Transcript

Father Stephen De Young: Okay, so when we start in just a minute we’ll start chapter 11 verse 1, where we left off last time.

We’re kind of at a transition point here now in the Gospel of John. I think I mentioned in the first lecture that St. John’s Gospel, like all the Gospels, has sometimes been described as a passion narrative with a long prologue, that really the focus of each of the Gospels is on the events surrounding Christ’s death and resurrection. That could be taken too far, especially in our Western Christian culture. There’s one New Testament scholar who talks about when he was an undergraduate in one of his first New Testament classes, they had these topics assigned to them to write about. They’re supposed to write about “the significance of…”, so somebody got the significance of Jesus’ birth and somebody got the significance of Jesus’ death and somebody got the significance of Jesus’ resurrection and somebody got the ascension. He got assigned the significance of Jesus’ life and he experienced that with some dread because he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to do with that. And that’s because again, our Western Christian culture, you get some stuff about Jesus’ birth around Christmas and you get a heavy focus on Jesus’ death, a little bit of the resurrection, but we tend to sort of minimize the rest.

So, we shouldn’t take that too far because those lengthy prologues are significant, contain a lot of significance in showing us what the meaning is going to be of Christ’s death and resurrection. These things frame each other and go together. But we do have to note here that beginning now, here in chapter 11, chapters 11 through 21 of St. John’s Gospel essentially narrate the last week of Jesus’ life. So you have ten chapters on Jesus’ life up to that week and then eleven chapters on that week. So there is an imbalance in the material.

Now, as we’re going to see, especially in the Gospel according to St. John, as we’ve seen already in the earlier chapters, where Saint John kind of stretches things out, takes his time telling stories, and has long discourses of Jesus and these kind of things, we’re going to see. There’s about three chapters coming up that are all one long prayer of Jesus to his father. So part of the reason why this one week takes eleven chapters to tell is that once again he’s going to go into detail, let the story unfold in sort of a rich way, especially when we compare it to the other gospels where as we said, the other gospels are very aimed at Christ’s death and resurrection. They sort of go straight there and then narrate it relatively quickly, especially the Gospel of Mark. It’s just kind of one thing after another, boom, boom, boom, and then you’re there.

So St. John’s description is going to be allowed to play out a little more and we’re going to see that a lot of what happens, for example, in that prayer, St. John’s Gospel is not so much aimed at narrating Christ’s death and resurrection as it is aimed at establishing what’s going to happen next. What I mean by that is we’re going to see he’s going to talk a lot more about the Holy Spirit and the coming of the Holy Spirit than the other gospels are. Even though that happens at Pentecost after Jesus has already ascended, he’s really going to be speaking about, he’s going to be directly connecting Jesus’ life and death and resurrection to the lives of the people in the church who he’s writing to at the end of the first century. And part of the reason, as we said, he can do that is the other three gospels have already been written, so he’s not telling people the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection for the first time. That story has already been told from several different perspectives. The people in the churches to whom St. John is writing know the basics of that story. And so he can now take his time to flesh these things out and give another perspective and explain more and take the time to interpret it and connect it to their experience in the church and their lives in the church 50 or so years later.

So all those are things to keep in mind as we go forward now, because we are now in this transition, we’re now going to be going into that last week. So the things we’ve already seen playing out in terms of the conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leaders and these things, these are all about to sort of come to a head.

And the story we’re going to have here in chapter 11 that we’re about to start about Lazarus is only here in the Gospel according to St. John. I’ve talked before about the fact that, again, because St. John is writing his Gospel after the others have been written, he can kind of fill in gaps and add things that maybe weren’t there. And so this story about Lazarus is very important in linking together the story for example, why were the people of Jerusalem so excited to see Jesus when he showed up on Palm Sunday? Well, St. John’s going to tell us what happened the day before to explain why the excitement. He’s going to fill in some of these gaps.

