If Only...

John 11:1-45

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

If only you were here, it would have all been different.
Wouldn’t it?

That’s the question that plagues this story:

Lazarus is ill – very ill. His sisters send a message to Jesus, saying “Your dear friend is dying.” When Jesus hears this, he says, “This is all for the glory of God,” and waits two days – two days! – before starting a journey to Bethany, to his friends who have called out to him in crisis.

Two days. While his good friend is dying.

And when he finally gets there – before he even enters the village, his friend Martha comes out to meet him, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Those are the first words out of her mouth, and out of her sister’s mouth, minutes later.

If you had been here…

You, the Messiah, God’s Anointed, you could have saved him.

If you’d been here.

And you weren’t.

How could God let this happen?

It’s the question that plagues all of us from time to time, in the midst of grief and loss: in the violence that bleeds on every evening’s news; when one unnecessary trauma piles on top of another in our family’s life, our own; when a long-held promise or dream is denied:

Why does God let this happen?

Why did Jesus wait two days, instead of coming to save his friend?

That’s the question I hear in my head every time I read this story, every time Martha says, and Mary, “Lord, if you had been here, he would not have died.”

But this week, for the very first time in about 20 years of reading this story with careful attention, I noticed that when Jesus got to Bethany, to the home of Martha, and Mary, Lazarus had been dead for four days.

Jesus delayed for two.

He never could have gotten there in time. Not if he had started out the moment he heard the message that Lazarus was ill.

And I’m not sure what to make of that.

Because like Martha, like Mary, like the neighbors and mourners who speculate audibly to one another that the rabbi who opened the eyes of a man born blind should have been able to keep his friend from dying, in the wake of tragedy, I speculate about what might have been.

If I had only called last week… If only he hadn’t gone so far…

A friend was wrestling with this the other day: “I keep thinking that if I had been there, if I had been in Florida, in my father’s crisis, it could have been so much better.”

I believe her. It could have been better.

And I believe that if Jesus had been there, Lazarus would not have died.

But Jesus was too late.

It was too late already by the time he got the message.

My friend could not have been there, for her father, even if hindsight looks different.

I can’t change now what I did last week.  I might not have been able to change it then.

And the tragedy, or the mess, or the stupid error, happened the way it did, and I can’t let go of “if only…”

So Lazarus dies.

And Jesus – who could not have been there to prevent his death – goes to the tomb.

He weeps.

He announces again that this is all for the glory of God, and calls Lazarus forth from the tomb, still wrapped in the shroud of death, but alive, and we are amazed.

It’s a miracle beyond the healing we would have prayed for, an answer more dramatic and profound than the one Martha and Mary hoped for when they called out to Jesus.

But it’s not the one we asked for, not what we’d have chosen if we’d been there; not the one that would allow life to go on, and to get better.

Instead, it’s a real tragedy, followed by a real miracle, that add up to a dislocating change we can never forget, a permanent mark on our being.

And it leads directly to the cross.

“Many of those who had come with Mary and seen what Jesus did believed in him,” John tells us. But some of them went to the Pharisees, for whom this raising of the dead was the final straw, the greatest threat to their power and their true faith, and from that moment on they plan to kill him.

This powerful miracle at Lazarus’ tomb leads directly to Jesus’ cross: to his death, his burial, his empty tomb and ascension and the salvation of all the world.

That’s what Jesus meant when he said – at the beginning, and again at the tomb – that this was all for the glory of God.

That Lazarus’ illness, the message that came to Jesus too late, the four day certainty of death, and the miracle more powerful and less comforting than any we could have prayed for, are directly linked to the salvation of the world.

What if our most profound regrets, yours and mine – our grief, our fear, our pain, our if only – are also linked to the salvation of the world?

To be honest, I don’t like the idea of God manipulating us into the right place for salvation any better than I like wondering how God could let my tragedies happen.

But it does help to remember that there is life at the end of this story of death.

That Jesus could not have been there any more than I myself could have kept a friend from being hurt, an illness from progressing, kept Lazarus from dying. And even so – and maybe because of that – after the tragedy something new and unexpectable happens.

God acts as only God can act, and launches the salvation of the world out of the grief of what might have been.

It may not cure me of the “if only”s. But it might help me – or you – live with that pain, to know that God will act after tragedy, or even after our common, miserable mistakes, in ways that link our errors as much as our best efforts directly to the salvation of the world.

In this season of Lent, we spend time with our regret. We confess, we reflect, we repent.

But Lent looks forward as well as backward:

forward to the empty tomb,

forward to what never would have happened if we’d been there to prevent it,

forward – as we must look, in the midst of our regrets and if onlys – to the salvation of the world.

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