Sermons
March 22, 2026 (5th Sunday in Lent)
“Wake up, dead man.”[1]
John 11:1-45
I am certain that contemporaries of Jesus during his time on earth would consider modern medicine nothing short of miraculous.
Folks in those days got sick and died from conditions we can easily cure with a course of antibiotics. We can take a person with cancer and, through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, bring them back to health. Without modern orthopedics, a great many of us would be living in constant pain that might eventually leave us unable to walk.
You probably remember how, a bit more than four decades ago, we started hearing about a very strange illness that was cropping up among certain populations. It destroyed people’s immune systems so that they became ill with things others would be able to fight off.
Eventually it was discovered that the culprit was a virus called HIV. Early on a person who got HIV would inevitably die from AIDS; but research produced a drug, and then eventually a cocktail of drugs, that could keep the virus at bay and allow a person with HIV to live a longer life. That took too long, in my opinion; and the memorial quilt that is now too big to be displayed in its entirety anywhere in the United States is a testament to that.
But with medical advances we have been able to reduce the number of blocks that have to be added to that quilt.
Do you remember when the news came out that NBA star Magic Johnson was HIV positive? I think he was the first well-known person for whom HIV wasn’t a death sentence. Up to that point we had lost dozens of people, artists, actors, athletes, not to mention friends and kinfolk, to HIV and AIDS; but Magic was able to start on the new drugs, and he is still with us, with the HIV virus in his system at undetectable levels.
Imagine finding out you have a disease that has taken so many lives. You assume it will take yours, so you begin preparing—getting your estate in order, retiring from work, maybe starting to give away your possessions. And then the new medications come on the scene, and you start taking them.
Now you have a new dilemma: You were preparing for your death, but now your death has been pushed far out into the future. So what will you do now that you’ve got your life back?
Each of the Gospels was written for a specific reason. The purpose of John’s Gospel was to demonstrate that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, partly through a series of signs, so that people would come to believe in him and have eternal life in his name. John tells us this in so many words at the end of chapter 20.
He was writing long enough after the fact that most of his original readers would not have been around when Jesus was. He had had lots of time to reflect and think about what Jesus meant to the world, and what he continued to mean to the people who followed him, even without meeting him in the flesh. So when he had a story like the story of Lazarus, he didn’t just tell the story; he embroidered it with lots of theological reflection. He added color to the story with conversations that allowed Jesus to get across some really deep ideas.
A lot of times a story in John’s Gospel is a jumping-off place for a speech, or maybe an argument. That’s not the case with the story of Lazarus. In this case the speech comes first.
John’s account of the raising of Lazarus isn’t just about one family restored from grief and loss, two women quite possibly losing their main source of support. It certainly is about that, but the event is a chance for John to get across something much bigger.
The first part of the story is sort of troubling. Why would Jesus wait when he found out a beloved friend was dying? Why didn’t he drop everything and go to him? Even if he was just a regular guy like you and me, even if he couldn’t do anything about the illness, wouldn’t he want to go see him one last time, say his goodbyes, maybe help with some of the arrangements that would need to be made?
But he didn’t go. He waited until it was too late.
When he finally does get to Bethany, both of Lazarus’ sisters tell him how disappointed they are in him. They both use the same words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” We can’t read tone in the passage, but I can’t help imagining Martha barrelling down the road to meet Jesus, ready to let him have it for not showing up sooner, for not doing what she knew he could have done and healed Lazarus.
Jesus takes the opportunity to make a major statement about what he’s on earth to do. He defuses Martha’s anger by engaging her in a theological discussion, and she is left with a glimmer of hope.
Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” In other words, don’t look for resurrection down the road somewhere, on some last day that isn’t even on the calendar yet. Don’t think that the resurrection is just about life after death—it’s not just about going to heaven. It’s here now.
This is John’s way of saying what the other Gospels meant when they said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”
Resurrection and life aren’t just about what happens after we die. As soon as we believe in Jesus and commit our lives to following him, we’ve been given access to the resurrection and the life.
What’s that mean?
His next two statements explain it. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Those two statements don’t mean the same thing.
In the first one, Jesus is saying that death is no barrier to the life-giving relationship with God that we have through him. This one is about life after death. The reason we read this so often at funerals is because Jesus is telling us death isn’t the end of us, so while we may say goodbye at a graveside, we can also have confidence we will one day be reunited with them.
But the second one is about life now. “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
The old cereal jingle from the 1970s said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”[2] When you make the decision to commit your life to Jesus—that’s what it means to believe in Jesus, not simply agreeing to a set of statements in a creed—that’s the first day of your eternal life.
Baptism is the symbol of that. Your finite life is over when you go down into those waters. It’s dead and buried. But when you come up out of the water, you’re born all over again—a new creature, an eternal being.