As I also mentioned, although for a long time, if you ask scholars, which isn’t a good thing to do about the Bible if you’re talking about spirituality, but if you ask scholars, they would tell you that, well, Matthew, Mark and Luke are fairly historical. They don’t want to say anything in the Bible is really historical, but it’s fairly historical. And then St. John’s Gospel is just sort of off somewhere. It’s later and it’s off somewhere. The fact that the chronology comes across is a little different. They say, “Oh, well, St. John’s chronology is off and he’s doing weird things and that’s how you know it’s not historical because his chronology is off”.

But if we look at the way the Church received the four Gospels, and by this I mean very early how the Church received the four Gospels, we see that the exact opposite is true. So Papias, who was writing at the end of the first century, so not long after St. John’s Gospel was written, Papias had met and knew Saint John in person. Papias wrote about St. Mark’s gospel that after accompanying St. Peter, he accompanied St. Peter to Rome. St. Peter was martyred there in Rome under Nero. And then after his martyrdom, St. Mark left and went to Alexandria in Egypt, and there he wrote down his Gospel, recording what St. Peter had told him, his testimony, because now St. Peter was gone, he couldn’t give that testimony anymore. So St. Mark put it down on papyrus to set it down and preserve it. But what Papias says is that he wrote his Gospel and wrote about the life of Christ, but not in order. And both St. Matthew and St. Luke used St. Mark’s gospel, as sort of the bones for theirs. They added things from their own knowledge and from their own experience, but they used the backbone. They used St. Mark’s Gospel. That’s why the three of them sort of agree.

So if the early church, even at the other first century, is telling us that those three Gospels are the ones that are not in order, what we find is whenever we see the Church Fathers talking about the historical life of Jesus, they all follow St. John’s chronology. They all say, for example, that Jesus had a three-year ministry. Well, in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it’s not real clear, but there’s no reason to think it was longer than one year. You wouldn’t think it was longer than one year if that’s all you read. The only place we get the three years is from St. John. And if you look at how we celebrate Holy Week. The way we celebrate Holy Week goes back to at least the fourth century, because we have a diary of a pilgrim to Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth century who describes the Holy Week services. So we know exactly how they did them, and it’s the same way we still do them. You’ll notice, when does Holy Week begin? We have Lazarus Saturday and then Palm Sunday. So we’re following St John’s chronology of those events.

So, in actuality, it’s a myth that it’s the other three Gospels that are historical, and St John’s Gospel is sort of fanciful. In actuality, St John gives us a much clearer picture and a fleshing out of Jesus’ ministry. Whereas it’s not that Matthew, Mark and Luke are wrong. It’s that Matthew, Mark and Luke are sort of bare bones and they’re aimed at telling you this central story. Whereas St. John already having those three, can now flesh things out and give this bigger portrait, give us some of the background and some of the colors around it.

So that’s how to think about that, when you see or hear somebody making comparisons between St. John’s Gospel and the other Gospels, these kinds of things, remember that according to all of our earliest sources it’s St. John’s Gospel that gives us the big picture, the big fleshed out picture. And that the others, from that perspective, the others are sort of leaving things out because they’re focused on telling this one main story, not on giving all the details. So unless everybody has any questions or anything left over from last time, we will go ahead.

Interlocutor: Which century did we have whole Bible, the 4 Gospels?

Father Stephen: It depends on the different pieces. By 100, because originally, of course, the New Testament, the 27 books, all circulated separately because they were so… you know, St Paul wrote one letter to one group. By 100 AD, all of St Paul’s Epistles had been put together into one collection. And in fact, all the copies we have of St Paul’s Epistles all come from that compilation. We don’t have any copies of individual letters. We know that by around 140 AD, the four Gospels had been put together into a gospel book like we have.

Interlocutor: But my understanding that this is not the only Bible we have. There was some other Bibles that were written, but they were not certified.

Father Stephen: Well, that’s partially true. There were other books that were written by other groups starting in the second century. There aren’t any that were written in the first century. All of the books of the New Testament were written in the first century, you start getting like the Gnostics started writing their own books in the second century, and they would claim that this apostle wrote them or that apostle wrote them, but they were never really nobody ever talked about including those in our Bible. They weren’t read in the church. They were read in these other groups. Like if you went to a Gnostic meeting or a Gnostic church, they would read from those. But Christian churches never read from those.

