Raising Lazarus For Glory (part 11 of 12)

That crowning and culminating and climactic event of all of history, of course, would be the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  Lazarus’ raising, which Jesus indicated would reveal the glory of the Creator God, is the seminal event that stirs the pot, roils the people, irritates the Jewish leaders, creates the tension, causes issues that had been seething under the service to boil over, and drives Jesus’ pre-Resurrection life and mission towards its grand conclusion. 

Based on Jesus’ ongoing responses to that which He knew awaited Him, together with the glory-related narrative that has been constructed in the Johannine narrative and that to which the narrative drives, it can most assuredly be said that raising Lazarus was for the purpose of glory.  So how did Jesus feel about what was coming?  How did He respond to the events as they took place? 

Continuing that narrative of the coming glory, at the “last supper” one finds that “When Judas had gone out,” for the purpose of completing his promised handing-over of Jesus to the authorities, “Jesus said, ‘Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in Him.  If God is glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself, and He will glorify Him right away’.” (John 13:31-32)  Here Jesus is found to be speaking of His death in terms of God’s glory. 

As Jesus goes on to speak to His disciples in the dramatic moments that follow, he can be heard to say “And I will do whatever you ask in My Name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (14:13).  He seems to speak of His ongoing presence with and through His disciples---it what appears to be an obvious speaking of the strengthening, performing work of “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send in My Name” (14:26a)---in terms of the glory of Israel’s Creator God. 

The record of Jesus’ “farewell discourse” to His disciples is quite lengthy, spanning three chapters in John’s Gospel.  Upon its conclusion, Jesus “looked upward to heaven and said, ‘Father, the time has come.  Glorify Your Son, so that Your Son may glorify You’.” (17:1b)  There’s that expectation of glory again, which has appeared to hinge upon Lazarus’ raising.  He looked to His pending death, while appearing to faithfully look forward to His deliverance from the coming grave, seemingly speaking of the Resurrection and its power that was going to be unleashed into the world in order to accomplish His God’s purposes and plans for His fallen creation, and spoke of it in terms of His God’s glory. 

In what appears to be His full expectation of the life to come through His Resurrection, where He will be shown forth as the Son of God in power (Romans 1:4) for all the world to see, Jesus continues speaking to the Father, saying, “just as You have given Him authority over all humanity, so that He may give eternal life to everyone You have given Him.  Now this is eternal life---that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom you sent” (17:2-3). 

It is this knowing of God---and knowing of God in and through the Christ---which will happen through the work of the Spirit that will be sent into the world, that is the manifestation of eternal life.  Eternal life, it should be said, is not simply a life lived in heaven for all eternity.  Rather, and as understood by His hearers and those that would first receive this Gospel story, eternal life was the life of the age to come---the messianic age of the renewed creation---breaking into the world, being the overlap of heaven and earth wherever it is shown forth in word and deed that the Creator God rules on earth, with this accomplished through the Christ and His Lordship. 

This eternal life is not static, but is shared with and through the knower so that it may flow with and through the knower into the world, so that the Creator God’s faithfulness might be known and shown, with this ultimately said to take place through the Christ.  This eternal life that is the sharing of the power of the Resurrection with all who believe, is the power of the Creator God that operates in the world through the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ, to redeem and deliver a cursed and exiled humanity, along with a creation that was cursed through humanity’s fall.