A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

June 2021

There is another question that John’s story of Lazarus raised for me.  Jesus is described as loving Martha, Mary & their brother Lazarus. When He arrived at Lazarus tomb John tells us that Jesus wept, such that the onlookers said “how dearly He must have loved him”.  John makes it clear that Jesus loved Lazarus and I wonder why he did so?  An obvious answer, but not one that I’ve considered before, is that John is identifying Lazarus as the “disciple whom Jesus loved” and who was at Jesus’s side during the Last Supper?  If so that could shed light on Peter’s question to His Risen Lord right at the end of John’s Gospel about “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and what would be his fate, to which Jesus replied “If it should be my will that he stay until I come, what is it to you?”  If the “beloved disciple” was Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from death, that question of Peter’s would make good sense.

I wonder if I can push this thought further? If Lazarus was the ‘beloved disciple’ present at the Last Supper, maybe that Passover meal was in part, to celebrate Lazarus’ being risen from the dead as a sign of the beginning of the Kingdom of God that Jesus had proclaimed?   God had at last begun to act to save His people.  Prayer in the garden of Gethsemane was then a time of prayerful waiting for the fulfilment of that Kingdom, as was Jesus silence before the High Priest. When nothing happened except his death, Jesus felt that God had forsaken him and that He had got it all horribly wrong.  His being raised, and in a manner & with consequences very different from the raising of Lazarus then showed that God had vindicated Jesus & inaugurated something nobody had quite envisaged and which still awaits fulfilment.