It is still awfully easy, though, to make this statement only about life after death—only about immortality.
When I was younger I enjoyed reading a series of books about an imaginary land called Xanth—a land that, on the maps in the books, looks suspiciously like the state of Florida. It’s a magic place, and every human being has some magic talent, like being able to grow any plant, or make rocks talk.
The first book opens with a young man named Bink getting ready to be exiled out of the land of Xanth. The rule in his day was that no person without a magic talent could stay in Xanth after the age of twenty-five, and twenty-four-year-old Bink doesn’t seem to have any magic talent. The whole first book is about Bink trying to find out whether he does indeed have a talent, and what that talent might be.
Eventually he figures it out, through a series of what seem like coincidences. His talent is that nothing magic can do him harm. The coincidences that have kept him from getting caught in a tangle-tree, or drilled through by a wiggle-worm, are his talent in operation. Far from being the most un-magical person in Xanth, Bink turns out to be one of the most powerful, because no other magic can hurt him.
That realization has a major effect on how he lives his life after that.
“Thos who live and believe in me will never die,” Jesus says. It’s not just assurance that a person’s life will go on after their funeral, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s about how we live when we know our lives don’t end at our funeral.
People told Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador, one of the newest saints in the Catholic Church, whose feast day is the day after tomorrow, that his life would be in danger if he didn’t stop speaking out against the atrocities being perpetrated by the Salvadoran government.
He refused to stop speaking. He said, “As a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people.”[3]
He wasn’t talking about reincarnation, and he didn’t mean that he would literally get up and walk out of his coffin. He wasn’t afraid to die because he was following Jesus in a radical and dangerous way—one that did indeed end with his assassination, as he celebrated a memorial mass on March 24, 1980. He knew that his relationship wouldn’t end with his death, and he knew his people would remember him and would carry his strength and example with them as they lived and struggled.
Years later, he is still a source of inspiration to the people of El Salvador and around the world. Young people who never knew him in life paint his face in their graffiti.
Someone told Dr. King much the same thing once, that he was putting his life in danger through his work for civil rights in the United States. He replied, “I’m not afraid. They can only kill my body.”
Death can’t hurt us. Threats can’t hurt us. Beatings can’t hurt us. Indifference can’t hurt us. Because we have committed to following Jesus Christ, we have a new life that can’t be stopped.
It can’t be stopped. Do you know what that means?
So much of the way we live is based in fear. We don’t stand up for someone who’s being bullied because we’re afraid the bully might turn on us. We dress and act like our peers because we’re afraid we’ll become outcasts if we don’t. We hoard our money and our possessions because we’re afraid we won’t have enough in the future. We don’t allow our faith to make a real difference in our lives because we’re afraid things will change, we won’t be comfortable anymore, life will be hard, maybe we’ll even offend people and lose friends or the love of family members.
What if we didn’t have to be afraid?
“Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
Life is difficult. But life’s difficulties aren’t terminal for those who have died and risen in Christ.
What if we didn’t have to be afraid? What if we could follow Jesus without worrying about the consequences to our lives and our livelihoods? What if we could really follow Jesus, the Jesus who went to Bethany even though he and his disciples all knew it would cost him his life? What if we could be disciples of Christ and not be concerned about whether or not we would be respectable? Because the need to preserve our way of life, our respectability, will cause us to water down the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The late Mike Yaconelli, formerly editor of the Christian satire magazine The Wittenburg Door, formerly the head of Youth Specialties, says this:
The Good News is no longer good news, it is okay news. Christianity is no longer life changing, it is life enhancing. Jesus doesn’t change people into wild-eyed radicals any more, he changes them into nice people? If Christianity is simply about being nice, I’m not interested. What happened to radical Christianity, the un-nice brand of Christianity that turned the world upside-down? What happened to the category-smashing, life-threatening, anti-institutional gospel that spread through the first century like wildfire and was considered (by those in power) dangerous? What happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on fire, who had no fear, who spoke the truth no matter what the consequence, who made the world uncomfortable, who were willing to follow Jesus wherever he went? What happened to the kind of Christians who were filled with passion and gratitude, and who every day were unable to get over the grace of God? I want a faith that is considered dangerous by our predictable and monotonous culture.[4]
Mike says these things because he believes what Jesus said. “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” He’s not afraid.
In baptism, Jesus takes our life and reshapes it into a new, eternal life, and gives it back to us. What will you do now that you’ve gotten your life back?
[1] H/t to U2, whose song “Wake Up Dead Man” was released well before the 2025 film of the same name.
[2] That was for “Total” cereal, which was supposedly more healthful than other cereals.
[3] Marie Dennis, Renny Golden, and Scott Wright, Óscar Romero: Reflections on His Life and Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 90.
[4] Michael Yaconelli, Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002).