And when we hear the dialogue between Martha and Jesus, we discover what gives us hope as disciples of Jesus. When we start looking at this Gospel lesson, we discover, I'm sure, all of us remember that this is a Gospel that we find very helpful at the time of death, when someone very close to us is dying and we're filled with grief and mourning. Then today, we have this last of the signs that John uses in his Gospel, the most extraordinary: this story about Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, the brother of Martha and Mary, his very deep friend also, and how Jesus works this sign and draws an extraordinary message from it. It was an extraordinary sign of how God gives the blind new sight. He went to the pool, washed his eyes, and he could see. She went and told other Samaritans about him, and they came, and they, too, became believers as she had.Īnd just a Sunday or so ago, we heard that story about the man born blind. Remember, she had had five husbands, broken relationships that must have left her a very wounded person, and Jesus brought her healing. Remember a couple of Sundays ago, the story about the woman at the well, a woman who was deeply broken in spirit.
These are some of the signs that Jesus had been working. If you want to try to understand what these signs are proclaiming, then it's important to go back to a passage in Matthew's Gospel where John the Baptist, imprisoned because he had spoken out against King Herod, was waiting his death sent messengers to Jesus to ask him, "Are you the one who is to come? Or should we be looking for another?" So then Jesus, drawing from the 61st chapter of the book of Isaiah, says, "Go tell John what you have seen and heard: how the blind have been given new sight, the brokenhearted are healed, and the dead are brought back to life."
As we try to listen deeply now to our Scripture lessons today, I think it's important that we understand how in John's Gospel, he uses what he calls seven signs, or miracles - big miracles or signs that make it clear who Jesus really is - and the passage that we heard today is the last of those signs and the most extraordinary.
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