My earliest recollections of being in a church was when I was in third or fourth grade. A school friend of mine, Ray, invited me to a summer vacation Bible school in my then hometown of Duluth, Minnesota. It was in a little white Baptist church within walking distance of Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Inside were two columns of a dozen or so wooden pews each filled with chattering children as the leaders up front tried to bark instructions over the ruckus. Amidst the organized chaos I strained to listen attentively. The cool thing was if you could go up front and say one of Ten Commandments from memory, you got a prize. So I boldly repeated, “Thou shalt not kill.” Easy!
If a reward is involved, another kids’ favorite for Bible verse memorization is the shortest verse: “Jesus wept.” As my Wednesday morning men’s group have going chapter by chapter through the Gospel of John, the Spirit opened my eyes to the wonder of Jesus in this short verse and its surrounding context! I regularly ask the Holy Spirit to help me pay attention to what’s in the Scriptures. The great thing about a prayer like that is He answers it! As I methodically combed through John 11 with a Greek-English interlinear, I observed six “cherry picked” words. In my studies I’m familiar with the biblical authors doing this with a couple of words, but six? John has done the most cherry picking in a small space that I’ve seen thus far. Why is this important? John, like the biblical writers, were literary masters of language under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. These cherry picked words subtly supply a kind of commentary that far excels modern Bible commentaries we’re familiar with. I’m not dismissing the latter, for we can and should learn much from brothers and sisters as holy watchers of the Word of God. But this Spirit-inspired commentary draws the hungry heart into much meditation with fantastic rewards that only the Spirit can give.
This little analogy came to my mind during this John 11 study. The temple in John’s day had a glorious outside that was beautiful and attractive. When we read a gospel like John’s, the straightforward stories present to us a beautiful temple from the outside. We gain so much revelation of who this Jesus is who loved us and gave Himself for us. But what’s cool is this. These cherry picked words serve as an inside commentary, one that grants you entrance into the inner beauties inside the temple. It is there we get fascinated with the heart and soul of this Jesus! The inside commentary grants us glimpses into the Lord Jesus’ heart and mind. For many years in my Christian life I thought that the Gospel authors had scarcely a word to say as from themselves in commentary, dispassionate in a way, knowing everything they knew Jesus Christ. I didn’t realize until recently that they actually do have a commentary. But it’s more subtle. Their mastery of words employ literary devices like plays of words and especially hyperlinking to other portions of Scripture. As God has been gracious to me, I’ve entered into the wonderful inner temple of John 11. I’m not one who cries much or easily, but the flood of light that has come through this view has shaken me to the core of my being (in a good way). It’s one thing to have an intellectual understanding that Jesus cleanses the temple. It’s quite another when the Lord actually cleansed me as His temple! I haven’t wept so much as my innermost being experienced this gentle but pointed cleansing, resulting in praising and worshiping Him all the more!
God assisting, I hope to show you what He has shown me of these six cherry picked words. I am calling this little series “The Apostle of Love’s Cherry Tree.” The fruit of it is literally out of this world! You have to try it! So I want to persuade you from the words of Scripture how these cherry picked words are intentional, not just coincidental. As we catch the heart on the inner temple, it throws a flood of light on the outer temple, the familiar narrative that in places puzzles us and mystifies us.
Allow me some space to get a little Bible nerdy here. These literary design fundamentals, though not particularly jazzy or flashy, are what make exploration and discovery of the truth centering upon Jesus Christ so much fun! These fundamentals serve as guardrails that prevent us from importing our own ideas and imaginations into God’s truth. How can we distinguish an intentionality on the part of the biblical author versus vandalizing the sacred words with the spray paint of our human cleverness? How is it that we can spot a design pattern within the narrative? What we’ll look at now in this well-worn story of the raising of Lazarus is first a rare Greek word usage. That unique word may be its sole usage (or nearly only one) in the New Testament. But then that word has a unique match to the same word in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, or perhaps elsewhere in the Gospels or other parts of the New Testament.
