This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 03/22/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was:
John 11:1-44.
There are a lot of reasons that a person might doubt the existence of God or the truth claims of Christianity. One of the most common reasons for this is theodicy. Theodicy is not a common word, not a word you hear in casual conversation, but it’s a useful one. It refers to the problem of evil. It’s the problem of what happens when you ask the question, “How can God be both all-good and all-powerful and also have a world that is full of injustice, suffering, and evil?”
This is a hard question, because as Christians we do believe that God is the definition of goodness and kindness and love and righteousness. We also believe that God is all-powerful. He created the whole universe and everything in it. Everything that exists came into being through him and for him and according to his will. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is.
From a philosophical perspective, theodicy puts us Christians in a tough situation. For all its beauty, our world is also full of terrible things. Brokenness, violence, violation, and death. Not everything is as it should be, to put it mildly.
Maybe that’s something we can learn to live with most of the time. Maybe we can accept in principle that our loving God made a good world, and that this good world is also broken. One of the ways that we’ve found to make this feel better to us, to make our faith feel more philosophically sound, is to redirect the blame that we might place on God and instead put it onto people.
We may say, “Well, yes, God is completely good, and God is completely powerful, but he gave us free will. And guess what? We misused it. We went astray. We ate the fruit. We rebelled. We chose the world of sin and death, even though God had given us a garden.”
And that story is true. That’s where we come from. We come from the story of the Garden of Eden. We human beings had it all, but we gave it up for what we thought was just a little bit more. More power, more control, more wisdom. We were made in the image of God, but the snake tricked us into thinking that that wasn’t enough. He promised us that if we rebelled, we could become like God, knowing the difference between good and evil.
So when we face the problem of theodicy, when we face the problem of evil and why there’s suffering in the world. We have a good solid answer: Because we chose it. We brought – and continue to bring – evil into the world through our own decisions.
I think this is a good story to keep in our repertoire, because when we apply it to ourselves, and when we take it seriously, I think it has a positive effect on us. When we realize that our own decisions are what has brought evil into the world, we also see that our transformation can bring the world back into harmony with God’s purposes. The fact that we are broken means that we can be mended. The fact that we’ve rebelled from God means that God can rescue us from that rebellion and reincorporate us into his plan.
This is a good story, and the only story that many Christians ever hear. But it’s not the only story that we have at our disposal. And that’s important when we are wrestling with theodicy. When the problem of why a good Creator has allowed evil and suffering to exist in the world, our true story about our own rebellion and sin can sometimes feel thin. Like we’re making excuses for God, rather than taking the problem seriously.
This is a place where the Gospel of John serves as a helpful minority report. John is in so many ways a very different storyteller from the authors of the synoptic gospels. It’s a testament to the wisdom and inspiration of the early church that John’s perspective could be successfully integrated and held in dynamic tension with the rest of the early church.
John is special, not because he rejects the testimony of the synoptic accounts, but because he illuminates those accounts with additional spiritual dimensions. John doesn’t deny the story that I just told you. John doesn’t say, “Actually, people are basically good, and evil happens because of circumstances beyond their control.” In fact, if anything, John is perhaps the most extreme gospel writer when it comes to the problem of human evil. John sees the world in very black and white terms. For John, you’re either with the light or you’re with the darkness. You’re either choosing good or you’re choosing evil. For John, there’s not much in between.
What makes John’s perspective so interesting is that he breaks out of this sharp dualism at several places in his gospel. For John, the world is one of light and darkness, good and evil. But it’s also one where God is perfectly good and perfectly in control. God is no stranger to darkness. God is not afraid of it. Instead, in Jesus we find a light shining in the darkness, and this light is not overcome by the darkness.
From John’s perspective, the darkness is the context in which we experience the light. In a sense, you might even say that darkness exists so that we can perceive the light. From this perspective, the darkness is not so much an overwhelming force to be feared, but rather a stage upon which the story of God’s Life can unfold and be seen.
In our reading this morning, we heard the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This story is simply amazing, and it doesn’t appear in any other gospels. This is pure John. In the synoptics, we do get other miraculous resurrections. In Mark, there is Jairus’ daughter, who’s 12 years old, and has just died; Jesus brings her back to life. In Luke, something similar happens with the widow’s son at Nain.
But in John’s gospel, the resurrection story goes a step further. This is not a person who has just died; it’s a person who’s been dead for four days. Four days is significant because apparently in some Jewish traditions at the time it was held that a person’s spirit left their body after three days. And so to be dead for four days was to be really, really dead.
In John’s story, the person who is raised from the dead isn’t just the child of some random person who asks Jesus for help on the street. The person who dies is Lazarus, the brother of two of Jesus’s closest disciples, Mary and Martha, who live in Bethany. And we can tell from the story that Lazarus is a good friend of Jesus. Jesus really cares about Lazarus as a personal friend.
This is a really fascinating story on a lot of levels; so much so that I need to say up front that I’m only giving this story a partial treatment this morning. There’s a lot more that could be said. I’m going to have to be selective so that this doesn’t end up being an hour-long sermon.
I’m going to focus in on the fact that Jesus knew that Lazarus was going to die, and yet he intentionally didn’t go to Bethany until four days after Lazarus’ death. As I read the text, it seems like, knowing what he knew, Jesus could have gotten to Bethany before Lazarus died and healed him, rather than needing to come after the fact and raise him from the dead. But he didn’t. He stayed where he was and waited for Lazarus to die.
