“The Last Laugh”

“The Last Laugh”

Text: John 11:1-44

© March 9, 2008 by C. Edward Bowen at Crafton United Presbyterian Church.

One day two men were out in the woods hunting together. Well, all of a sudden the one man starts to clutch his chest, gasps for breath, and drops to the ground. The other guy whips out his cell phone and right away dials 911. And he says to the 911 operator, “Help! My friend just died! What should I do?” The operator replies, “Calm down, sir. I can help you. First, let’s make sure that your friend is really dead.” There’s silence for several moments, and then the 911 operator hears the sound of a shotgun blast. The hunter gets back on the phone and says, “OK, now what?”

We tend to laugh at death, because the truth is we’re afraid of death. It’s like one day a funeral procession was heading out of town. The hearse, with the casket inside, led the way, and a string of about a dozen cars followed behind. But just as the hearse was about half way up the first steep hill, the back door popped open, and the casket slid out. And the casket began to rumble its way back down the hill, through the town park, past the florist shop, past the gas station, and finally ended up crashing through the front door of the drug store. When the casket finally bumped up against the pharmacy counter, the dead person sat up and said to the pharmacist, “Do you have something I can take to stop this coffin?”

OK, one more, and then we’ll get down to work here. One day a man was riding in a taxi, and he leaned forward and tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder and said, “Hey, buddy.” But when the man did that, immediately the cab driver let out a scream and lost control of the taxi, nearly hitting a bus, jumping the curb, and stopping just a few inches from a plate-glass window. When the taxi finally stopped, the driver said, “Man, you scared the daylights out of me!” “I’m sorry,” the passenger said, “But I didn’t realize that a little tap on the shoulder would frighten you that much.” “It’s not your fault,” the driver said. “Today is my first day driving a taxi. I’ve been driving a hearse for the past 25 years, and in all that time no one ever tapped me on the shoulder before.”[1]

We like to laugh at death, because the truth is that death is something that makes us feel uncomfortable. After all, it’s like what the popular speaker Tony Campolo often says: We don’t like to think about the fact that someday someone is going to shovel six feet of dirt on top of us, and then everyone is going to go back to the church and eat potato salad without us.

But one of the things I believe this story in the Gospel of John is trying to show us is that it’s OK to laugh at death. And that’s because despite what we might be tempted to think, death isn’t the end. In fact, nothing that we face in this life – no matter what kind of problem it might be – is truly the end. Instead, as this story in the Bible shows us, as we put our trust in Jesus, there is always hope, even in the most incredibly hopeless situations. As this story in the Bible shows us, as we put our trust in Jesus, we discover for ourselves that Jesus truly is the resurrection and the life, the resurrection and the life that will never ever end.

As we take a look at the story here in John’s Gospel, it starts out with kind of a strange twist. You see, Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus, becomes gravely ill. And so Lazarus’s sisters, Mary and Martha, send word to Jesus for him to come quickly to help Lazarus. After all, they figure that if Jesus can heal the blind and the sick and the deaf and so many other people, surely he could do something to help Lazarus, his close friend, someone who Jesus loved.

But of all things, instead of hopping in his car and racing to the town of Bethany to Lazarus’s house, Jesus delays. In fact, Jesus delays so long that by the time he finally ends up getting to Bethany, not only is Lazarus dead, but we’re told that he’s been dead for four days. You see, in that time it was generally believed that for three days after a person died, the person’s soul hung around, with the possibility that that soul might come back into the body and the person might come back to life. But they believed that if that didn’t happen within three days, the soul would then move on and leave. And so it was only after a person was dead for three days that people back then considered that person to be really dead. So when we’re told that Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days, we’re being told that not only was Lazarus dead, but that he was really dead.

And so when Jesus finally shows up, immediately one of Lazarus’s sisters, Martha, tears out of the house, runs up to Jesus, and screams at him, “Where have you been? How could you have let us down like this? Our brother, your friend, was sick and needed your help – and where were you? And now he’s dead. Now it’s too late. Now there’s no hope.”

But Jesus looked at Martha and basically said to her, “Despite what you might think, yes, there is hope.” Martha answered back, “Yeah, Jesus, I remember what they taught us in Sunday school. Sometime in the future, sometime maybe thousands of years from now, there’s going to be a resurrection when God is going to make the dead alive again. But what good is that to us right here, right now, today?”

Jesus looked at Martha and said: “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” (John 11:25-26a). And then he said to those who were standing there, “Go over and roll away the stone that’s in front of Lazarus’s tomb.”

But when Jesus says that, how does the sister respond? The old King James Version of the Bible describes Martha as crying out, “No, Lord, he stinketh.” He stinketh. In other words, Martha doesn’t want the stone to be rolled away because she figures that there’s no point, that there’s no hope, that if they roll away the stone all that is going to happen is that everyone there is going to be offended by the stench of decay emanating from inside the tomb.

But despite Martha’s protest, Jesus insists that the people there do what he said. And after they rolled the stone away, Jesus called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” And to everyone’s amazement, a few moments later Lazarus came out – alive and well.

And when Lazarus’s sisters and all the people in Bethany saw what had happened, the hopelessness that they had had suddenly turned into hope. The tears of sorrow that had been pouring down their cheeks suddenly turned into tears of joy. And the sound of grief and moaning that had been heard in that village suddenly turned into the sound of laughter, the sound of laughter and celebration at what God had done.

Like Martha and her sister and those people in Bethany, there are times in all of our lives when we’re tempted to think: it’s the end, there’s no hope. But whenever we think that, whenever we say that, we need to take a moment to quiet ourselves down and listen. And if we do that, if we listen carefully enough, what we’re going to hear is the sound of laughter, the sound of God’s laughter. Because the truth is that despite what we might sometimes think, there is no problem, no burden, that’s too great for God. Instead, the good news is that no matter what we might face in life, we can trust without fail that the last laugh belongs to God.