Now, this alone does not a design pattern make. We have to be cognizant that culturally these ancient writers used quotations, allusions, or in this case, unique word matches, qualitatively differently than we typically do today. For example, when we quote someone, the quote usually can stand on its own two feet without all the supporting context. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—Franklin D. Roosevelt. The quote is a memorable one liner that makes sense even without knowing all the supporting context of it. Not so with biblical authors. When a New Testament author quotes from the Hebrew Scriptures, he’s teleporting us into the whole surrounding context along with it, which is what I call an “ecosystem.” We all know what an ecosystem is. The Amazon rain forest has all these mutual give and take interrelationships of lush jungle trees and plants, colorful birds, exotic fish, chattering monkeys, and swarming insects that all coalesce and synthesize into one harmonious environment. God’s word is like this. Many diverse verses (even at times consisting of many chapters) form an ecosystem conveying harmonious revelation about who the Lord is.
So in dealing with literary devices, we don’t just compare word for word but ecosystem to ecosystem. The single word linkage serves as an anchor to the ecosystem for us to enter into and explore. By meditation on the ecosystems and active dependence upon the Spirit, each ecosystem illuminates the other. As Psalm 1 encourages us, meditation makes us fruitful in knowing God and living the life of God’s word in the world around us.
So with this bit of introduction, let’s now dive into the seventh sign in John’s Gospel, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We know the story. Jesus’ good friend Lazarus is critically ill, prompting his sisters, Martha and Mary, to send a message: “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Jesus replies, “This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” Jesus waits two more days. When He and the disciples finally arrive in Bethany, Lazarus has been dead four days. The Lord converses with Martha and then Mary, who escorts Him and an entourage of mourners to Lazarus’ tomb. Here is where we’ll examine the first cherry from the apostle of love’s cherry tree.
Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone.
John 11:38-41 ESV
Let’s zero in here on Martha’s gentle protest: “Lord, by this time there will be an odor.” I love how the King James Version phrases it: “Lord, by this time he stinketh.” The word for odor is a very rare word indeed. It’s ozō (od’-zoh), only here in the New Testament and in only one other place in the Septuagint. Its solo appearance is in the second plague of the ten plagues on the land of Egypt:
So Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs, as he had agreed with Pharaoh. And the Lord did according to the word of Moses. The frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards, and the fields. And they gathered them together in heaps, and the land stank.
Exodus 8:12-14 ESV
“And the land stank.” “Stank” is our word ozō. Is intentional selection on John’s part? I believe it is. First, there are other Greek words that John could have chosen for stink. I won’t bore you with the lexical details, but the Septuagint translated verses with stink, stench and odor with a half dozen different Greek words. John could have employed any of these common Greek words here. He didn’t. Instead, he settled upon this rare one.
Second, remember that the native tongue of Jesus, Martha, Mary and the Jewish characters in the Gospels was Aramaic, not Greek. John had to translate what they said in Aramaic into Greek, so he had some flexibility in word selection to, after much theological reflection, best convey truth. Since Martha spoke in Aramaic, he could have translated her words any number of ways into Greek. Instead of a typical Greek word for odor, he chose this literally one-of-a-kind word from the Old Testament. Again, matching words alone don’t guarantee intentional design, so we’ll need to compare the linked ecosystems if they truly harmonize together.
Now, notice in introducing Martha here, John calls attention to her as “the sister of the dead man.” As a reader we’re pretty deep into the story and know who Martha is by now. There’s no need to identify her again as the sister of the dead man so we don’t confuse her with some other Martha. Rather, John appeals to this relationship to shine some light on Martha’s present frame of mind. The word for “dead” here is teleutaō (tel-yoo-tah’-oh), showing up 11 times in the New Testament. What’s interesting is the very next reference to Lazarus as a dead man in verse 44 uses a different Greek word. Teleutaō most likely originates from teleō (tel-eh’-oh), which means not just the end in time but completion of purpose. Martha’s perception of her brother was that his life had peaked and had reached full completion. His life had expired. Lazarus was finished up, not to live any more in their day to day existence. Martha is the sister of finished up man. That’s how she saw it. She’s still persisting in the defeated mindset when Jesus first met her outside Bethany: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” John as the narrator is winking at us, for we know Jesus will very soon raise him back to life. The reality is that Lazarus is anything but the finished up man!
