is no greater champion of Life than He is, and no one who hates death more. He is not troubled by any lack of faith, nor does He succumb to hopeless despair, but He does mourn the death of His friend. His heart, mind, body, and soul are wrenched with real sorrow.

Here is a Mystery as great as that of the Holy Trinity. It belongs to the Mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God, not simply as a dogmatic affirmation, but as the truly human experience of God in the Flesh. That “Jesus wept” is not merely the shortest verse of the Bible, but one of the most profound. Here your merciful and great High Priest knows your weakness by making it His own; for not only has the Word become Flesh, but in His Flesh He has taken on the burden and hurt, the curse and consequence of our sin. So, His cheeks are moistened by hot and salty tears like yours, and His heart breaks, too, over the mortal wound that sin has inflicted on those whom He loves.

As He has made Himself like you, as He has borne your sins and carried all your sorrows in His own Body of flesh and blood, and as He has suffered and died in your place, in your stead, so do His tears sanctify yours. He joins your weeping to His own. He gathers up your sadness and your mourning into His. He unites all your groans and shudders with His own deep sorrows. And all of this He bears and carries and experiences in His own Body, even unto His death upon the Cross.

All of this He does in steadfast faith, in perfect love for His Father, for you and for all men and women everywhere. In flesh and blood like yours, He suffers everything, though without any sins of His own. And even though He takes the sins of the world upon Himself, and He dies for them as though they were His own, He is not broken or destroyed by them. He does not sin in any of His thoughts, words, or deeds as He suffers and dies. He does not despair of His God and Father, but trusts Him to rescue Him from out of death and to vindicate His righteousness openly.

The Law of God is thus fulfilled and satisfied in Christ Jesus, in His own Flesh, in His Cross and Resurrection. Sin is condemned and punished in His Body by His death, and atoned for by the shedding of His holy and precious Blood. Consequently, all those for whom He died — that is, Adam and Eve and all their children — are justified and reconciled to God in His Resurrection from the dead. So, too, the faith and love which the Law requires is perfectly established once and for all in this same Lord Jesus Christ. And that is the righteousness which is credited to you, by His grace, through faith in His Gospel. As He has taken what is yours to be His own, so does He give what is His to be yours. He takes your sin and death, and He gives to you His righteousness.

It is by His righteousness that you are set right with God, and also by His righteousness that you now live in faith and love. Not as though you were already perfect in yourself, nor as though you now live by a righteousness of your own; but in Christ Jesus you are reconciled to God in peace, and as He now lives in you by and with His Spirit, you live in love for your neighbors. In Christ your bones and flesh are raised up and made truly alive, day by day, even in the midst of death.

This righteousness and life of Christ Jesus, His faith and love, His Spirit, and His peace are given to you by the Ministry of His Gospel. It is for this purpose that He has established the Office of the Ministry in His Church on earth, so that His servants should preach His Word in the footsteps of the Prophets and Apostles. So have you heard how Caiaphas preached the Atonement of Christ Jesus even as he plotted against the Lord to put Him to death, because he spoke according to his office as high priest. And you have heard the familiar story of the Prophet Ezekiel, who preached to the dry bones and to the Breath — that is, to the Spirit of Yahweh — as the Lord commanded, and by his preaching the bones were raised from death to life. So greatly does the Lord honor such preaching of His Word, that He binds Himself to it and allows Himself to be ordered by it. The Holy Spirit is thus given by and with the Word of Christ, and by His Word and Spirit you live.

Like Adam in the beginning, like Lazarus in this morning’s Gospel, and like the Lord Jesus in His Resurrection from the dead, so does the Word of God raise you from the dust of the earth and breathe His Life-giving Holy Spirit into your flesh. That will certainly be true on the Last Day, when He raises your body from its resting place and glorifies it with His own glory in heaven. But it is already true here and now in His preaching of the Gospel to you, in His Word of forgiveness, which undoes the power of sin and death and pours out the Spirit of God upon your body and soul.

That daily resurrection does not compromise nor contradict your human nature, but it confirms your true humanity, like that of Christ Jesus, in holy faith and love. It does not cancel out your personality, nor deny your feelings and emotions, but it leaves all of these intact while cleansing them of sin and renewing who you are as a child of God in Christ. It does not deny or forbid your tears, but hallows them with the tears that Christ has wept for you. It does not prevent you from mourning, but enables you to mourn in the peace of Christ and the hope of His Resurrection.

Death remains the last great enemy, but Christ Jesus, the Son of Man, tramples it beneath His own mortally wounded feet. He does not succumb to death, He defeats it in Himself — by submitting Himself to death in order to burst it apart from the inside-out. And now He calls you out of death into Life by the Gospel, as He called forth Lazarus out of the tomb, and as surely as He Himself has gone into Hades ahead of you and come out again in Victory — into the land of the living.

You share His Victory over death and the grave, and you share His Life in both body and soul, now and forever, by virtue of your Holy Baptism in His Name and because the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead now dwells in you through the Gospel. He strengthens you in faith and love, helps you in your weakness, intercedes for you when your groans are too deep for words, and grants you courage and peace in the face of death.

As all of this is not only for your soul but also for your body, the Lord Jesus not only pours out His Spirit upon you, but He gives to you His Body to eat and pours out His Blood for you to drink. This is Spiritual Food for your body as well as your soul. Given by and with His Word, it forgives you all your sins, and it enlivens you with Christ Jesus for Life everlasting. Indeed, as this Body and Blood of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus are given into your mortal body of flesh and blood, death is served notice that it shall not be able to keep your body, no more than it could hold His. When death lays hold of you, it lays hold of Christ Jesus, and it is defeated. Thus do you live and believe in Him, and even though you die, yet shall you live.

He has not come too late to help you, dear friend of Jesus. He has not shut His ears to your fervent pleas and desperate prayers, nor does He delay in order to hurt or harm you. He rather moves in love to save you — not from the Cross, but by way of the Cross — for the Resurrection and the Life everlasting. As He bears your sins to atone for them, and as He shares your sadness, so does He share His joy and gladness with you — which is neither denied nor washed away by your tears. Whatever weeping remains for the night, He weeps with you, until the dawning of that eternal Day when He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and there shall be no more sickness, sorrow, sin, or death; for all of these things shall have passed away, but Christ Jesus shall remain forever.

In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.