Sunday, March 22, 2026, Fifth Sunday in Lent
“Conversations with Jesus: Mary, Martha… and Lazarus!”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 124:1-8; Ezekiel 37:1-14; Romans 8:1-11; John 11:1-45
Service Order: Morning Prayer, Lutheran Service Book p.235
Hymns: “God, Whose Almighty Word” (Lutheran Worship #317); “Christ, the Life of All the Living” #420; “Christ Is Risen, Christ Is Living” #479; “I’m But a Stranger Here” #748
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Some conversations are easy. Some are pleasant, joyful, and even fun – like a conversation with a friend you haven’t seen for a while, or sitting down with your family to make plans for a vacation, or a nice, conversational Bible study; or just a conversation about not much of anything, just to pass the time of day.
Other conversations, not so much. Some conversations are difficult, even painful, the kind that are necessary sometimes, even though we do our best to try to avoid them – like a sit-down talk with a misbehaving child; or a discussion about your finances, or a talk with someone who’s hurt you feelings, or with someone you need to apologize to; or a talk with your doctor about bad news, or a talk with a loved one about a nursing home. In our Gospel today, Jesus has the most difficult conversation of all.
Jesus had three very dear friends, Scripture tells us: Mary, her sister Martha, and their brother Lazarus, who lived in a town called Bethany. Their home was a favorite stop-over for Jesus and His disciples whenever they happened to be in the neighborhood. You remember the story of Mary and Martha? About how Martha was going frantic trying to put a nice meal together for Jesus and His companions, and Mary only wanted to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to Him, and how mad Martha got at her sister? And our Gospel says Mary was the same woman who’d poured expensive perfume on Jesus’ head and wiped His feet with her hair.
Jesus really loved this little family, and they loved Him. And now the sisters sent word to Jesus that brother Lazarus was sick, so sick he was about to die, and that He needed to hurry and come. When Jesus got the news, He told His disciples, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it." It’s the same thing He said when He was asked about the blind man: “This happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”
What Jesus does, we have to remember, He does already knowing what He’s going to do. He knew Lazarus was sick before anyone told Him, and He knew that he was going to die; and He already had in mind the miracle He was going to do for him. The sisters hoped, assumed, expected, that He’d come on the run and get there in time to save their brother. But He didn’t come; He stayed where He was for two more days, which didn’t seem to be a loving thing to Mary and Martha at all.
Then, says our Gospel, Jesus stood up and said to His disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea,” and they were appalled at the idea: “Lord, last time we were there the Jews tried to stone You; why would You want to go back there?” And His answer was, “To shine a little light. To give our friends Martha, and Mary, and the whole world, something to hope for.”
And then, listen to this conversation; Jesus tells them: "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I’m going there to wake him up." The disciples take that as good news, assuming that if Lazarus is sleeping, he must be on the mend; but that isn’t what Jesus meant at all. He tells them, "Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I’m glad I wasn’t there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him." Then Thomas, the gloomy, glass-is-half-empty doubter among the disciples, said to the rest, "Let us also go, that we may die with Him."
By the time Jesus got to Bethany, Lazarus had been in his grave for four days. Now the Jews had the idea (an unscriptural one) that the spirit or soul of a person stayed with the body up to three days after death, before departing to wherever souls go. So up to three days after death, there was still hope for a miracle and the hope of revival. But Jesus waited for four days, until the soul of poor Lazarus was thought to have departed. Decay had begun to set in, and hope was gone. If you had asked the sisters, “Can dry bones live?” they would have answered, “No.”
Bethany, says our Gospel, was less than two miles from Jerusalem, up on the Mount of Olives, from where Jesus would later begin His ride into the city, seated on a donkey’s colt. Many Jews, says our Gospel, who knew Lazarus and his family, came out from Jerusalem to offer what comfort they could. A Jewish funeral could sometimes last for days, with people coming and going. Some even hired professional mourners who were paid to grieve and wail. They expected only what you always see at a funeral; none of them expected the miracle they were going to see.
Now, here comes the “hard conversation” part of this Gospel, that awful, difficult, don’t-know-what-to-say conversation we all hope never to have to have. Martha, the more direct and outspoken of the two sisters, was heartbroken, upset, and angry with Jesus; so when she heard He’d finally arrived, she stormed out to meet Him. And she said the same thing many of us have said, when we’ve prayed and prayed and prayed for someone we love, and God didn’t answer our prayer: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” Lord, where were you? You could have helped him and healed Him, but You didn’t. Either You don’t have the power that You say You have, or You do have the power, but You just don’t care. “But I know that even now,” Martha tells Him, “that God will give you whatever you ask." Lord, You can still fix this; You can still give him back to me;” although she didn’t see, through her grief and her tears, any way that could possibly be. Sometimes we want so badly to trust God, but it’s so hard to believe Him.
Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." And that’s good, Lord, and thank You for that; but how does that help me today? I don’t want him back a million years from now; I need him today. I need to touch him, hold him, and have him here with me. A memory and a distant hope isn’t nearly enough. (Tell me you haven’t ever thought the same thing when somebody said to you at a funeral, “You’ll see them again in heaven one day”). Martha answered, "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Which is only hope she or any of us has, but small comfort at a graveside.
Jesus injects into this sad and tearful conversation, one of the most profound of His “I Am” statements that we find in Scripture, that tell us who He is: “I Am the Good Shepherd; I Am the Light of the World; I Am the Door; I Am the Gateway for the Sheep; I Am the Bread of Life; I Am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” And here He says, “I Am the resurrection and the life.”
