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slent505
Never
Was Love Like Thine ragnarok sk bot
Text:
John 11:35-36 (Lutheran Service Book Series A)
Date: The Fifth Sunday in Lent 
3/13/05
Nicodemus,
the Samaritan Woman at the Well, the Man Born Blind. So far this
Lent we have heard the stories of these few individuals coming to
the saving faith, each from a progressively more distant and challenging
situation and background. Nicodemus was drawn to inquire of Jesus.
The Samaritan Woman, however, Jesus had to come and find her. As
for the Man Born Blind, though he experienced the grace of God,
he didn't know what it meant until Jesus revealed himself to him.
Nicodemus, the Samaritan Woman, the Man Born Blind. Each of these
show how repentance of sin and the saving faith are impossible apart
from the power of the Word of God. Today, then, the ultimate example.
Jesus raises a dead man from his grave. This is the point: as a
dead man has no ability to come back to life on his own, so no man
or woman has any ability to come to repentance and faith on your
own. As Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out,”
and the man who had died came out, so it is only by the commanding
voice of Jesus that a person can repent, be baptized, believe and
receive the gift of eternal life. The scriptures say clearly that,
because of our inborn sinful nature, all people are spiritually
blind, spiritually dead, having no impulse for God, and are even
enemies of God.
Saint
John tells us “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” Is
this why Jesus went out of his way to help them, because he loved
them? Yes. Because he loved them more than others? No. For all the
other details we can discover from this text, the most important
one, at least for this morning, is for you to discover and believe
the great love God has for you.
Now
you may not question that God loves you at least at this moment.
But many do question God's love, and even you have questioned it
at times in the past, and will question it again in the future.
“If God is love, why does he allow tragedy, illness, accident, disease
and death?” That's the question you usually hear. But there is no
adequate answer to that question because the question is wrong in
itself. Our own sin and death, the devil and the rebellious world
are the cause of all suffering. God has a righteous hatred for all
sin. He doesn't redefine death to make it some sort of “friend.”
He calls it “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26). God's love is
deeper than mere sympathy or merely relieving the uncomfortable
symptoms of the ultimate cause of death.
There
at the grave of Lazarus John tells us, “When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping,
and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved
in his spirit and greatly troubled.” “Jesus wept. So the Jews said,
‘See how he loved him!'” But they hadn't seen anything yet! For
the love of God is no mere pious wish, no simple emotion. The love
of God took on our flesh and blood, our humanity in the incarnate
Son of God. “Jesus” is the name of his human nature. And as a fully
human being, as the Book of Hebrews says, “we do not have a high
priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one
who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”
[Hebrews 4:15 (ESV)]. Yes Jesus was deeply moved; yes Jesus burst
out in tears at the sight—at the sight of what dreadful sin and
hated death was doing to those he so loved.
How
much did he love them? How much does he love you? I can't imagine
that there wasn't an audible tone of righteous anger in his voice
when he commanded they take away the stone from the entrance to
the tomb of Lazarus. The detail of Martha's warning of the odor
of death is significant because a person couldn't officially be
declared dead until after three days. That this was four days means
Lazarus was really, really dead.
This
would be the “last straw,” the final sign that moved the chief priests
and Pharisees to make plans to put Jesus to death. Nevertheless,
the Lord proceeded, commanding the soul of Lazarus to reenter and
reanimate his body, and he came out of the tomb, “his hands and
feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth.”
“Unbind him,” said Jesus. That mental image of a formerly dead man,
tightly bound for burial is a picture of all humanity, of you and
me apart from God, helpless and enslaved by deadly sin. But at the
command of Jesus, “unbind him,” sin is forgiven and taken away,
and life, eternal life is restored.
Jesus
has that power because he himself became bound and was delivered
to death. But as the holy, sinless Son of God the blood he shed
was so powerful as to destroy death, to make atonement for the sin
of the whole world, and to become the lifeblood for the life of
the world.
We
are about to trace the Passion of Jesus the Christ. The liturgies
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