Resisting Our Raising

By Audrey Stallsmith

You would think that raising a man from the dead would prove the raiser’s supernatural powers for once and all. But the reaction of the chief priests and Pharisees to the resurrection of Lazarus shows how extreme their hatred of Jesus had become. 

John reports that the enormity of that miracle finally did convince a few of the Jewish leaders that Jesus was, indeed, the Messiah. But it seems the others reacted with consternation and hurried to confer with their peers about how the new prophet’s increasingly staggering wonderworking could be stopped.

The fact that the supposedly religious hierarchy wanted to prevent miracles is peculiar, to say the least. If that group simply had included the high priests, who probably were Sadducees, their reaction would have been easier to understand. The Sadducees, after all, didn’t believe in any life beyond the grave. So their main concern was how to make the best of existence here on earth.

But the Pharisees were the highly religious church people of their day, who supposedly had been anticipating the arrival of their promised Messiah for generations. If that really were the case, shouldn’t they have eagerly welcomed Jesus?

Maybe they would have, had he been one of them. But he so obviously wasn’t! The apparently illegitimate son of a carpenter, he hadn’t been educated in their schools and he traveled with a band of lower class “louts.” To add insult to injury, he frequently criticized the Pharisees’ legalism and their strict adherence to traditions that never had been part of the original law. 

Okay, “criticized” probably is too mild a term. We might say Christ actually excoriated the Pharisees, flayed off the “skin” of their religious pretensions to reveal the corruption that lay beneath. 

So their outraged reaction is, to some extent, understandable. And, if they had believed Lazarus’s resurrection to be a trick, their determination to punish Jesus for it might even have been commendable. However, both the Sadducees and Pharisees admitted that “this man certainly does miracles.” And they no longer seemed to be attempting to connect those miracles to demon activity as they had in the past. 

But they still wanted Jesus dead. Their thinking had become so disjointed by this point that they actually plotted to kill Lazarus to—as  if, by so doing, they somehow could reverse the most recent miracle. Hadn’t it occurred to them that they were planning to break one of the commandments, that against murder? And didn’t they realize that, as Gamaliel would remind them later, fighting genuine miracles was fighting against God? Or did they simply not care?

The Pharisees attitude in this meeting proves that Jesus was right about them. Although they enjoyed the respect they were accorded because of their religious knowledge, it appears that—with many of them—that knowledge didn’t go beyond their heads to their hearts. They might obey God as long as it was convenient, but they apparently didn’t love him enough to do so when his commandments interfered with what they saw as their own best interests.     

Some apparently even had used their positions of influence to cheat the poor. And their attitudes about “gold” and “gifts,” as pointed out by Jesus in Matthew 23, proved that money actually meant more to them than mercy did. We see that attitude in many who preach the prosperity gospel these days too. Though they claim to be different than the secularists, just as the Pharisees claimed to be different than the Sadducees, deep down some of them really aren’t. 

Fortunately, the "born rich" often have a more realistic view of what their money can and cannot buy. They realize that it isn’t going to get them heaven, either here on earth or in the hereafter. 

When young millionaire William Borden decided to become a missionary in the early part of the twentieth century, a friend accused him of throwing his life away. In response, Borden is supposed to have written in his Bible “no reserves.” Later, he would add “no retreats.” And, around the time that he died of meningitis in Egypt at age 25, he reportedly concluded with, “no regrets.” He knew that he had done his best in this life to prepare himself and others for the next.   

But almost all of Israel’s so-called “religious” leaders had too much invested in the status quo to be interested in a Messiah who would expect them to change. And now Jesus was undermining their influence by winning the hearts of the people away from them.

Their excuse for wanting his death was that he was going to get them in trouble with the Roman government. That obviously wasn’t the truth, since Pilate showed little interest in the new prophet until he had to. Religion, we can guess, didn’t mean much to him either. 

But, not being possessed by the hatred the Pharisees had for Jesus, the Roman governor could see that there was something uncanny about this particular prisoner. After apparently concluding that it would be bad karma to kill such a man, Pilate too allowed what he probably would have considered “superstitious” qualms to be overruled by his own “best interests.” It’s hard to convince people who don’t believe in heaven or hell that their interests aren’t best served by concentration on this too-brief lifespan.

But the Pharisees, who purported to believe in their own eternal existence, should have known better. We have to wonder whether any of them ever woke up to what they had done. 

I can well imagine one of the more conscientious emerging from his “drunk with dudgeon” phase into an agonizing hangover of remorse. Especially so, if he’d been staggered by the earthquakes and the rending of the temple veil. He then would have to ask himself “Were we so blind that we slaughtered our salvation by turning our Messiah over to the enemy?”

We modern religious people can just as easily allow our commitment to God to be superseded by our hankering after this world. We also may base our obedience or lack thereof on what we perceive as our own best interests—and react with anger against anybody who warns us that we are spiritually deceased and rotting beneath our whitewashed exteriors. 

Christ was trying to raise the Pharisees from the dead too by giving them a whiff of what they really smelled like. But they reacted by killing the messenger. We can do the same. However, Paul warns us in Hebrews 6:6 that repentance is excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible, for those who “again crucify to themselves the Son of God.”

If we want to be free of regrets on our deathbeds, we would do well to follow the example of the young missionary who threw this life away in favor of the next. He tells us in one of his journals how we, too, can do that. “Say ‘no’ to self and ‘yes’ to Jesus every time.”