With this bit of context in mind, let’s return to John’s selection of ozō. As I’ve mentioned several times before, I learned from The Bible Project a great visual picture of how these kind of design patterns work. See the main characters—Jesus, Mary, Martha—acting out the Gospel drama on the main stage. Behind them is a sprawling movie theater screen flashing sepia images choreographed to Old Testament links (or at times within the Gospel itself). As Martha is voicing the words, “Lord, by this time he stinketh,” the ozō literary design link activates this sepia flashback of the whole land of Egypt with dead frogs piled up in heaps everywhere, reeking to high heaven. The plague of frogs differs from the other nine plagues in this peculiar emphasis: its pervasiveness everywhere. “The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls” (Exod 8:3 ESV).
Consider what’s happening. As Martha is perceiving a bad odor trapped within the tomb, the narrator is popping up an image of a foul stench everywhere! Yeah, there’s a stink, but it’s not just in the tomb. It’s everywhere! See the irony. Superimposed on Martha, the sister of “the finished up man,” concerned about releasing the bad odor, is a sepia image of a bad stench everywhere in the land! This clever juxtapositioning of Martha’s ozō is a reversal. The bad odor of the dead frogs of Egypt reverses the bad odor just being in the tomb to a bad odor being among all the characters on the main stage. The stink relegated to Lazarus and the tomb has been transferred to Martha and everyone outside of the tomb! This word play functions as a mirror: what’s going on with Mary, Martha and the Jews around is paralleled by what’s going on with Lazarus in the tomb. What’s true of Lazarus physically is true of everyone around spiritually.
As is common in John’s Gospel, the narrator is tracing the natural events towards a spiritual understanding of the life of faith. The bad odor is a spiritual one. Ozō plays a pivotal role in connection with Martha thinking him as a finished off man. Martha’s stinking thinking is that of Lazarus as the finished up man. Her faith had died. She’d stopped expecting Jesus’ words to be fulfilled in the here and now. But it wasn’t just Martha’s faith that had died. So had Mary’s and everybody’s around. Trust in Jesus’ words had died everywhere. Just like the dead frogs. Jesus’ sensitive spiritual nose detected this dead faith stinking up the land. So when Lazarus died, their faith in Jesus’ words died right along with him. They buried Jesus words that this sickness would not end in death but was for the glory of God right along with it. Martha put a period where Jesus had a comma.
This little bit of commentary colors the narrative we’ve walked along with so far. It’s giving clarity to some otherwise vague understandings we’ve had before. This cherry on the apostle of love’s cherry tree sweetens part of the story that before puzzled us. Why did Jesus weep? Was He sad like everyone else that Lazarus had died? Was He sympathizing with Mary’s weeping? After all, we’re to weep with those who weep (Rom 12:15).
They’re all weeping for a finished off man. They had written Lazarus off. And by doing so, they’d written off Jesus’ words and reinterpreted them. “If You had been here my brother would not have died.” New theology based on sight and experience, not faith in Jesus’ revealed words. No, they let sight and experience redefine Jesus’ words. Martha’s being troubled about opening the tomb because of the stink has its parallel in Jesus not long before this all took place.
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.
John 11:33 ESV
John’s cherry picked word, ozō, is the inner temple view of this familiar scene. We now see how it colors the events that preceded it. There’s more death happening in the story than Lazarus. Faith has died in the land of Bethany. This is suggestive that Jesus is not weeping over the same thing that Mary and everyone else is weeping about. It also expands the resurrection mission to not only Lazarus in the tomb but the entombed faith of the people of Bethany.
This is just the first cherry on the apostle of love’s cherry tree. Five more are coming! Each one yields progressively invaluable insight into the heart of God. John’s cherry tree of cherry picked words is a vibrant rainbow of colors washing over a gray landscape of John 11. The next cherry we’ll taste will blow your mind! It did mine. Like ozō it’s also in accordance with the death that I found both personally convicting and eye opening to Jesus’ loving heart.
What does Jesus do for us if our faith has died? I’m not talking about every aspect of our faith, but one particular area. Have you been so long in sickness that you no longer have any expectation for Jesus to heal you that you once did? Do you have a wayward child you once dedicated to God but now have stopped believing for his or her salvation? Have you a vision or prophetic word stored in your heart from God that you now don’t think will ever happen? Jesus, the author and finisher of your faith, is also the resurrection and the life! We’ll see how He not only raises Lazarus from the dead but also the dead faith of Martha, Mary and the bystanders, too! And how Jesus raised their faith is how He will raise your faith and mine when we’ve stopped believing His words to be fulfilled in us in the land of the living.
Glory Unveiled: Discovering Jesus 