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Dear God,
We get to the infamous “raising of Lazarus” story today, which, depending on my mood, either gives me hope or ticks me off (you know, just like everything else I read in a foul mood). In the Gospel of John (11:1-45), we read this:
Jesus … came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay across it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.” And when he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go.”
Now obviously this tale inspires hope for the person who doubts your miracles. Because we can fathom your healing someone with a boo-boo on his leg, or maybe even a leper. But bring a dead man back to life? Now that’s the Cadillac of miracles, one that has skeptics shaking their heads in disbelief.
So here’s my question, God: why don’t you pull off that stunt all the time? How do you decide whom to raise, and whom to leave alone in his stench?
I’m not trying to be disrespectful or facetious. I just don’t understand why you’d bring Lazarus back from the dead and ignore my friend’s three-month-old who couldn’t get off the respirator and start breathing on his own? Lazarus smelled. If I were you, I opt for the baby. And it’s not like the little guy had time to commit that many sins in his three months. That was an innocent life taken from this world with no explanation.
Theologically or philosophically, I know why you can’t raise every Lazarus. My college professor who taught “The Problem of Evil,” Joe Incandela, explained it this way:
If God saved us all the time, then the world would be so unpredictable that it would lack the kind of stability needed for most human activity. This has been called the “cosmic nursery school” view–one does good and gets rewarded, and does bad and gets punished. But if that happened all the time, then God would be constantly intervening in the world in ways that would make any sort of regularity in our lives look impossible. It would also make something like compassion impossible. Compassion (or work for justice or whatever good deed you want to substitute here) requires a regular world, and a regular world means that some people get hurt who don’t deserve to get hurt. I suppose that in a broad sense, this all can be attributed to the Fall. But I think that another reasonable answer is that this is the price of a finite world. Only God is infinite and unlimited. Because of that, any created entity will be corruptible or conflicted in some way. Corruptible or conflicted things tend to rub up against other corruptible or conflicted things, and the result is physical or moral evil.
I keep Joe’s paragraph on my desk and read it whenever something happens like the Virginia Tech shootings or whenever I hear of a young, innocent death, and I’m confused all over again why a God who is supposedly good and loving doesn’t do anything about this stuff.
I also like what Douglas Cootey, fellow blogger, said about Lazarus’s miracle as a response to a post on Beyond Blue where I was griping, as usual, about the Law of Attraction and my problem with people who espouse positive thinking to the exclusion on modern medicine. Douglas wrote:
You shouldn’t discount others’ experiences with positive thinking and faith just because you have not experienced the same. Lazarus was raised from the dead, my brother was not. Does that mean that Lazarus wasn’t raised? Or that faith is a joke because it didn’t work for me? I blamed God for years because of my own disabilities. He wouldn’t take them away for me. All that negative thinking merely made me miserable.
I like this because it leaves room for God to cure however the heck he chooses to—even if his policy makes absolutely no sense to us. Douglas Cootey and Blessed Angela of Foligno, a wife and mother of the fourteenth century who later became a Franciscan tertiary and prominent mystical writer, basically agree on this point: We must believe in God independent of the Creator’s miracles. Writes Blessed Angela:
The way in which a wise person knows something in truth differs from the way a simple person knows only the appearance of truth….Suppose two florins, one of gold and one of lead, were lying in florin because it was beautiful and shiny, but would not know about the value of gold. The wise person, knowing the truth about gold and lead, would avidly go for the gold florin and pay little attention to the lead one. Similarly, the soul, knowing God in truth, is aware and understands him as good, and not only good, but as the supreme and perfect Good.
I suppose right now I’m holding the gold and lead florin with my left hand, and flipping a coin with my right to determine which I should keep and which I should drop at Goodwill. Maybe I’ll go back and take a closer look.
One of my very scripture quotes, Hebrews 11:1, says this: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Which, I think, means that I can ask all the questions I want about Lazarus, and why you chose him over the three-year-old baby of my friend, but that I have to believe in your goodness and love all the time: miracle or no miracle.
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Therese Borchard is the author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes and The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit. Subscribe to Beyond Blue, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter @thereseborchard.
Meet others on the journey in
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Therese Borchard is the author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes and The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit. Subscribe to Beyond Blue, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter @thereseborchard.
posted March 10, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I appreciate your transparency in your blog. I understand your frustration with God and His choices. God chooses whether or not to intervene and provide healing or a rescue. God’s sovereignty, and the questions raised by the subject, are the most difficult area of our faith journey. We will never completely understand God’s sovereign choices…He hinted at this when He told us in his word “my thoughts are not your thoughts, and My ways are not your ways.” (Isaiah 55:8) It all boils down to a faith issue…Do I trust Him or not? In these times we have to rely on knowing the heart of God even when we do not understand His ways, thoughts or actions. You reached the right conclusion when you ended with “I have to believe in your goodness and love all the time: miracle or no miracle.” Well done!
posted March 10, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Therese, I really appreciate the wisdom of your college professor. Sounds like a class I would have loved to sit in. If there is a central question we all must come to grips with, it is this one. No answer is complete or satisfying, but each time I read more on this aspect of belief in God, I come away feeling that I have peeled one very thing layer away that leads to truth. Though I’ll never reach an understanding in this life, it is an important process that I need to continue with.
posted March 10, 2008 at 5:41 pm
There’s a problem with your professor and Douglas Cootey that’s a bit different than orthodox explanations of, say, the Book of Job and 2 Corinthians 12:
That is, they really verge onto a Deist view of G-d, a Big Guy who winds the clock and lets us suffer all the consequences. And that’s fine, except why is Clock-Winder worthy of our prayers?
posted March 10, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I enjoyed your post will print, clip and save.
