From Forward Day by Day
John 12:10 So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well.
The authorities wanted Jesus dead. His teaching was a threat to the established order. They wanted Lazarus dead, too, but for a different reason. Lazarus’s very life was a testimony of God’s power to raise the dead. His existence was a rebuke to the world of fear, might, and commerce. Every time Lazarus spoke, no matter what he said, he was testifying to a different reality of hope, life, and love.
It’s not so different in our time. Someone who wanted to extinguish hope gunned down Martin Luther King Jr. Those who commit hate crimes against people because of their race or sexual orientation or religion—people who may be thriving and happy—are trying to extinguish hope. One way to understand Holy Week is to see it as a battle between fear and hope, between hatred and love. These are not just 2,000-year-old problems. What we experience in Holy Week is real today, as too often God’s people are slaughtered for testifying to hope and love. Let us enter fully into this Holy Week, and let us enter fully into the embrace of hope in our time.