John is explicit in the reason that Jesus didn’t come earlier. He writes that, when Jesus heard that Lazarus was ill, he told the disciples not to worry about it. The illness that Lazarus has “does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”
Jesus intentionally spent two additional days doing his usual ministry, knowing that Lazarus was seriously ill, before finally making his way to Bethany. At that point, he knew that Lazarus had died.
It says that as Jesus was coming to Bethany, he hadn’t quite even arrived in the village yet when Martha, one of Lazarus’ sisters, came to meet Jesus on the road. She said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” (A little bit of an accusation, maybe?) And then she says, but I know that anything you ask of God is going to happen. So what is Jesus going to do for Lazarus?
Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.” And Martha, being a well-educated, devout woman, says, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
And this is where Jesus really drops the explosive news. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” And Martha declares her faith, just like Peter did at Caesaria Phillipi, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
Then Martha went to get Mary, and Mary came out to meet Jesus on the road where he was waiting. When Mary came, she was weeping. And many of the other people from the village came out and were weeping with her. And she said the same thing to Jesus. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”
It says that “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews 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.’ Jesus began to weep.”
This part is so important because in much of John, Jesus seems completely transcendent, almost unaffected by what’s happening in the world. At times in John’s gospel, he seems borderline inhuman, but in this moment, it’s very clear that Jesus is not only a man, but a loving friend to Mary and Martha and Lazarus.
Jesus is absolutely gutted. John writes that he began to weep. He also says that Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and troubled. Jesus was agitated. He was emotionally unsettled. It was a deep, primal, animal feeling in his body. Jesus was really upset. Jesus was as human as he could be.
This is crucial, especially for John, who typically portrays Jesus in highly-elevated, spiritual terms. In this moment with Lazarus, Jesus wasn’t above the fray at all. He was fully in it, suffering with Mary and Martha and Lazarus’ family. Lazarus was Jesus’ good friend, and Lazarus had died.
The fact that Jesus was so upset is particularly amazing when you remember that he knew exactly what he was about to do. He knew that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew he was about to give Mary and Martha their brother back. He knew that death was about to be defeated.
And yet he was disturbed and agitated and worked up. He was crying, and he meant it.
I think back to what Jesus said when he was told that Lazarus was ill. He said that “this kind of illness doesn’t lead to death, but it’s for God’s glory.” It reminds me of another story in the Gospel of John, from just two chapters before in John 9, when there was a man who was born blind that Jesus healed.
Before Jesus healed him, when the disciples first saw the man, they asked Jesus, “Whose sin caused this man to be born blind?” Was it his parents sin? Was it their fault? Or did this man himself sin in some way that caused him to be blind? Jesus said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
There’s something very mysterious happening here. Because on the one hand, just like Jesus is devastated at Lazarus’ death, Jesus has compassion on the blind man. Jesus presumably thinks it actually is a difficult and terrible thing for a man to be born blind. This has caused the man and his family to suffer. It’s not something that anyone would wish for, if they had the choice.
And yet Jesus says that the man was born blind so that God’s glory might be shown in him. In the same way, Lazarus died, causing so many people to weep and mourn, and causing Jesus to be agitated in his spirit and to break down crying. But Jesus tells us that Lazarus died so that God’s glory could be made known.
This brings us back to the question of theodicy. Jesus’ raising of Lazarus speaks directly to the problem of evil. It gives us a fresh perspective on how it could be that God is all good and all powerful, and yet has allowed and continues to allow terrible suffering to exist in our world.
We already know very well the story of the garden and the tree and the snake, and why all this mess is our own fault, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. And John wouldn’t disagree with that. But in his gospel account, John provides us with an angle to understand this mess we are in, and how God is rescuing us.
I hear John asking us, “What if, even in our holy story, we’ve gotten too focused on ourselves? What if all the evil in the world isn’t primarily a question of our mistakes and rebellion? What if, instead, this story is primarily about how God wants to show his glory in us?”
We find our answer in the raising of Lazarus. God is going to resurrect us. He is going to call us out of the tomb. He’s going to give us new life and reunite us with our true family. We often spend so much time looking at the darkness that we miss the power of the light, which has not and will not ever be overcome. We lose sight of the first light that is glowing on the horizon, just before the coming of the dawn.
Theodicy – the problem of evil – trips us up primarily because we give evil too much credit. We grant it too much power. John reminds us that we can view evil as merely a foil for God’s glory. Sin and death aren’t much of anything, at the end of the day. Our God is the substance. Evil, hatred, and suffering are mere shadows. If we really believed that, really dwelled in that faith, how would that change our posture?
So often it seems like we only have two options when it comes to the problem of evil: Blame God, or blame ourselves. But there is another option: We can stop blaming altogether. We can see the darkness the way that John does: as an opportunity for light to shine. We can regard the cross the way that Jesus did: as an opportunity to lay down our lives to show the fullness of God’s love for the world.
John reminds us that, as followers of Jesus, we are people of the resurrection. We are also people of the cross. We’re not above the fray, we’re in it. We weep. We get agitated. We get disturbed in our spirits. We pray for God’s help.
And yet, like Jesus, we know what is coming. We know that rescue is on the way. We know that dawn is just over the horizon, and that the resurrection is real. We are a people weeping, approaching the tomb, knowing that God is about to show his victory. To show his glory. To raise us from the dead.