What if God healed 50%, what about the other 50%? We would want more and more healings. And those remanining few will wonder if they are damned for eternity and forgotten. God is a fine-tuner but always aware and involved in ways beyond our understanding. Steven Speilberg said that the cave man understood God on a level of a 1 or 2. Today we can contemplate Him/Her as an 8. however the scale goes up to 100. Maybe higher.
Compassion is the key. We a have grown. Oh, but how much we have ahead of us.
posted March 10, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Jesus hadn’t yet ascended to the right hand of God (power) and Lazarus appeared – from the text – to be a close friend of Jesus. Jesus broke a rule about the adulterer, and on the Sabbath, maybe He used His “authority” for a friend? Also, there were people dying all around Judea the same day as Lazarus was being re-animated cell upon cell. There also, must have been other good candidates for Apostles. Why one and not the other? I buried my oldest child. I know the eternal nature of the question. Also, just looking at my own children, and then myself in mirror, none of us wants to be “ruled” by someone else, “even” when we are told the right thing to do. Your professor is on the right track. The New Testament is writings about things to a reader. It is not always written to a readership. In the Lazarus story, we have something more beautiful to contemplate: How Jesus thought about His “friend.”
I have always known that God “loves” me . . . BUT, does God “like” me?
We have a glimpse in the raising of Lazaurus, what it is like having Jesus as a friend.
I know – from a far less than Deity perspective – that my “best” friends, have never left my side.
“What a friend” Lazarus had in Jesus.
posted March 11, 2008 at 6:51 am
Miracles of healing is based on faith & how much one has in the power of Jesus — These days Jesus uses a man of God as His host to lay the miracle of healing on the sick & dying. As some of the loved one left behind there was strong faith with those that past on. As they found out when they met God at His throne He had a better duty to do with the ones left behind if they would only open their hearts & listen to their loved ones along with Jesus. Their miracles would happen as well.
posted March 11, 2008 at 7:33 am
The raising of Lazarus was not a miracle of healing. A decaying, stench-filled corpse cannot be healed!
The raising of Lazarus gloriously reveals that Jesus, because of his sacrifice on the cross, has conquered sin and death. In Jesus Christ, death has lost its sting; the grave is robbed of its ultimate victory.
Jesus is the hope of every man’s resurrection, my mother and father, my brother, that three-month-old baby, and millions upon millions. . . .
posted March 11, 2008 at 10:00 am
I truly believe that we as corporeal beings have a really hard time understanding concepts that are spiritual in essence. That is to say we see that which is (the violence of man, the apparent injustice of the universe, the slaughter of innocents, the percieved victory of evil) and weigh that against what we think should happen. We cannot see the bigger picture with so much emotion involved. It’s been said that some souls are too good for this world and are given a “free ride” to Paradise. While this may seem unfair to us now, who are left behind, it should be of some comfort to know God takes ALL souls to a safe haven to await final jugdement. My personal feeling ,as I had a good friend who misscarried and lost her baby girl said ” I know my daughter is there with God now and someday I will get to meet her.” that faith is trusting God to make the important decisions because he is the only one who knows what’s around the bend. I also met someone who had been clinically dead durring a heart attack and said his experience was so peaceful and beautiful that he no longer fears death and tells everyone that Paradise is real. He said he did not want to come back but he was told it was’nt time yet, he still had work to do .I consider this person to be a credible witness. So I believe!
posted March 11, 2008 at 1:03 pm
It reminds me that we have been given the power to raise the spiritually dead as well. Let us not forsake these gifts.
(*and, oh yea, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how sponsoring a child through Compassion International, or any ministry for that matter, goes a long way towards this goal).
http://compassiondave.wordpress.com/
posted March 11, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I think that the raising of Lazarus is symbolic. It intends to teach us that even the most decaying of characters can be redeemed because we’re all inherently good, only have taken the wrong path.
posted March 12, 2008 at 1:03 am
Therese, Thanks for speaking out (I think you called it griping) about the hype surrounding the so-called “law” of attraction. My objections come from my perspective as a psychotherapist, but nevertheless, they do address the moral problems presented by Rhonda Byrne & Company’s snake oil, in the form of “The Secret.” If you and any of your readers have the time and the inclination, please take a look at a web site I have created specifically to register my objections to “The Secret,” and the authors’ worship of the “law of attraction.” The web site is http://www.thesecretantidote.com. Thanks. Thom Rutledge
posted March 16, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Thom:
Any enemy of Rhonda Byrne is a friend of mine …