The Fifth Sunday of Lent

The Moment before the Miracle

By Alli Bobzien

Today’s reading, Jesus raising Lazarus, features one of my favorite women in scripture: Martha. Sister to Mary and Lazarus, Martha is the character who repeatedly gets it wrong but whose mistakes and missteps make her all the more relatable. I see myself in Martha, this woman of action and practicality. Jesus rebukes her not once but twice in the gospels, in both today’s reading and when she is shown hosting in Luke 10. She has the best intentions and is really striving to do what is right, but she often falls short—as we all do.

In preparation for this piece, I read up on John 11 and learned that the repeated assertions of belief that Martha gives to Jesus, while good, were also strategically avoiding his actual line of questioning. He wanted to know if she believed that He was the resurrection and life. Martha kept replying what she already knew: that He was the Messiah, that He could work miracles, that Lazarus would rise at the end of time; but she fails to respond to Jesus’ self-revelation as the resurrection and life.

How often do I reply to God like Martha? My prayers are riddled with phrases like, “Yes, yes, I know You are good. But…” Like Martha, all too often I nod along to the readings, trusting in my own understanding and confident that I need no further truth revealed to me.

In this scripture, after the group has walked to the tomb, we have a classic Martha moment: when she questions Jesus’ instructions to move the stone for fear of a stench. I love her practical concern. For Martha, a female head of household in Judea at this point in history, common sense and physical needs were of paramount importance. Of course she was worried about the smell!

But Jesus says, directly to Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you would see the glory of God?” A rebuke couched in a question, a reminder that she had more to learn. The next verse reads simply “So they took away the stone.” I wonder what transpired in those moments between verses. Did Martha hold Jesus’ steady gaze? Did she look away embarrassed? Did her eyes well with tears as she turned and nodded to the strong men enlisted to roll away the tombstone? We will never know, but I believe that something shifted in Martha’s heart. Perhaps it was in this tender moment before the miracle that Martha came to understand and believe that Jesus was truly the resurrection and life.

Lent, this 40 days of preparing for the miracle of resurrection, can also feel like a gentle rebuke. Yet, like Martha, we need this reminder of our limitations to pull us out of the physical needs of life and turn us back to the sacred glory of God. We can affirm what we believe, as Martha did, but unless we are willing to roll away the stone and see the burial clothes empty on Easter morning, we can’t fully know Jesus as the resurrection and life. The miraculous is at our fingertips, waiting to be revealed, if only we aren’t too scared of the stench.

Loveliness in the Desert