I Asked and Nothing Happened

Some of you are not out here because of anything you did.

You’re out here because you asked, and nothing happened.

You have a file. It isn’t long but every item in it is heavy. You prayed over that marriage for eleven years and it ended anyway. You prayed over that boy every night from the time he was fifteen and he is forty-one now and still using. You sat in a hospital and prayed the way a person prays when there’s nothing else, and your mother died hard, over eight months, in front of you.

That’s not doubt about doctrine. Nobody argued you out of anything. You have a track record, and you read it, and you drew the only conclusion the data supported.

And here’s the part that keeps you quiet about it. You can’t say any of this out loud, because the people who’d hear it would explain it to you. They’d tell you God answers in different ways, or that He had a bigger plan, or that you have to keep believing, and every one of those sentences would land on you like a man explaining your own house to you.

So you filed it and stopped asking for anything.

I want to take you to the one place in the Gospels where God is explicitly, deliberately, and on purpose late.

Two sisters have a brother who is dying. They know Jesus. He has stayed in their house. This is not a stranger.

So they send word, and the message is one of the most restrained sentences in the Bible.

Lord, the one you love is sick.

That’s it. No request. No argument, no bargaining, no telling him what to do about it. They just tell him, because they assume that telling him is enough.

Anybody who has prayed the real way knows that sentence. It’s not the polished prayer. It’s the one you actually say in the truck. This is happening. You know about it.

Now read the next two verses in a row, because there’s a word in the middle that will stop your breath.

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.

So.

Not but. Not and yet, mysteriously.

And I’ll tell you something that ought to make you feel better about how hard that is to swallow. Some translators couldn’t take it either. Open a New Living or a New Revised Standard and you’ll find they’ve quietly turned it into although. Jesus loved them, although he stayed.

The Greek doesn’t give them that word.

Because he loved them, he stayed where he was.

I have read that verse a thousand times and I have never gotten comfortable with it and I’m not going to pretend to you that I have. The text puts the love and the delay in a cause-and-effect sentence, and every instinct in me wants a different conjunction there.

But that’s what it says. The delay was not distraction and it was not absence. It came out of the love, somehow, and John wants us to know that before anything else happens.

Then Lazarus dies. And a couple of days later Jesus finally goes.

Martha comes out to meet him on the road before he reaches the house.

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

She says it to his face.

And a little later, Mary comes out and falls at his feet and says the identical sentence. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

In English it is word for word. In the Greek there is one small difference, and it is the kind that only shows up if you go looking. Mary moves the word my forward, ahead of the verb. My brother. She leans on it.

Two women, separately, both of whom loved him and knew him, and both of whom have exactly one thing to say when they finally see him.

Neither one of them is rebuked for it.

Neither one is corrected for saying it. He does not tell Martha she is being unfair, and he does not tell Mary she needs more faith. He lets both of them say the accusation, out loud, to his face, and he takes it.

You have been carrying that sentence for years and you have never once said it. You’ve thought it in a hospital hallway and at a graveside and you have never let it out of your mouth, because you were raised to believe that saying it is the beginning of the end.

Two women said it directly to God and the story kept going.

And the crowd standing there says the ugly version, which is the version you actually think when the house is quiet.

Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?

Meaning: we’ve all seen what he can do. So this was a choice.

That’s the real accusation, and John writes it down instead of leaving it out. It’s in the record. Somebody said it at the funeral and the Bible kept it.

Now two words, and I think they are the most important two in the chapter for you.

Jesus wept.

He knew what he was about to do. He had said it plainly to the disciples days earlier. He was minutes from calling that man out of the ground and he knew it when he walked up.

And he cried anyway.

And not politely, either.

John puts a word in front of the weeping that most English Bibles soften into deeply moved. It is a harder word than that. The lexicons take it back to the snort of a horse. Every commentary I have ever read on it says the same thing, which is that it is not sorrow. It is anger.

So the sequence at that grave is fury first, and then tears.

