Before we can return to the issue of Lazarus’ sickness and death and God’s glory, it is necessary to traverse the territory that is laid out before us with the exchanges that take place between Martha and Jesus, and Mary and Jesus. So Jesus goes to Bethany, where He encounters the grieving sisters of Lazarus, whom He loved. Upon His arrival, Martha greets Him, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever You ask from God, God will grant You” (John 11:21-22). There is a faith-rooted belief to be found in those statements, as Martha, believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and her knowledge that part of the work of Messiah will be to restore all things, appeals to her knowledge of His powerful, healing and restoring works, in hopes that a restoration to life will be granted to her deceased brother. Jesus responds to Martha’s faith and messianic understanding by saying, “Your brother will come back to life again” (11:23).
Martha, reflecting the general hope of Israel in that day, which was the resurrection of the righteous dead (God’s covenant people) into God’s good and restored creation, replies by saying, “I know that he will come back to life again in the resurrection at the last day” (11:24). Jesus’ response to this is to flatly inform Martha that “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me will live even if he dies, and the one who lives and believes in Me will never die” (11:25-26a). Jesus punctuates this response with an inquiry, saying, “Do you believe this?” (11:26b) With this, Jesus confirms both Martha’s belief in Him as Messiah, as well as the Jewish hope in the resurrection of God’s covenant people into a renewed created order in which God has put down death and corruption (as they were not looking towards a spiritual, dis-embodied, heavenly existence for all eternity), defeating the evil that had been launched into the world at Adam’s fall, all of which was connected with the coming of messiah at the last day. Martha’s enthusiastic reply is “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are the Christ (the Messiah), the Son of God (King of Israel) Who comes into the world” (11:27-parentheses mine).
This worldview that Martha presents is that upon which the Apostle Peter will seize in his Pentecost “sermon” in the second chapter of Acts. As a member of the nation of Israel, Peter himself had been looking towards God’s action in history, which would culminate in the resurrection of the righteous dead. The righteous dead were the saints---those who were God’s covenant people, Israel. In that tremendous piece of oratory, Peter said, with an ultimate reference to the Resurrection of Jesus, that “this is what was spoken about through the prophet Joel” (Acts 2:16). Following that, Peter recounts Joel’s prophecy, which was understood as a presentation of that which would accompany the resurrection of the righteous dead, Israel, in the last days.
After quoting Joel, Peter would go on to speak of Jesus, saying “God raised Him up, having released Him from the pains of death, because it was not possible for Him to be held in its power” (2:24). This was what the people of Israel, Peter’s fellow Jews, were expecting to be said of all of God’s covenant people in the last days. Peter makes it clear that the expectation of Israel has been fulfilled in Jesus, and that He had gone down into death and had been raised up as Israel’s representative. In Jesus, Peter says, God has performed the resurrection of the righteous dead, and now invites all of Israel, and all of mankind, to join Him in His Resurrection (the expectation of the “last days” now brought forward into their present), through believing “beyond a doubt that God has made this Jesus Whom you crucified both Lord and Christ” (2:36b). What Peter tells his hearers is that their messianic expectations were confirmed. This Resurrection had taken place in the last days, and now, a new day and a new age has dawned, and the long-awaited kingdom of God has been inaugurated, with Jesus as its Messiah-King. With this, the inexorable, unrelenting march towards God’s final restoration of all things has begun, with God’s covenant people, now identified by belief in Jesus, the vehicles by which God will reveal Himself, through the inward to outward working of the Spirit, sending His light and glory into the world.
With this declaration of Jesus as Lord and Christ, or Lord and Messiah---presenting Him as the “Lord” that Israel’s King David had called Lord, as well as being the King of Israel (Son of God, Son of Man), Peter seizes on the well-understood concept that Israel’s king would always serve as a representative of the people, with the fortunes of the people of God waxing and waning based on the performance of their king as it related to what God required of His people (avoiding idolatry, reverencing the sanctuary, keeping the Sabbaths). We see this most explicitly in King David’s infamous “numbering of the people.” When David did this, without carrying it out appropriately and in the way that God had commanded (which would have been in association with an offering as outlined in the book of Exodus), a plague came upon the people. When David repented, built an altar, and made a sacrifice (an offering), the plague stopped.
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