43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice,
Lazarus, come forth.
44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with
graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin.
Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. (John 11:43-44)
We often envision
this scene with Lazarus walking out of the grave doorway, but the reality was
probably a lot weirder.
The text says Lazarus
was bound hand and foot, which probably means his feet were wrapped tight together
and his hands were wrapped tight to his body. Also his face was covered up. It’s
really hard to move under those conditions. (How would you have done it if you
were wrapped up tight like a mummy?)
How did he get out? Lazarus
probably had to roll and inch around to exit the cave where he’d been
put. It probably looked really strange, like an enormous cloth-covered inch
worm thrashing around. (It may have even looked a little frightening
too.) Jesus had to tell people to loose Lazarus so he could move better.
When we read this
story, it reads like a dramatic and spiritual event, but it may have looked
strange or silly, or weird, or scary for a small period to those who saw it.
I think this is
probably true more often than we realize. We may experience miracles that seem
strange, silly, weird, or even scary when we’re going through them, but which
sound a lot better in the telling.
We’re used to slick,
carefully-edited media, with nothing incongruous or out of place. We’re used to
church videos that deliberately infuse the sacred into the smallest gestures to
achieve a polished, shiny view of holiness. And yet, we love amateur videos
that show the touch of “awkward” because they are so human and genuine. There’s
love and truth there.
Maybe we need to
remember that in real life, there is awkward in the sacred, and the sacred in
the awkward. Let’s learn to find
gratitude for that in our lives. It can heal tendencies toward perfectionism.
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