What moves Jesus? What is so compelling that he is emotional about it; what really inspires God? It’s our faith. The only times that we see God moved by humankind is when we display heroic faith.  We see grand versions of this, like from Elijah, and we see less grand but equally striking versions of this, like from the centurion that calls on Jesus. Here we see Mary and Martha displaying their faith, trusting and believing, and we see Jesus respond with weeping… and an awesome miracle.

Now, this isn’t “prosperity gospel“, it isn’t that every time we display faith we can get God to do our bidding for us; God is not our puppet. So let’s not go there. The point that is being made is that grace faith gives way to great response.  When we display our faith like Mary and Martha, we give God space to act.  In the end, God gets to decide what to do with that space. He raise Lazarus from the dead, but he left John the Baptist in prison. One day, when we get to heaven, we can ask him why - but for now though, the one thing that is clear is that we need to create space for God to move in our lives if we ever want him to do so.

Also in the reading today, we see the Jews make their final decision to pursue Jesus to kill him. It is clear that their motivation is to maintain control and not necessarily to find the truth. We’ve talked about it before, so I’m just gonna leave this idea alone - other than to say that this illustrates how being a control-seeker and a truth-seeker can become mutually exclusive; we must decide to be more interested in the truth than in being right or being in control if we want to grow in our faith.

Some great lessons today!