Take It Personally

I’d been reading through John 11 slowly each morning, following the story of Lazarus’ sickness, Jesus’ delay, and then His encounters with Martha and with Mary after Lazarus lay dead. It’s a story I’ve read many times, mostly just noting quickly that Jesus is incredible and death is awful before moving along.

But this time, the day I read that Jesus wept, I heard a child I’d served in ministry died tragically. That night, I wept too.

I remembered again what it’s like to hear the news, to be overwhelmed by questions and emotions flooding in, to play memories over and over as if that will bring them close again. 

Death is personal.

When morning came, I read of Jesus telling them to roll the stone away. Martha protested.

“‘But, Lord,’ said Martha, the sister of the dead man, ‘by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days’” (John 11:39).

It struck me that day, grieving a particular person I loved, that for Martha, this was not just some corpse potentially being disturbed. Jesus wasn’t making an odd request of a stranger, but the sister of the deceased. The miracle He was about to perform would mean something to the masses – but how much more it was going to mean to Martha and Mary when their brother, Lazarus, rose from the dead.

Sometimes we distance ourselves from death.

We like to live like dying is a nebulous “thing” that happens. But it’s something we actually witness and experience, that we feel and sense. It’s part of life, not theory. While we easily keep our distance from death most of the time, somewhat purposefully, we can’t ignore its stench when someone we love is buried.

Thousands of years, and for many of us, thousands of miles, lie between us and Golgotha. So we also easily distance ourselves from the reality that when Jesus died, it was personal and not theoretical. Both for Him and for those who ate with Him, talked with Him, and lived life with Him – those who grieved His death in real-time. 

Like Martha said about Lazarus four days after he died, the people who loved Jesus knew He’d stink too. “Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds” to bury with Jesus (John 19:39).

Jesus was a real man, with nerves and memories and all, as He watched His loved ones watching as He gasped for breath. His Father looked on, and Jesus cried out to Him. Jesus knows the stench and feel and sorrow and struggle of dying as both the one succumbing to it and the one who stood by the graveside of a dear friend.

What’s unfathomable is that God chose the experience of death.

Jesus, fully God, chose to become fully man as well. He chose to put on flesh – smelly, dirty, achy, dying flesh and to experience personally all the things we do.

God the Father chose to watch as His only begotten Son bore all our sin as He sacrificed Himself for us on the cross. It was in keeping with His extraordinary character that He did not keep his distance from death and dying because it was through the cross that He would save us. 

For God, suffering and grief and death are personal. But so is life.

When Jesus rose Lazarus from the grave, He called him by name. When Mary met Jesus outside the empty tomb, it was Him saying her name that stopped her grief and brought her peace.

Jesus didn’t die for the theoretical or an impersonal tangle of humanity. He died for you, for Lazarus, for me, and for the child I grieve. 

Jesus rose again so that we will rise and be with Him, in a living, eternal, and personal relationship. 

When we encounter death and grief, it’s personal.  But because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, hope is personal too. 

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