Interlocutor: I have some of them. I have books of them.

Interlocutor 2: The scrolls? [Laughter]

Interlocutor: Oh yeah, I have the original copies.

Fr. Stephen: I didn’t know you read Coptic either.

Interlocutor: Well, I have many hidden talents [Laughter], but I’ve read some of them and I just can’t keep reading them because they’re so obviously wrong.

Fr. Stephen: They’re frankly bizarre.

Interlocutor: They’re strange. There are stories in there of Jesus behaving in ways that you’re pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t behave. What, does he turn little boys into birds or something like that?

Fr. Stephen: Well, he makes clay birds that makes them come to life, and then he kills some kids because he gets mad and then brings them back to life because he feels bad about it afterwards.

Interlocutor: Yeah, you can see why I didn’t persist with reading them.

Interlocutor 2: I read that they discovered a new Bible written. It’s a very old, ancient one. And like that Bible was saying, that what is written in that Bible, that Lord Jesus was not crucified. I didn’t want to read it!

Fr. Stephen: They come out with one of those stories at least once a year, usually around Easter. And all of all of these books, all of these books were known by the church fathers and they wrote about them at the time, like the Gospel of Judas that they found a few years ago, St Irenaeus wrote about the Gospel of Judas. He said there’s this group of Gnostics they have the thing that they claim was written by Judas and explained why it’s nonsense. And that was in the second century when it was just written.

So, they were lost because the Gnostics ceased to exist. The groups that used these books ceased to exist. And the church didn’t have any reason to keep copying those books because they didn’t want them. But every once in a while, they’re digging in Egypt and because it’s so dry and hot there, it preserves papyrus. So they find some old copy and they say, “Oh, this is going to change everything.” And it never changes anything.

The church we have to remember that the church was continuous. So Ss. Peter and Paul were in Rome preaching the gospel, and they died there. But the churches where they preached were still there. And there were still people alive in those churches who heard them preach and who told their children, here’s what St. Peter used to say when he preached. And then St. Mark goes and writes down what St. Peter used to preach. So they had this living memory, and St. Irenaeus talks about that in the second century. He says, “Look, right now there’s nobody alive who heard St. Peter and St. Paul, but there are people alive who heard people who heard St. Peter and Paul.” And when you look at what they’re reading in church, what they call the epistles of St. Paul, well, they probably know what they’re talking about since dad actually met St. Paul. And so there’s this living memory, where they started reading these scriptures that just kept reading them.

And then when these other books start showing up in the second and third century, and somebody shows up your door saying, “Oh, I have this other gospel written by Peter.” They just say, “What are you talking about? Peter preached here. If Peter wrote a gospel, we’d know about it.”

Interlocutor: That’s how they kept the Bible and the teachings of St Paul. They kept it through the generations. In that time, people can memorize way more than we do now. We’re kind of lazy now, and we think it’s too much to but there are some people who just have the whole Bible and they know it like without reading.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that was in order to become a rabbi in the first century. So this will tell you something about St. Paul. You had to memorize the entire Torah, the entire Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible, you had to memorize it in Hebrew, the whole thing, and be able to recite it, and be able to recite any passage. And when they asked you to recite a passage, they would give you the first line. They’d say, “Here’s the first line, start”. And you would have to continue from that line and do the whole… We have smartphones now, so we can look up stuff, so we’re spoiled. But at that time, if you were going to know something, you had to memorize it. Because even if you were extremely rich and you could own your own copy, you know, it’s not like you could carry it around with you. And because it costs the equivalent of… a book in the first century, just to give you an idea, in the first century, a book, a codex, costs the equivalent of $5,000.

We take for granted that we have Bibles laying around the house in four or five different translations. They didn’t have a Bible. Most people never had a Bible. The church would have one. Part of the vestments I wear is actually… the pouch originally was where they kept the gospel book, and the deacon, the little entrance that we make, the gospel, that’s because the deacon would take the gospel book home, because you had to hide it, but you wouldn’t just leave it laying in the church where somebody could come in and steal it. He would take it home with them and then show up with it at the church. Because books were incredibly, incredibly valuable at that time.

