(Audio)
Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
Martha did not need to hide what she was feeling. She felt that Jesus had let her down and she said as much. But she did not let her feelings or her partial understanding of the situation limit her faith in Jesus.
But even now I know that whatever you ask of God,
God will give you.
Because she was able to hold in dynamic tension her own sadness with faith in Jesus he was able to draw her to another level of faith, one which encompassed and in some way made sense of the sadness.
Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.”
Martha thought faith was something distant, a hope for the last day, which could not speak to her sadness in the present moment. Jesus told her it was more than that.
Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Jesus revealed himself as the resurrection and the life. This was true even before he rose, even before he raised Lazarus from the dead. It was more than simply saying that Martha had good grounds for hope in something happening eventually. Jesus told her that who he was even in that moment was an undying life, and that all who would ever believe in him would share and be united to that life. There was a sense in which, close to Jesus, nothing was truly taken or lost. He was the head and the body was even then united to him.
We are drawn away by many distractions. Even Martha, whose faith was great, let serving detract from the one thing necessary. The more we can make that one thing central to our own lives the less we will be pulled by the anxieties and worries of life, even in the midst of service, even in the midst of sadness. We need to be like the prophet Jeremiah.
When I found your words, I devoured them;
they became my joy and the happiness of my heart,
The words of the LORD make us a solid wall of brass toward anything the world can send at us. Do we believe it?
She said to him, “Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
the one who is coming into the world.”
Matt Maher - Because He Lives
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