What if God doesn’t have a plan?
Wonderings:
I wonder: what is an unhelpful thing that someone has said to you when you were grieving, or in trouble, or just down?
I wonder if you’ve ever felt powerless to help someone you loved?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Fifth Sunday of Lent.
Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; John 11:1-45
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
I want to sit with Mary and Martha this morning; these are friends and followers of Jesus. They love Jesus, and he loves them. I want to invite us all to experience this Gospel story today from their perspective, to see these events through their eyes.
Lazarus falls ill. And he just…isn’t getting better. He gets worse, and because they’ve seen death before, they know what it looks like when someone is nearing the end. Their brother is dying, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They send word to Jesus—hoping that he will come and work one of his healing miracles, as he has for others. But Jesus doesn’t come.
So Lazarus dies, and their world slips off its axis.
Lazarus dies, and his death rips a hole in the world.
Lazarus dies, and everything feels like it is spinning out of control.
Friends and neighbors in their village of Bethany come to sit shiva with them: grieve with them, weep with them. And when they finally hear that Jesus is on his way, Martha runs out to meet him. And she puts on a good face; she shows him honor as her teacher, her authority, the one she calls “Lord.” But I think it’s fair to imagine that she’s not only heartbroken; she’s trying to restrain her rage. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Of the four Gospels accounts that we have in the Bible—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—the Gospel according to John depicts Jesus as the most “god-like.” As in, invulnerable. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there are scenes where Jesus gets worried or afraid; he is sometimes surprised, or wrong. Not in John’s Gospel. He seems to see everything from a God’s-eye view. He seems to be fully in control. And so, what does this transcendent, resplendent God-man he tell Martha? He says this is all part of God’s plan. Everything happens for a reason.
Jesus tells her that her brother will rise again, and she says she believes him; she wants to believe him; she wants to trust that he is what he says he is. And when she gets home, I can imagine the mixed feelings that Martha has, telling Mary that Jesus is on his way, that he has a plan. The relief that help is on the way. The resentment that Jesus has stayed away…on purpose. Maybe one of the disciples whispered to her what Jesus had told them, that he was glad he was not there. Because Lazarus’ death—and his sisters’ grief, they are setting the scene for such a great display of God’s power. So many people are going to believe after this.
So Mary runs out to meet Jesus, thinking that he must be nearly at the house. But I can’t get over this detail: “Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him.” Again, he has not moved. Absolutely no sense of urgency to be with those who he loves, who are hurting. I confess that I do not find this invulnerable, all-knowing version of Jesus to be a very sympathetic figure.
And so when Mary kneels down at Jesus’ feet there, where he has been just chilling out, I imagine that she is more openly furious. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Many of our inherited ideas of God insist on God’s omnipotence and omniscience. Fancy words for “all-powerful,” and “all-knowing.” But this story of Lazarus sort of dramatizes the problem that creates for us. Because, again, if God knows everything and can do anything—and if we trust that God is good—then why does God allow bombs to fall on schools? Why does God allow war, or injustice, or cruelty, at all? Why did God put my friend’s cancer into remission, but not my other friend’s? Why, Lord, would you allow my brother to die? Where were you, God?
I don’t have an answer to that question. I’m speaking to you this morning out of my not-knowing, my not-being-sure.
I know many people who have stopped believing in God because they felt that this all-powerful, all-knowing God had failed them. They thought that if God allowed this terrible thing to happen, then God cannot be good. The God they knew was not a God worthy of their worship.
And that makes sense to me. If God is all-powerful, and is all-knowing, and is good, and something bad happens to you, it makes sense to me that you would stop trusting in that God, that you would stop giving worship, and honor, and glory to that God.
Again, I’m speaking to you this morning out of my not-knowing, my not-being-sure. I can’t tie this up with a bow for us. What I can do is notice that there is a very different kind of Jesus also present in this story. A very different kind of God. A God who has power, but is not in control. A God whose love for us makes God vulnerable to our suffering, whose infinite love makes God as vulnerable as a parent, or a lover, or a friend.
When Mary kneels at Jesus’ feet and unloads on him, something shifts in Jesus; it’s like he wakes up. Or it’s like he’s cracked open. “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Judeans who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” And Jesus began to weep.”
And some onlookers say, Wow, see how much Jesus loved Lazarus. And others, maybe those who did show up for Mary and Martha say, if this guy can give sight to the blind, surely he could have kept his own friend from dying. But he didn’t. Where has he been?
I said a minute ago that this story of Lazarus sort of dramatizes the problems that an all-powerful, all-knowing God creates for us. Maybe the sharper thing to say is that we can read this story as a reflection of a struggle in the community that was writing and reading this gospel about how they imagined God’s relationship to their suffering.
As I mentioned last week, the community around John felt that they were living on the edge. They feared persecution; they felt disempowered and at the mercy of vast forces. And no doubt many of them wanted, as we do, to trust that God was in control. And it’s also easy to imagine that some people in that community were also saying well, if God can do all the things that the stories say, then how come God is letting all this bad stuff happen to us? Where has God been?
I don’t have an answer to this question. But I wonder if it’s possible to reframe it—and in so doing, to reimagine God. I’m coming at this in a spirit of wondering. I wonder, if God really is loving, liberating, and life-giving…if that means that God can’t be in control? I wonder if God is more open, more improvisatory than that? What if God respects our freedom and the dignity of all creation too much to control us?
I wonder if God doesn’t have a plan—except to go with us into the depths, and never abandon us? I wonder if God’s plan is to have God’s heart broken open over and over with everything we suffer, at all the cruel and heartless things we do to one another; to have God’s heart broken open over and over by how beautiful we are, by all the ways we’re growing? I wonder if God is powerless to make us do anything, or to make anything happen, and so God's plan is to show up in every moment to unbind our sense of what is possible—if we can allow it? I wonder if God’s plan is to show up with us and for us in every moment, breathing life into our dry bones?
Amen.