So if you were the average person and you wanted to know Scripture, you weren’t going to have a copy that you could sit there and read at night. You had to memorize it. You had to learn it to be able to do that.

Interlocutor: And you wouldn’t have a copy, you’d have to learn it from someone who knew it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. You’d learn it by hearing it. You’d have to memorize it by hearing it.

Interlocutor 2: Sitting down and hearing wise men, that was valuable. So you can take some words from him that you will never hear from somebody else. It’s not like today. It’s the whole opposite. There was a lot of respect for elderly people who will know, who will have the knowledge.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the way we read scripture in the church is a function of that. It’s to help you memorize it. If you come to Vespers regularly, you probably, without really trying, know most of the Evening Psalm because you’ve heard it and you’ve heard it and you’ve heard it and you’ve heard it. And if you come to matins regularly without really trying, you pick up those six psalms after a while, and Psalm 50 because you just hear them over and over. And so those just get into your head, which is a good thing and better than most of what gets into your head listening to the radio in the car where you learn the lyrics to all these songs that you weren’t trying to learn. But yeah, so that’s why we do it that way was it goes all the way back to then. It was to help people learn it and memorize it and have it available to them in their heads because they wouldn’t have it in… I was going to say in print, but print didn’t exist. They wouldn’t have it in a material form.

Okay, so let’s get started here in Gospel according to St. John, chapter 11, verse 1:

Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha.

Now, Bethany, we know from the other gospels, is just outside Jerusalem. And beth ‘ani means “house of the poor”. So this is not a prosperous suburb of Jerusalem, this is a poor village outside of Jerusalem. And we’ve already seen Mary and her sister Martha, remember, who we know, know Jesus. And so this is their brother who is sick.

It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.”

“He whom you love” is sort of a circumlocution, it’s “Your friend, your good friend is sick.” And again, this is how you have to again, we take for granted because we have cell phones in our pockets, if I need to talk to so and so, okay, well, here we go. Well, if Jesus is in another town, you have to send someone to walk to that town and tell him and then walk back with Jesus to get him there.

When Jesus heard that, He said, “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

So this is sort of parallel to the discussion we had before. Remember, with the man blind since birth, they said, “Who sinned?” and he said, “So the glory of God may be revealed.” It’s the same kind of thing.

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was.

Now this should strike you slightly, very frustrating, where it says, “Now, Jesus really loved them. These are really close friends of his. And so when he hears that Lazarus is sick, he hangs around for two more days before he goes to see him.” That sounds a little odd. So St. John is setting us up for something here that’s going to come later.

Interlocutor: The third day, am I right?

Fr. Stephen: Well, not quite that late. It’s going to be sooner than that.

Then after this He said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”

So this gives us an idea how far away he is. This means he’s back up in Galilee.

Interlocutor: It’s about 2 hours by car, so walking it will be a couple of days.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so he waited two days up there and now he starts this long trip down to Judea. So it’ll be four days by the time he gets there. Plus you have to take into account the travel time from when the people left Judea to go get him. So it’s actually going to be six days since they sent for him by the time he gets there.

The disciples said to Him, “Rabbi, lately the Jews sought to stone You, and are You going there again?”

They’ve kept some of the King James language there, “lately”, meaning, “You remember what happened when we just left the Feast of the Tabernacle? They weren’t happy with you. They were trying to kill you, you know? So we came back up here to Galilee. We understood that. We understood why you’d want to get out of Dodge. Why would you want to go back there?”

Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”

Interlocutor: And I’ve never had a clue about those two verses and what it’s doing there.

Fr. Stephen: Okay, if we’re at the equinox, there are 12 hours of the day, but the idea is what Jesus is saying is, there’s day and there’s night. And if you walk during the day, you can see, the sun is out, everything’s fine. If you try to take a journey at night, you’re probably going to run into trouble because you got to remember, at this time in history, there’s no street lamps, there’s no so when it’s, if you’ve ever been out camping at night, you well, there’s no light. It’s pitch black.