What do we make of His statement to poor Martha, who’s standing there heartbroken, having had to put her poor brother in the ground? “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Really Jesus? Everybody dies; we all know this. Death is 100% universal; it’s going to get us all.
But Jesus isn’t just our hope of resurrection one day; He is our resurrection now. He’s the resurrection of our spirits, the resurrection of our hope and joy, even through our tears. He’s the Lord and giver of life, the One who holds life in His hands. We who believe in Him for our salvation will live, even though we have to die. St. Paul wrote to us, “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”
The prevailing opinion about death in this world is that we live, and then we die, and that’s all there is; that is, that we go from living to dying; and that really would be sad if it were true. But the truth is, and we Christians know this, that we go from living to living – from living here to living on. The promise is that when you close your eyes in this world, you’ll open them again in the next, one life giving way to an even better and happier one in God’s heaven – a new life with God and the people you love. Jesus isn’t talking metaphors; He really does mean it when He says, “Whoever lives and believes in Me will never die.”
"Yes, Lord," Martha told him, "I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world." An honest confession, from one so full of grief. My Uncle Gary and I stood by my grandmother’s casket once, and he said to me, “This is why Jesus died.”
Martha went back to the house to tell her sister Mary, “The Teacher is here, and He’s asking to see you,” and Mary got up to go out to Him. She was sad, heartbroken, and angry too, that Jesus hadn’t come in time. All the mourners, professional and otherwise, assumed she was going out to the tomb to cry some more, and followed after her. (Can’t you feel the miracle coming at this point!)
Mary fell down at Jesus’ feet and said the same thing Martha had said: “Lord, if only You’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” And she began to cry. What does it tell us that Jesus cried, too? That He isn’t indifferent to our sorrow. There’s a Psalm that says, “The Lord counts all our tears.” Jesus is with us, beside us, and crying along with us - by every sickbed, in every hospital room, at every funeral we have to go to, at every graveside where we have to look at the flowers and the dirt.
Death and sorrow breaks His heart, the same as it breaks ours. He loves you and me, same as He loved Martha and Mary, and Lazarus. The difference, one we can see in this Gospel, is that when we stand crying by a graveside, there’s nothing we can do to change it; but Jesus can! That’s why He didn’t come running when Martha and Mary called, and why He waited four days until all hope was gone. This is something we have to see and believe, if we’re going to have real hope. If Jesus has no power over death, then death has us. But if He has the power to change it, if He can bring up those dry bones and make them live, then death is something we never have to be afraid of, ever again.
Jesus wept, along with them all. And then He asked, “Where have you laid him?” Some of the Jews standing by said, “See how He loved him!” But others (and there will always be skeptics, even at funerals), said, “If He could open the eyes of a blind men, why couldn’t He have kept this man from dying?” But the doubters needed to see the miracle, too, maybe most of all.
Jesus, deeply moved – moved with compassion – came to the tomb, a cave with a stone laid across the entrance; a grave like any other, marked by a stone that was never meant to be moved. He ordered the stone to be taken away, and Martha pointed out the obvious: “By this time, there will be a smell.” No mortuary science in those days, no preserving fluids, no make-up to cover the gray-green face of death. You older folks might remember that years ago funerals were usually done within two or three days, for that reason.
Then Jesus said, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" So they took away the stone. And with the smell of death wafting out of the tomb, Jesus looked up and prayed; and His prayer told everyone there - and us - why He’d waited for death to be hopeless and irreversible before using His power: “Father, I thank you that You have heard Me, and I know that You always hear Me; but I’m praying out loud for the sake of these people standing here” (and for the sake of everyone who’d be reading and hearing this blessed Gospel all these years later) “that they might believe that You have sent Me.” More than anything, we need faith we can lean on. Especially when we’re staring at an open grave, we need faith that can see through our tears. What do we have, if we have no hope that God is able to give us back what we’ve lost?
Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” To where did that voice reach?
How far down into the darkness of death? Or better still, how far up into the glory of heaven? (I wonder if Lazarus ever complained afterward about having seen and experienced heaven, and having to come back? The poor man had to die twice!) It’s interesting that the Gospel says, “The dead man came out,” since he clearly wasn’t dead anymore. He came out wrapped in the rags of death, strips of linen around his hands and feet, and a burial cloth, a shroud, wrapped around his face. And Jesus said, “Take the grave clothes off him and let him go.”
I can’t imagine the reaction of Martha and Mary (and the Gospel only leaves us to imagine it). Were they frightened? Were they afraid to touch him? Did they even believe he was real? When they realized he was, when he took them in his arms, their joy must have been beyond belief. I get the idea that’s what heaven is going to be like when we get there - a joy we can’t even imagine, when everyone we’ve loved and lost has been restored to us.
“Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, put their faith in Him.” This gives us the backdrop to our Gospel on Palm Sunday next week. The crowd coming into Jerusalem with Jesus had witnessed the miracle. They’d seen Lazarus, four days dead, walk out of his grave at a Word from Jesus. “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” they said. But there was another crowd that came out to meet Him that wanted all the praising stopped.
Our walk through Holy Week begins very soon, as we follow the road Jesus walked to the cross; a road that brought Him to death, and to a tomb that was sealed by a stone. Then came the blessed Easter morning, when death was broken forever. Jesus lives, and because He lives, so He has promised, we shall live also. And not just for a little while, but forever. One day we’ll all be together, and a glorious thing that will be.
“No more mourning or sorrow or crying or pain; God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
“Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.’" In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com