With Easter Sunday happening this weekend, a Lenten service was held April 6 at Faith Fellowship Lutheran Church with a seminary student giving the possible reflections of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead by Jesus and who was at the foot of the Cross when the Messiah was crucified.
The noon service began with the Rev. Becky Hand, pastor, reading John 11:30-44 and Sioux Falls, S.D., Seminary intern Laura Webb dressed in burial clothes and reading from an imaginative book called “Bible People” what could have been Lazarus’s thoughts. “My sisters Mary and Martha and I occupy a rather prominent place in the Gospel story,” Webb said.
“Maybe it was only natural when Jesus began his public ministry that our home became his home. He and his disciples spent many nights as our guests. It was a place for him to get away. When he came to our home, he could relax at least for a little while.
“He was an unbelievable person. I know he was the Messiah, the Son of God. His Mother Mary had told us the circumstances of his birth. He was a friend, the best friend anyone could have. He’d been a carpenter and if anything needed fixing, he just did it.”
Webb said Lazarus and his sisters particularly enjoyed Jesus’s explanations of the Old Testament. “We were always fascinated by his interpretations of Scripture because he could take the most complicated things and make them simple,” she said.
“He brought a peace that I can’t explain.”
Lazarus and his sisters lived in the village of Bethany, two miles southeast of Jerusalem.
Webb said the Jews in and around Jerusalem had been holding very elaborate funerals “till the great Rabbi Gamaliel said he wanted only the simplest ceremony for his death. “Little by little, people began to change and funerals became more simple,” she said.
“Bodies were dressed in a long linen cloth. The Hebrew word for it (tachrichim) is translated ‘traveling dress.’ Quite appropriate, don’t you think?”
The intern said Lazarus felt that he had been in a deep sleep when he came back from the dead after four days. “It was as if I was in a deep sleep when I heard these words,” she said.
“They sounded far away yet loud: ‘Lazarus, come out!’ It was dark, but a blazing light was coming from somewhere. I sat up, turned my head and saw that the light was coming through the entrance. I looked around, saw the skeletons lying around me and realized where I was: a burial tomb.
“I walked to the entrance and outside, crowds of people were standing around staring at me. Then I saw him. Jesus was standing with his arms outstretched and smiling.”
When Jesus was crucified, Webb said, none of his followers understood why he had to die. “What had he done?” she asked.
“Loved people, healed people, listened to people, helped people? Is that cause for death? No, it was pure fear on the part of the religious leaders, fear that people would follow Jesus rather than them.
“God could and would raise Jesus from the dead. It was a few days later when we saw him. I’ve never been so glad to see someone. I wish I could tell you everything was easy then. It wasn’t. It seemed that someone was always plotting my death because I was still the most visible evidence of a man who had power over death. But no matter how difficult life would get, I could go on because I, perhaps more than anyone else, had felt the power of Jesus turning death into life.”
Scholars say Lazarus lived another 30 years.
