You Preached Resurrection At A Graveside

It was raining, and the cloth they put over the earth had gone dark at the edges, and there were nineteen people standing round it under six umbrellas.

He knew every one of them. That is the thing about doing this in a place where you have been for a long time. He had married two of them. He had sat in the front room of the woman who was crying hardest, in that same street, eleven times over three years, and drunk the tea and heard the same story about the greenhouse.

And he stood at the head of that grave in the rain and said the words. I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

He said them the way you say something you would put your hand in a fire over. And there was nothing at all inside him while he said it.

Not doubt. He wants that understood, and he has said it to himself a hundred times since and never once said it to another human being. He was not standing there wondering whether it was true. He was standing there holding a truth he would defend against anybody, in a chest that had gone completely quiet, in the rain, at a graveside, for a family he loves.

Afterwards the son shook his hand and could not speak and just held on to it for a second longer than people do. And he drove home and sat on the drive with the wipers going and thought a thought that has not gone away since November.

The thought was: they got the words and they deserved a man who felt them.

That is the wound and it is worth saying plainly before anything else in this message. Not the flatness. The flatness would be survivable. What is not survivable, what he has been carrying alone for months, is the conviction that those nineteen people were short changed at the worst hour of their lives by a man going through the motions, and that he is the only one who knows.

Look at what He was doing with His face

The sentence he said in the rain was said first outside a tomb at Bethany, by a man who had walked there deliberately, four days late, knowing exactly what He was going to do.

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.John 11:25

That is one of the highest claims in the Gospels. It is said to a woman standing in the middle of the worst week of her life, and it is said with total authority, and it is followed by a demonstration that ends with a dead man walking out into the daylight.

Now read what the same chapter says about the man saying it.

He groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. And a few verses later, in the shortest sentence in the book, Jesus wept.

Put those beside each other and refuse to smooth them over. The one who says I am the resurrection is, in the same hour, at the same graveside, groaning and crying. He is not standing above the grief conducting it from a distance. He is in it, with a wet face, saying the most triumphant sentence ever spoken, and both are completely real at once.

So hear this, over a drive with the wipers going: those nineteen people were not short changed. That is not my comfort for you; it is what His word shows about the man who said those words first, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a scene at Bethany and lays it down on a graveside in November.

Now let me name the thing underneath, because you have never let anybody at it.

You have been assuming that the power in those words is transmitted by the state of the one saying them. That a man with a warm chest hands over a live truth and a man with a quiet one hands over a recording. That is the whole logic of the last several months. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.

But nothing in that chapter locates the power in the messenger's condition. Martha did not receive resurrection because the speaker was moved. Lazarus did not come out because the voice cracked in the right place. The word had authority because of whose it was, and the man who owned it was crying while He said it.

You are not going through the motions. That phrase has been running in your head since November and it is the wrong phrase. A man saying a true thing with everything he has, at a graveside, for people he loves, in a chest that has gone silent, is doing the hardest possible version of the job, and Scripture never once measures faithfulness by the temperature of the one being faithful.

And you are held right now, on your own drive, more than you know. His word puts groaning and resurrection in the same chapter without embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling a tired man that a quiet chest disqualifies his mouth.

Here is one more thing, and I want you to have it before we go on, because I think it is the true shape of what happened in the rain.

You may not have been empty. You may have been carrying nineteen people's grief plus your own for a woman you had eleven cups of tea with, at a volume that had nowhere to go, and gone quiet the way a body goes quiet when it is holding more than it can process standing up. That is not absence. That is a man at capacity, and it looks like nothing from the inside.