Lent 05: Lazarus
Community Group Questions
1. The story of Lazarus is very well known, especially in Christian circles. Hearing it framed today in the larger context of John’s narrative and the timeline of Jesus’s approach to Jerusalem, were there new things that struck you in the way that you understood it or how it resonated?
Tim preached and discussed the nature of Jesus‘s tears in the John 11 narrative. He talked about common interpretations that say that Jesus is weeping for loss and empathy, but he also pointed out the mention in the passage of a deep anger that welled up in Jesus. Tim also talked about his tears being tears of anger and frustration essentially “at death.” Tim also said that Jesus knows he’s about to raise Lazarus, and that in the end, the result will be his death.
How do you see this? What do you think Jesus‘s tears were about? What makes you say so?
2. Tim gave multiple examples of the kind of impact the Christian community can have when it stops fearing death, and works to enact goodness as its people lay down their lives in numerous small and big ways. He juxtaposed this willingness to get dirty and be vulnerable with a fear of death. Tim also said that the story of Lazarus dares us to remember that we are not powerless because death is not the end.
With all of this context in view, consider your own relationship to death and the fear you may have of it. How much does the fear of death impact you? Don’t think only of actual final earthly death, but of the small deaths that many of us can die throughout the course of our lives, and sometimes throughout the course of our days.
Take some time to slow your mind, and think of someone that you know personally, and whose life seems, to you, to not demonstrate much fear of that personal type of small (or not-so-small) death? Or perhaps even of true physical death in the typical sense?
What do you think it is about them that brings them to mind? Is it personality traits? Stories of their choices and history? Simply from being in relationship with that person? How might you describe that person to a stranger outside of the context of this story and discussion? What characteristics stand out in them?
What kind of impacts or outcomes seem, to you, to have resulted from that person’s way of being in the world? Most likely, most of those outcomes are small and personal - not necessarily the stuff of news stories. Can you make a connection between those outcomes and the idea of not fearing death? In that person, does it feel like a Christian characteristic (whether that person would call themself a Christian or not)?
After reflecting on this person, and how you understand their own relationship to the fear of death, reflect on your own orientation to death in the way we’re discussing it today. What feelings or thoughts surface in you as you consider yourself in this context as well?
3. In his closing prayer, Tim asked that God “help us see that in our powerlessness, there is something we can do: we can lay down our lives in boring mundane ways.”
What are some of the places in life where you feel most powerless? Where you, perhaps, are most powerless?
Think about applying Tim’s prayer to those areas. In that powerlessness, what does it look like to lay down your life in boring mundane ways? What might that mean? What could it mean?
If you were to take some of the actions identified in relationship to your own powerlessness in the previous question, what do you think some of the outcomes could be? How does this thought process make you feel? What surfaces for you as you contemplate these ideas in your own life today?
