Study Format:
1. What did you hear Jesus offering to you? To us? To the world?
2. What kind of resistance to Jesus did you hear?
3. What will you have to learn to resist or renounce in order to receive what Jesus is offering?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• Like last week’s healing of the man born blind, while the presenting issue of the story is the miraculous raising of Lazarus, the bulk of the conflict deals with the conversations between Jesus and other characters in the narrative.
• While the raising of Lazarus is only recounted in John’s gospel, other stories of Jesus raising people from the dead occur in the synoptics, so this sort of a miracle is common to all Gospel traditions.
• Lazarus is also the name of the poor man in the parable in Luke 16:19-31. While the two are certainly not the same character, as the naming of characters in parables is pretty unusual, some scholars have posited that the name “Lazarus” entered the parable through Luke’s knowledge of this story from the Johaninne tradition.
• The story begins with identifying Mary as “the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.” However, this event hasn’t happened yet, it takes place in John 12:3. Some scholars have read this as an editorial gloss, indicating a mistake where an ancient editor rearranged stories. Others have argued it is the writer of John’s Gospel assuming the audience’s familiarity with Mary already, and thus the reference here links the death of Lazarus to the death of Jesus, which Mary is preparing the body for by anointing Jesus.
• In v. 4, Jesus moved the focus of the illness from the illness itself to it as an opportunity for God’s glory to be revealed, just as the man born blind was not blind because of sin, but in order for God’s glory to be revealed. The irony of the story of Lazarus is that while Lazarus’ illness did not lead to Lazarus’ death, it will lead to Jesus’.
• Jesus’ talk about hours in v. 9-10 recalls the coming of Jesus’ hour as a metaphor for his death. Prior to this, Jesus would say, “my hour has not yet come” (2:4; 7:30; 8:20), but now he will begin to say that the hour has come (12:23; 13:1; 17:1).
• V. 17 states that Lazarus had been in the grave four days. This is a reference to the popular belief that the soul hovered around the body for three days, and after the third day would leave the body for good. So saying Lazarus had been dead four days reinforces the idea that he was very much dead.
• We tend to read Mary and Martha through the lens of their depiction in Luke, Martha being the hard working one, and Mary more passive. Those traits don’t really apply here, and we should read them only as their own characters. When Martha says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” commentators have been hesitant to describe it as a complaint so much as an expression of her faith in Jesus as a healer. If it is tinged in complaint however, complaint is a language of faith in scripture (c.f. Psalm 4; 6; 13; 22), so the two do not have to be exclusive.
• Jesus’ response to Martha, that Lazarus would live, is open-ended, so her misunderstanding of the timing is understandable. She affirms her belief in one of the tenants of her faith, while misunderstanding the nearness of that belief.
• Jesus’ prayer in v. 41-42 is the first time in John’s Gospel that Jesus addresses God as “Father,” though it is common in the synoptic Gospels. The prayer has been dismissed as a “show prayer” more an example than an act of piety. But other scholars have noted it is a prayer of thanks. Jesus does not need to petition God, for his relationship with God is such that he is always in communion with God. The prayer reinforces the purpose of the miracle, not to draw attention to Jesus, but to draw attention to the revelation of God.
Works Sourced:
O’Day, Gail. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
No comments:
Post a Comment