Interlocutor: This is something any six-year-old at this time knows. Why is it asserted here?

Fr. Stephen: So what’s the point he’s making, right? Just a note on that last thing, because it’s, “light is not in him”. The way they viewed seeing is that they thought at this time, not Jesus thought, but I’m saying the people he’s talking to, they thought light actually came out of your eyes to see things. And so the idea is at night, the light is not in you. So that’s where that turn of phrase comes from.

Interlocutor: So this is not some sort of moral state.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The light not being in you, is not a moral state. That’s referring to… that’s their idiom. For being able to see and not being able to see. But now to the point he’s making. He’s making a point very similar to what it says in Proverbs, that there’s a time for different things. There’s a time to make a journey, there’s a time not to make a journey. So what he’s really trying to get across from them is, it’s time for me to do this. And while they wouldn’t get that because as we’ve seen, they don’t get, the disciples at this point, before Jesus’ resurrection don’t get a lot. But remember this refrain we’ve been hearing in St. John’s Gospel over and over again. They wanted to kill him, but it was not yet his time. It wasn’t his time yet. They can’t kill Jesus, Jesus is going to lay down his life. They can’t do it because it’s not his time yet. And so they say to Jesus, “Why are we going back there? They’re trying to kill you.” And what Jesus is indicating by saying, “This is, it’s now time. It’s now time.”

So he’s not saying to them, “Don’t worry, we’re going to go down there and everything will be fine.” What he’s saying to them is, “I know they’re trying to kill me, and now it’s time. And now it’s time for me to go.”

These things He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.”

Which again, they probably did not understand to what he was referring. But notice no one came and told him that Lazarus had died. In the other Gospels, when Jesus has raised someone from the dead, he has made comments, “Oh, they’re not dead, they’re only sleeping.” And he usually gets laughed at by the people and then he brings them back to life. So he uses the same language about Lazarus, “Lazarus is sleeping and I’m going to wake him up.” But here notice nobody has told him. They came a couple of days ago and told him Lazarus was sick, but no one… so Jesus just knows. So what does this tell us about him waiting those two days? He waited to allow Lazarus to die, to pass away.

Interlocutor: Actually, it’s amazing that the disciples and the apostles and everything continued to follow him, even not even understanding what he was trying to tell him.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s interesting, because even where this is important, remember the answer they give to him? Remember in chapter 6, what he was talking about, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, there’s no life. And it said, and a whole bunch of people left at that point, and Jesus turns to the disciples. He says, Will you now also leave? Do you remember what they say to him? They say, “Where would we go? You have the words of life.” So on some level, even though they don’t comprehend what Jesus is telling them, they have a sense, they have this sense of who Jesus is. And remember what Jesus says to St. Peter when St. Peter tells them, you are the Christ, Son of God, he says, you haven’t said this, it was the Holy Spirit. This has been given to you. And so while they don’t have an intellectual comprehension of, “What does Jesus mean by that, what does he mean by that?” They’re going to later, after the resurrection, not coincidentally, when the Holy Spirit comes upon them in power. But they believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They believe in what he’s saying and what he’s doing, even though they don’t fully comprehend.

Interlocutor: A lot of us have been there. I mean, we came to the Church and we knew that this is where God was, even though we didn’t know much about what was going on.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Well, at the core, we’re all there to some extent, because there’s nobody who’s figured out, for example, the Holy Trinity, right? None of us comprehend that, intellectually or any other way. But we know that it’s true. We know that it’s true. And so, intellect and knowledge aren’t always the same thing. And the example I give for that is, I know my wife loves me. I can’t take a chalkboard and do a math equation and prove it. “This is a picture of her giving me a hug. See, that proves it.” Well, you can say, “Well, no, she was just pretending.” You can’t ever prove it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know it. It’s a different knowing and the intellectual part are two different things. And so they know on a deep level who Jesus is. But intellectually, they don’t comprehend and they don’t understand.

