When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”
John 11.43-44, NIV
I wrote a post some time back about the widow of Nain and her dead son, making the point that Jesus only works where there is faith; and faith requires a living person to exercise it. The dead son didn’t exercise faith, neither did Jairus’ daughter, and neither did Lazarus. The people of Nazareth had so little faith that He was only able to heal a few sick people (the few who did have faith, implied). In the case of Lazarus, Jesus seems to have identified Martha (not Mary) as the person able to exercise a mustard seed of faith. She could have allowed the stone to be removed without comment; Jesus had to get her past her odour-based objection by saying “did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Objection withdrawn, they rolled away the stone.
So there is the faith, active in the arena (equivalent to the Widow of Nain ceasing her tears). It seems very small to us, hardly faith at all; and maybe that is because we should really be reading that word as trust (its primary meaning), rather than ‘faith’ with its overtones of spiritual superpowers. A mustard seed of trust in Jesus will move mountains.
But what happens next?
What Jesus does is even less elaborate than most English translations suggest; and that bears thinking about.
We can get very confused – and confusing – as we “prepare the atmosphere for amazing miracles”. Why? Because we are trying to engender an environment in which faith will arise. Jesus took a different approach: He found out where the faith was and then activated it using the least possible number of words. And the least complicated.
There are other examples. Elisha telling Naaman to dip in the Jordan seven times to be healed of his leprosy (which annoyed Naaman until a brave subordinate convinced him to just get on and do it); God telling Moses to speak to the rock, to bring forth water (which cost Moses his right to enter the promised land, when he disobeyed and used last year’s striking action instead); and perhaps, most significantly, God igniting the whole universe by saying “Light: be!” (Which is extraordinarily interesting when you listen to cosmologists talking about the first few seconds of the universe, and the structure of the universe formed by what were essentially acoustic waves working upon the earliest proto-matter as it condensed. But I digress…) (Except to say that you should never be frightened of science; all it can do in the end is arrive at a picture of what God did and how He did it. Which probably didn’t involve screwing the legs onto a giraffe…)
So what about Jesus and (the extremely dead) Lazarus? Jesus, ‘having said these things, cried out in a great voice! “Lazarus! Here, outside!” (In Greek, that is just “Λάζαρε, δεῦρο ἔξω”)
And Lazarus appears covered in his grave clothes – he has literally done nothing but what Jesus ordered him to do, which is to come outside to Him. Jesus tells those with him to release him from his bindings.
To summarise, if we want to operate like Jesus, we need to:
1. Find the person with faith and the relevant authority (Martha was the senior living relative in this case; in most case it needs to be the person themselves who needs a ‘miracle’)
2. Speak with authority and no fuss, the minimum words that describe or arrive at the answer.
3. Hand over to others the pastoral tidy-up, as required.
So we don’t need to hide behind a barrage of words and prayers, “babbling like the pagans”. Let your words be few, and to the point!
As a PS: If it is something not involving people being raised from the dead or saved from imminent death (which tends to be time critical), then time may be an element as the pieces assemble themselves; but as Mark 11.24 tells us, believe that you already received it when you spoke, and it shall be yours.
Seeing the Kingdom 