Scholars argue about what exactly he was angry at. Death itself, probably. I’m not going to pretend to know. But if you have spent fifteen years quietly furious about the eight months your mother took to die, and been told the whole time that a person of real faith would have handled it better, then I want you to sit with the fact that the first recorded reaction at that particular graveside was rage.

He stood at the grave of somebody he was about to raise and he came apart.

If you have ever suspected that your grief is a failure of faith, that a stronger man would have handled it better, that the crying meant you didn’t really believe, then I want you to put those two facts next to each other and leave them there.

He knew the ending. He wept at the grave anyway. Knowing did not make the loss smaller.

That is who He is. That’s the answer to the question underneath your file.

Then Martha says the sentence that belongs to everybody reading this book who is over fifty-five.

They come to the tomb and he says to take away the stone, and Martha objects.

But, Lord, by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.

The King James, which is the only Bible I heard for the first eighteen years of my life, does it better than anybody has managed since.

Lord, by this time he stinketh.

I have never once read that without laughing, and I don’t believe it’s irreverent to laugh at it. It may be the most human line in the chapter. A practical woman standing in front of her brother’s grave, wrecked, loving him, and saying out loud the plain thing everybody else in that crowd was too polite to say.

Whatever else I’ve got to say about the world I came up in, they handed me that sentence, and it’s perfect.

It’s too late.

That’s her whole argument and it’s a good one. Not he can’t, not I don’t believe. Just: this has gone on too long, the decay has set in, there’s a point past which you don’t open something up again.

You have made that exact argument about yourself. Twenty years is a long time. The kids are grown. The marriage is over. The body’s not what it was. Whatever might have been possible at thirty-five, there is a point past which a person doesn’t get opened back up, and you are well past it, and you’ve been quietly telling God so for a decade.

The one time in the Gospels that somebody said too late to his face, it turned out not to be a category he was working with.

Now let me tell you what I am not going to do, because you’ve been handled before and you’d smell it.

I am not promising you that your Lazarus comes out.

Most don’t. I’ve buried people. I’ve sat with families whose boy did not get clean and whose wife did not recover and whose marriage did not survive, and I am not going to stand on this page and imply that enough faith produces a different Tuesday. That’s a lie, it’s cruel, and the people who tell it have usually not been in the room.

Here’s what I’ll say instead, and it’s what the text will actually support.

The delay was not absence. He knew, the whole time. He was moved, the whole time. The two days were not Him being elsewhere.

The grief was real even for the one who knew the ending, which means yours is not evidence against you.

Both women said the hardest thing to His face and neither of them was corrected for it.

And too late was Martha’s category, not His.

That’s all. It’s less than a promise and it’s more than nothing, and it’s what’s actually there.

One more detail, and it’s the reason this chapter sits where it does in this book.

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

He came out still tied up.

He was alive. He was standing in the doorway of his own tomb. And he was wrapped head to foot in the clothes they had buried him in, and he could not see and he could not use his hands.

So Jesus says one more thing, and he says it to the people standing there, not to Lazarus.

Take off the grave clothes and let him go.

He raised the man himself and then handed the unwrapping to the neighbors.

That’s this whole book. You come back still wrapped in the stuff. Nobody walks out clean. And the getting free of it is slow, and it is done with your hands full and your eyes covered, and it is done by other people.

Which is why chapter after chapter of this thing has been sending you toward somebody’s kitchen table.

Here’s your move.

Say the sentence.

Lord, if you had been here.

Out loud, alone, with your own thing in it. The marriage. The boy. The eight months. Say the accusation you have been too afraid to say for twenty years, in your own words, to God, directly.

You are not going to be struck down. Two women who loved Him said it to His face on the same afternoon and He stood there and took it and then he walked to the grave with them.

And afterward, don’t explain it away or take it back. Don’t append but I know you had a reason. You don’t know that, and He never asked you to say it.

Just say the true thing and stop, the same as chapter four.

The file you’ve been keeping is not a sin. It’s a record of a man who kept asking, which is not the behavior of somebody who walked away.

He knows what’s in it. He was there for every entry.