Reading Francis

Who is Jesus to you?

I’ve been asked that by a couple of people recently, and, to be honest, my answer to that is pretty flat. I know the “right” answer, but the reality is that I’ve always found it easier to relate to God through the (non-anthropomorphized) Holy Spirit than through the person of Jesus.

That was floating in my head when the Parable of the Good Samaritan passage (Luke 10) came up in the daily Mass readings last week. If you don’t recall, what prompts that classic story is a scholar of the law who asks Jesus what he has to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus turns the question back on the scholar, who knows the right answer (Love the LORD your god with all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself), but then, to justify himself, he asks the follow up. Who is my neighbor? And off to the parable we go.

That got me praying about a few of the other people whose stories show how they relate to Jesus. A rich young ruler has a similar story, asking how he can inherit eternal life and then, after answering Jesus’ 10-commandment quiz correctly, balks at the final challenge, to give away his riches and follow Jesus. Both the scholar and the rich young man know the right answers, but aren’t able to fully commit themselves.

Some of the others that came to me were Jairus, the head of the synagogue who pleads for Jesus to heal (and raise) his daughter (Luke 8, among others), and the unnamed centurion (Luke 7 and Matthew 8), who asks Jesus to heal his servant. Both are desperately asking for Jesus to intercede to heal someone they care about, and Jesus follows through for both of them.

Then there are the sisters, Mary and Martha. It seems like their story (Luke 10, right after the Good Samaritan), and the split between being distracted by work and giving Jesus your full attention, come up a couple times a year in the Mass readings, but that may just be because it’s a story too easy to relate to.

But the one that jumped out of the Bible and grabbed me was Lazarus (John 11 and 12), the brother of Mary and Martha.* Even though he has no lines in the Bible, here’s how he shows up:

1. He is a friend of Jesus. Jesus says so, as does the Johannine narrator. Jesus loves Lazarus (in fact, some scholars argue that he, not John, is the “beloved disciple” in that gospel). We are invited into the same relationship.
2. Jesus saves Lazarus from death. We profess that Jesus does the same for all of us.
3. In John (the only gospel in which Lazarus appears), it’s the raising of Lazarus that sparks the plot by the religious leaders to kill Jesus. He dies for Lazarus. Which, again, we Christians profess he does for all of us.

My challenge, then, is to find out how to be more like Lazarus and less like the scholar of the law, when it comes to answering the question that some say is the only one that really matters:

Who is Jesus to you?

*So, reading John 11 again, I realized that the narrator seems to kind of work his way up to connecting Lazarus as a sibling of Mary and Martha. Check out John 11:1-2. Lazarus was “a certain man” from “the village of Mary and her sister Martha.” Then the narrator reminds us of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus (which is done anonymously in the other gospels), and says “her brother Lazarus was ill.” (But not Martha’s?). I’m just saying this seems like the kind of thing that happens when traditions evolve over the retelling. Nonetheless, let’s keep him in the family.