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John 12 starts on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. Jesus is at Lazarus' house. Yep same Lazarus that was recently dead, now living life large. Jesus is there and I'm telling you everyone wants to see Jesus, everyone wants to be on team Jesus. The crowds are going hard after Jesus. The next day is Palm Sunday, the processional of King Jesus into Jerusalem. The crowds continue to grow.

But at the heart of the Saturday before Palm Sunday is the love-burst of Mary...for Jesus. For 2000+ years this story has been told. It's how Mary is remembered? It makes me wonder how I will be remembered. Have you ever had a love-burst?

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In John 11, we get a whole new picture of Jesus. We see Jesus, standing near the tomb of his friend, pain and grief cascading over him. It's not simply the death of his friend that he rails against, it is the hand behind death. It is the power behind evil, this death symbolizes the accumulation of all that is wrong in the world. Evil, pain, sorrow and suffering, hopelessness, despair, injustice, cruelty, loneliness, and sin. He weeps for his friends, but he is deeply moved by the outrageous abnormality of what has become normal.

As he turns to the tomb, Christ comes face to face with messed up stuff that Father God never intended his children to face when he created us and called it good. He is stirred up in His spirit and shows his face as our champion!

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Isn’t there something in each of us that wants to believe that our stories matter? Sometimes we call that hope. We want to believe that we are living a good story, or perhaps even better yet, we want to believe that we are part of a good story. Yet, there are chapters where it seems like we are stuck in a bad news story. Right? In our culture today, we talk more than a bit about the good life. I live in Happy Valley. How could I live anything but the good life in a place called Happy Valley? But even in Happy Valley, we have bad news stories, right?

There is a question that Jesus asks in this story. The question first to Martha is simply, "Do you believe?" You understand the resurrection is not just something to believe in, it is someone to believe. What do you believe?