Second Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: John 11:32-44

[An explanation of what these passes are about and the first pass can be found here.]

John 11:32-44
A Few More General Comments
1. A theme central in last weekend's text is also dealt with here: The struggle--for followers of Christ--to remain in Christ, to keep believing in Christ. Faith is not a "one and done" thing. The call to believe in Jesus Christ is a call to trust Him through lives of "daily repentance and renewal." Martin Luther, who used the phrase I put in quotation marks in that last sentence, used to upbraid the "born again" Christians of his day, saying that they weren't "born again" enough. The sin against the Holy Spirit, which cannot be forgiven, isn't a specific act: It's the refusal to allow the Spirit to convince and convict us about our sins. We must daily reconnect with Christ, so that God can overcome anything that distorts our relationship with God, others, or our true selves.

Here, the fiercest hurdle to faith is dealt with: Death. I often tell mourners at funerals that if our faith isn't true then, it simply isn't true. A Lord Who doesn't have the power to overcome death cannot overcome ultimate cause of our death, the common human condition of sin, which brought death and decay into our world. And if a Lord can't do that, He really isn't Lord--Boss, King, Overlord--of the universe at all.

Jesus' raising of Lazarus is another sign--a semeia, the characteristic New Testament term for what we often call miracles--of His Lordship and the inbreaking of His Kingdom.

2. A perceptive commenter on the last pass at this lesson wondered "if it wouldn't be possible if it [what happened to Lazarus] really was a resurrection" rather than a resuscitation, as the Church has historically styled the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

It's a good question, one that appropriately asked if I might not be splitting hairs in order to give Jesus His place as "the first fruits from the dead."

I think that the traditional view is correct of what happened to Lazarus, though. I say that for several reasons:

• Resurrection involves an irrevocable reversal of death; the resurrected don't die. Had the plan been for Lazarus never to die again, simply translated into heaven, I feel certain that John would have mentioned this.
  
• We have no indication that Lazarus' body was like that of the resurrected Jesus, unconstrained by time and space, either.
• Only two Biblical figures were or seemed to be translated into heaven: Enoch (probably) and Elijah (for sure). Neither one died first, though.
• Finally, I really do think that if Lazarus was resurrected, Jesus could not be considered "the first fruits of the dead" or "the pioneer and perfecter of our faith," both important Biblical confessions about Him.

The Greek NT word translated as pioneer in the New Revised Standard Version, according to A Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament, can also be rendered as leader, founder, or originator. It appears to be a compound of two Greek terms, arche, which can be translated as beginning, origin, first cause, ruling power, authority. It's this word that appears in the first chapter of Genesis in the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, with which Jesus and the early Church would have been familiar: "In the beginning..." (En arche). It's also the term John, the Gospel writer, uses at the outset of his prologue: "In the beginning..." (En arche). (We see arche in such words as archeology today.) The second word in this compound term translated as pioneer is ergon, meaning work, deed, action, task, occupation, undertaking. (We see this word in the English one, ergonomics, which is finding the "laws"--nomos, the Greek word that gives us the suffixes -nomy and -nomics in English, means law--that will help people do tasks, work comfortably.) The basic idea then, is that Jesus is the first worker of this new resurrected life. He has blazed that trail, the first among the resurrected and the one who opened resurrection to all who follow Him.]

I hope to present verse-by-verse comments tomorrow.