Interlocutor: Even though we try to put ourselves in their position. Sometimes you think, would I act the same? Because at that time there was no Bible, we have no teaching, and it’s just what you hear from Jesus, and it’s your option to believe or not believe, to follow or not to follow like other people. And if I put myself in that position, I wonder, I’m not sure how I would act.

Interlocutor 2: Those two verses I was just asking about, I’ve heard them all my life, and I said I didn’t know what they meant or what they were. I didn’t say, “Oh, well, not true, forget it.” But I just didn’t know.

Fr. Stephen: But I said before, I think, if they ever invented a time machine, and I don’t think they ever will, because if they would, I think we would have seen time travelers by now [Laughter]. But anyway, if they ever invented a time machine so people could go back in time, go back to the first century, go to Judea and go and find Jesus, I think people would be shocked. Because our iconography, our icons of Christ are beautiful and they make important theological statements. But Jesus didn’t have a nimbus around his head with a cross, identifying him as God. And you see a lot of this Western art of Jesus. He’s sort of faintly glowing and his clothes are just all white and red and he has perfect teeth and all this. And the reality is, and this isn’t just a historical reality, this is a theological reality. In Isaiah, in the Servant Songs, there’s this meditation. There’s nothing about him that recommended him to us, right? It wasn’t that he was physically beautiful and big and strong and all this that we would find someone who just looked like a Jewish man in the first century, who had bad teeth like everybody else and sweated like everyone else and went to the bathroom like everyone else and whose clothes got dirty and hair got dirty like everyone else. So, when Jesus says, “Blessed is the man who does not find me to be a stumbling block,” in St. Luke’s Gospel, I mean, that’s what he’s talking about.

Especially here in St. John’s Gospel, he records Jesus being so clear about the fact that he’s God. You know, if a man who looks just like everyone else, he might be able to convince people he’s a prophet, but if he starts saying he’s God, if that happened today, he’d be in an institution, right? And so we tend to be very judgmental of the disciples and others at that time for not getting it. But the reality is, I don’t think I’d get it. I don’t even know if I’d be one of his disciples, let alone get it.

Interlocutor: I listened to the St. Matthew Passion an awful lot. When the crowds shout for Barabbas instead of Jesus, I think that’s probably what I’d be doing right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, because he’s this political prisoner. Barabbas is a political prisoner, he went and went after the Romans. And I don’t know who this Jesus guy is. He’s some crazy person. But there’s a really interesting book that Dostoevsky wrote the premise of which is, what if someone very much like Jesus came to live, in his day, contemporary Russian society. In his contemporary society. And I won’t spoil too much, but it doesn’t go well. The title, as it’s translated in English is The Idiot, because that’s what everyone thinks of him, because he doesn’t fit in to their society and their cultural values.

So, the disciples, we need to be a little charitable and we have to remember that St. John is one of these disciples. So is St. Peter in St. Mark’s Gospel. And St. Mark’s Gospel is just brutal to St. Peter. St. Peter was very humble about his own lack of understanding and everything. So they’re being honest about their own lack of understanding here when they talk about this. And we should not judge them too harshly. And we should remember what Jesus said to the Pharisees at one point when he said to them, “Your ancestors killed the prophets.” And you say, “Well, if I was alive at that time, I wouldn’t have killed the prophets.” And he says, “Well, first of all, you’ve just admitted that it was your ancestors who killed the prophets. And you go and you decorate their tombs, but the reality is you do the same thing.”

Then His disciples said, “Lord, if he sleeps he will get well.”

So, like, “Oh, well, that’s good. If he’s sick, he needs rest.” And this is we’ve seen this over and over again at St. John’s Gospel. Jesus says something that the people take it the most literal way possible.

Interlocutor: The translation that I have here says he will be saved.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s salvation in the sense of protected or safe, the way we use the word safe. But I mean, that’s what they’re trying to get at there is that if he’s sleeping, that’s good, that’ll help cure his illness.

And then, of course, just in case you’re confused like the disciples were, St. John adds:

However, Jesus spoke of his death, but they thought that He was speaking about taking rest in sleep.

Then Jesus said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead.”

They weren’t getting it. He’s dead.

“And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, that you may believe. Nevertheless let us go to him.”

