This semester I’ve been helping to facilitate a Bible study that looks at the question Jesus asks His disciples, “Who do you say I am?” by examining the titles given to or claimed by Jesus in the Gospel account of the John the Evangelist (St. John to some). The idea is to try to get some insight into Christ’s nature and relationship to us by looking at who He is in the Fourth Gospel. Of course, from the title of the series (“Who do you say I am?”) you can probably guess that we are spending a lot of time looking at the 7+1 “I Am” statements Jesus makes. The first seven of these are found in the Gospel spread between the sixth chapter and the fifteenth and involve the divine name associated with a qualifier such as I am the bread of life or I am the light of the world. The eight occurs at Christ’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane where He speaks “I am” and those who come to arrest Him fall to the ground.
I’ve studied these various statements several times in the past and have always found them to be highly instructive in helping me shape my understanding of who Christ was and is. The one that I always seemed having the most trouble with was the statement right before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, “I am the resurrection and the life.” It just always seemed so obvious to me and overshadowed by the miracle/sign that follows it. As I prepared for the study and wrote the daily devotionals that I send out tot he students in the group, I began to see the deeper meaning of the passage.
The part I want to focus on is where it said that Jesus was “deeply moved in His spirit” when He sees Mary and again when He is standing before Lazarus’ tomb. I went and looked at the Greek for the word and found that it was more commonly translated as anger. Jesus isn’t deeply moved, He’s angry. So, I wondered, what was He angry about? As I thought about it I realized that He was angry about death. I realized that here was a God who created the Universe and nowhere does it mention that He created death. Now whether you read the Genesis creation stories literally or not, it is important that death (whether you interpret that as spiritual or physical is a matter of theological choice but I think that we are talking about death in a spiritual sense here) was not part of God’s creation. Death is brought into creation as a consequence of Adam’s choice in the Garden of Eden.
So when Christ encounters death and the pain and suffering it brings in Mary and at the tomb of Lazarus, He takes it kind of personally. All of the life in the creation came to be through Him so I think that anything that passes out of life and, in a sense perhaps, out of creation, has to really get under the Creator's "skin" so to speak. This is really powerful to me because it tells me that Christ not only takes death in a general way personally but He takes my death personally. I sort of see the idea of me dying as something Christ would get angry about, the way a friend gets angry when something wrong or bad is done to a friend.
Anyways, enough for now. I'll post more soon as I continue to work through these thoughts.
Thanks for reading
