““Where have you put him?” he asked them. They told him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus wept. The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!” But some said, “This man healed a blind man. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?””
John 11:34-37 NLT
There must have been quite a crowd of people in the area where Jesus was because His emotions were seen and commented on. The kinder ones in the crowd observed Jesus’ tears and put them down to His relationship with Lazarus, now ended after his death, or so they thought. So to them tears were a sign of a grieving Jesus. However, there were others in the crowd who were not so impressed and came to the conclusion that Jesus wasn’t all-powerful, because the Healer of the blind man obviously, to them, couldn’t have saved Lazarus. Well, as we know, they were about to receive quite a shock!
A major problem within Israel was false expectations. The people had drawn their own conclusions about the Messiah they were expecting, based on Scripture that portrayed Him as the coming King, who would restore to Israel their autonomy, and political and emotional stability. Scriptures such as Zechariah 9:9-10, “Rejoice, O people of Zion! Shout in triumph, O people of Jerusalem! Look, your king is coming to you. He is righteous and victorious, yet he is humble, riding on a donkey— riding on a donkey’s colt. I will remove the battle chariots from Israel and the warhorses from Jerusalem. I will destroy all the weapons used in battle, and your king will bring peace to the nations. His realm will stretch from sea to sea and from the Euphrates River to the ends of the earth”. The Jewish people extrapolated the prophetic writings into an imagined situation where the Messiah would destroy the Roman occupiers and fulfil their expectations, even if He was riding a donkey.
Such was Jesus’ impression on the people of Galilee after He fed the crowd of five thousand men and their families, that we read, “When the people saw him do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, “Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” When Jesus saw that they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself” (John 6:14-15). They wanted Jesus to lead a rebellion to be free of the Romans, just as their ancestors had been freed from slavery to Egypt. But the same attitude to Jesus was present when faced with His miracles. Some people wanted to dictate to Him what He should and shouldn’t do. Their expectation was that the Healer of Mr Blind-no-more was also supposed to be the Healer of His friend Lazarus. So in their eyes Jesus wasn’t as powerful as He seemed to say He was.
Jesus was never going to conform to an earthly or human agenda. He was counter-cultural and non-conformist within the Israeli society. His work was in accordance with His Father’s instructions, not the expectations of the people. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “ … When you have lifted up the Son of Man on the cross, then you will understand that I Am he. I do nothing on my own but say only what the Father taught me. And the one who sent me is with me—he has not deserted me. For I always do what pleases him” (John 8:28-29). Jesus was not a man-pleaser and was never going to conform to human expectations.
We pilgrims are also counter-cultural and non-conformist in the sense that we are not going to always behave in a way that unbelievers expect. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God living as ambassadors in our natural world, the kingdom of darkness, and that will expose us to all sorts of criticism and expectations. We are not followers of the crowd walking long the broad way that leads to hell. We are journeying on the narrow way, a path paved with ridicule and abuse from the broad way people. But that matters little to God’s counter-cultural and non-conformist children.
Dear father God. Please help us on our journey to the Promised Land, a place where we will find the glory of the Lord. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 