In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!
Beloved in God brothers and sisters, I greet everyone on the feast! How weak and feeble is human faith, and how limited in spiritual knowledge is the human mind! We often grumble, cry, complain about God, ask Him (as it seems to us) uncomfortable questions, and demand a quick answer from Him; but nothing changes in our lives—our prayers are not always heard and our requests are not always fulfilled. How not to despair here? The main question that we ask always begins with “why”, and there can be a great many of these questions. Yet the answer is always the same. Does He Who created the ear not hear, and does He Who created the eye not see?! The Lord does see and hear; however, He is slow to fulfill our requests, not because He does not want to, but because we have no faith at all, even as tiny as a mustard seed; and we always blame God for this.
Due to the limitedness of their minds people try to make God limited and dependent on their judgments. In the Gospel the Lord more than once shows that He thinks and acts differently and not according to any standards. Thus, with a single phrase He could silence enlightened legalists and teachers of people. It is human nature to live according to patterns in a taboo system of prohibitions and restrictions, in which, having soberly assessed our strength, we understand that a man cannot do more than he can. God is not limited by anyone or anything, and therefore He always acts in unfathomable ways.
Today's Gospel passage describes an unprecedented event in world history, a phenomenon that is beyond human comprehension. This is the resurrection of a dead man named Lazarus. The Gospel emphasizes that Jesus loved Lazarus and his sisters, just as the Lord loves the soul of each one of us. So, the Lord came to the house of His friends, where a tragedy had occurred. Both in sorrow and in joy the Lord comes to our homes, too, and we all meet Him in different ways. As a rule, when we are happy we rarely remember God; but when we feel sad and bad, then if we remember Him, we often blame Him for our misfortunes. A person with weak faith is fickle in his thoughts. Today he can offer up blessings, prayers and gratitude to the Throne of God, and on the same day, just as much, if not more, he can blame God for all his troubles. It is always easier for a person to look for someone to blame—it is easier to blame God, people, and circumstances than to admit that his faith has failed.
Here, too, when the Lord enters the house of Lazarus, He is not greeted with a blessing—as was the case every time He visited this house—but with a stinging rebuke from the sisters Martha and then Mary: Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died (Jn. 11:21). Of course you can't blame a grieving person for how he expresses his emotions, especially when he’s lost a loved one. And we often reproach God when we are in trouble. It seems to us that God is not here when we really need Him. Humanly, you can be sorry for God: it seems that we are so petty in our relationship with Him that we only need a miracle from Him, and self-interest and personal gain can be traced in this. And that is true: many of our prayers begin like this, “Give, give, O Lord!” Let’s ask ourselves the question: “Does our faith really depend on circumstances?” After all, many people believe that if there is prosperity, if everything is fine, then God is close; and if there are difficulties, then God has abandoned us. And we imbue our lives with this magic: If we pray, we will receive; if we do not pray, God will punish us. Our ideas about God are so primitive and narrow that we make Him responsible for our successes and failures.
Remember! With God it is good, always and everywhere—both in sorrow and in joy; He never abandons us. But we often turn away from Him, especially when not everything is as smooth in our lives as we would like. This is our real faith... faith in Christ as the Wonderworker, with Whom we always feel comfortable—when necessary He will multiply bread and wine, and when someone is sick He will heal him. But we do not want to follow Him to Golgotha because we feel comfortable on earth. So let each one of us decide for himself Who Jesus for us is—God, or the Wonderworker.
Martha cannot be reproached for her light-mindedness and unbelief—she knew about the resurrection and confessed the Lord Jesus as Christ. But her faith was nothing more than knowledge, which had no spiritual power. We also love to brag about our faith in God, giving thousands of arguments and participating in theological conferences, but when a real tragedy happens in our lives, all our zeal disappears. And it is precisely in difficulties that our faith in God is truly revealed, and therefore faith must be tested in the crucible of trials. Theoretical knowledge about the resurrection did not give Martha and Mary the spiritual strength to overcome grief in themselves. They accepted the resurrection as a fact, but they did not truly believe it until they saw their resurrected brother.
There is an episode in this story that makes us marvel. God weeps. The Gospel openly says that Jesus wept. Our Savior’s tears once again prove to us that God is not limited by human reasoning. Christ’s tears show us that He not only has compassion for each one of us and perceives all our pain as His own personal tragedy; but the Lord also mourns the unbelief of our hearts. The human heart closed by unbelief is a coffin with our stinking soul in it. By the command of God the stone was rolled away from Lazarus’ tomb. From this we also learn that we must remove the stone of unbelief from our hearts. The resurrection of Lazarus is a visible example of the strengthening of faith of each one of us. As then, so now the Lord strengthens our faith in Lazarus’ example. There was no such miracle that someone would raise a dead man; and there was no such Master to Whom not only the elements, but also hell would obey. How could Christ’s disciples have known about the Resurrection if the Lord had not shown them this miracle? Therefore, before His Resurrection the Lord revealed to us the mystery of the Resurrection by the example of His friend Lazarus.
Sometimes we are overcome by thoughts of unbelief. Let it not scare us. We admit to ourselves honestly that we cannot comprehend with our limited mind what lies beyond the boundaries of the supernatural. Our mind, defiled by sin, is unable to explore the mysteries and depths of God—which is why the Lord gave us His Divine Revelation. But the path to understanding the Divine lies precisely through faith. Let’s trust God. Not all of us fully understand what the resurrection is and how it is possible. It is God’s mystery, which man cannot unravel by mathematical calculations and mechanical solutions. Our Savior raised Lazarus not only to give him life, but also to instill faith in God in the hearts of people, thereby showing that everything is possible with God. Today’s feast is the resurrection of our faith. Never doubt God—He can do everything. To believe means not to prove or explain—it means to trust and accept.
Let us turn to God, so that He can roll away the stone of unbelief from our hearts. Let us trust the Holy Scriptures—the voice of God. Let us reject all doubt, following Christ and remembering that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life (Jn. 3:16). Amen.