So this is the other piece of that. Jesus said he was sick, but not unto death, not because he wasn’t going to die, but because Jesus knew he had the power to give him life again, but that he was going to allow this to happen. So that the people would see the glory of God. The people would see the resurrection. Why? Because now it’s time for sort of this final confrontation.

Interlocutor: When Jesus did arrive there. There were a lot of people there, right? To come to see.

Father Stephen: Well, we’re going to see, yeah.

Then Thomas, who is called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with Him.”

So Thomas has pieced together at least he understood what he was saying about “it’s time”, right? Thomas understands. Okay, well, look, if he goes back down there, it’s not just into Judea in general, but Bethany being that close to Jerusalem, they we kill him. Thomas says, “Well, look, if he’s going there to die, then we might as well go to and die with him.” Now, keep this in mind when we get to Thomas, Thomas gets a bad rap. St. Thomas is the one who doubts and all this, but he’s ready, at least right now to say, “Well, if he’s going to go down there and die, I’m going to go down there with him and die with him.”

So when Jesus came, He found that he had already been in the tomb four days.

Why is this significant? Well, at this time in the first century, they believed that when someone died, their soul sort of lingered around their body for three days. And so since the soul was still lingering around, it was possible they might come back to life. But if they were dead for four days, that was it. Why would they have that belief? Well, you got to remember medical science in the first century, they didn’t understand comas. They didn’t want to bury people alive. And so it might look like someone’s dead, but you would wait sort of to make sure. But if someone four days later, they’re dead. That’s it.

Interlocutor: Would they have a funeral before they put him in the tomb?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah they’d have a funeral. And there was a funeral procession with the body that would go to the…

Interlocutor: Would that last one day, or would it last more than one day, do you know?

Fr. Stephen: Well, they would continue. There’s still family and everyone here. So they would stay for a while. That would all happen at one point that they’d bring them to the tomb. And then what happened was, because tomb space was at a premium, after about a year, the family would go back and collect the bones and wash the bones, and those would go in what’s called an ossuary, which is a box, that the person’s name would be written on. And so if you went to like, a family crypt, there would be like a stack of these boxes of the family members and then there would be sort of a shelf and that would be where if there was a recent body, it would be for that first year. And what they do in Greece today is actually similar to that. If you go to Greece today and you go to a family mausoleum, they’ll open it up and there’s boxes and the more recent ones will have photos on the front of the different people.

Interlocutor: A lot of the writings that come out and they’ll have the martyrs or somebody that that had died and they talk about how they found their relics and they brought them back. I didn’t realize they could talk about their bones. I was thinking they were talking about maybe some of their writings.

Fr. Stephen: No, that’s their bones. So that was the process. And in our culture, we’re very disassociated from death. We do everything possible to not… someone dies and people from the funeral home show up right away and the body disappears. They work on it and try and make them look as alive as they possibly can. And you maybe see them briefly at the funeral or before the funeral, and then they’re gone and they’re buried. And a lot of our, especially our new cemeteries, just sort of look like a big park because they want to have little headstones. So we’re kind of disconnected from it. But it wasn’t that long ago… And even in America, if someone died, their body would lay in their home and people would come to their home and visit and people would clean the bodies of their own loved ones and that kind of thing. And that’s the way it was very much at this time in history. So we could expect that when Lazarus died, his sisters went and washed and cleaned his body and prepared him for the burial and took the ointment and everything and did all this. There wasn’t an undertaker or a funeral and that they had done this.

So, we need to remember that as we come here to the sisters. The sisters have been through this process with their brother. It’s not just that he died, but they’ve also been through this whole process of burying him and everything.

Interlocutor: The whole people around were as witnesses. They witnessed him putting in that tomb. And the tomb has to be closed with the rock, with a big rock or something, to keep animals and everything out. So definitely they are sure that this guy is dead.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And the people have been around, the whole community has been around them mourning and supporting them.

Interlocutor 2: Remember, this is a small village. Everybody knows.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s a little village. So there’s been four days of this sort of going on and now Jesus arrives to this scene, is what we have here.