"Lazarus, come out!"
I want to work through the story of Jesus raising Lazarus over the next month or so. This of course will be interspersed with random posts about whatever, but I'll try to post a few thoughts on this story every week.

About a month ago someone told me that Jesus is raising me like he raised Lazarus, and without overstating it, it cut right to the core of where I am and who I am. Since then I've spent many nights reading and re-reading this story. Normally I would pull out all the commentaries and learn what the people who've studied this story far longer than me have to say. And there's some of that going on, but I felt like I should spend more time thinking and praying and journaling about what this ancient text is saying that is making me feel so alive and well in the year 2006, and then temper, integrate and cultivate my thoughts with the thoughts of others later.

It occured to me at some point that there's a simple power in reading this story from finish to beginning, understanding it in reverse order. So that's how I'm going to blog about it. Because as each layer is added, it is important to understand two points about the end of the story and seeing how everything leads up to that.

First I want to just state it simply and then maybe later today I want to talk about some of the specifics about the end of this story and why it's speaking to me in such a powerful way.

Reading the Last Page First

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"
The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
Jesus said to them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."
- John 11:43-44

This is the end of the story you've probably read a hundred times. To say absolutley nothing new, Jesus raised a guy from the dead. So Lazarus was dead, Jesus shows up, says a few words and suddenly the guy is not dead. That's one powerful Rabbi.

And that's the hypothesis to begin what may become a lengthy reading on the first 44 verses of the eleventh chapter of the Gospel according to John, the disciple of Jesus. If this were a movie, this is the stylish opening scene where you see Jesus raising a guy from the dead and then how that happened is slowly revealed over the next two hours. Movies begin this way because part of the dramatic tension is created from wondering how we got from point A to point Z, or, from verse one to verse 44. In Memento, the opening scene is the end of the story and each subsequent scene is what happened just before that scene, and the next, what happened right before the second scene.

I'm opening this way because I think it's important to keep in mind throughout the story that in the end, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. I think that fact makes everything that I'm about write much heavier and hopeful. Because, truth be told, the beginning of this story, when all the facts are on the table, has a bleak outlook for Lazarus, who, as I previously posted, was kicking back with Jesus enjoying a meal just a short while later.

Anyway, we'll get to all of that, hopefully sooner than later.

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