Outside Bethany

Dear Martha saw You from afar. She has been looking for You. She sees You and Your disciples. They cannot meet her strained expression and reddened eyes. You meet her eyes, and she falls into step beside You as You finish the last mile to Bethany.

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." She had been repeating it over and over as she hurried to meet You. But now she cannot leave it at this. She wants to berate You. How could You come late? She cannot find a voice for the pain in her heart. It does not well up. It is a fact, like the dry crust of earth she is walking upon. Her eyes are dry. All has gone terribly dry, and cracks. She cannot leave it at this. She loves You; she respects You; and even now she has not forgotten herself. So she tries to say something more: "But I know that even now God will give You whatever You ask."

Did she just say that? Martha wonders what she meant, exactly. Nothing is impossible for this friend. And now, as she tries to mend what might have looked like reproach, she has asked the Christ to raise the dead. She would have been silent now if You had not responded. She needs... oh, she does not know what she needs. But as she walks beside You, the duststorm of her soul begins to quiet.

You break the silence of her settling heart and the anxious men walking bravely around You, "Your brother will rise again."

Martha looks up with pleading--how could You say something so benignly conciliatory? How can You watch her heart break before You? You know her heart through and through, and this is Your response?

"I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Martha looks hard ahead. The details of the small houses on the outside of the town are quite visible; she squints at the patchy-looking walls where the clay has been built up, a colorful blue rug being used as a door in one house, a sack for a door on the next house. Coals are smoldering in that house where the smoke rises.

You stop walking. Everyone stops. You have been looking at her this whole time. You bring her to stand face to face with a motion of her shoulders. Martha can see something in your eyes she did not detect before: pain.

"I am the resurrection and the life. If someone believes in me, he will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe me, Martha?"

Martha's heart begins to flood. The dry, cracked earth she feels will never be fit for life again--on that earth, drops of water fall. Many drops. And now, Martha finds voice through tears that well in her eyes and fall onto the rough garments she wears, "Yes Lord," with passion she did not know she could feel (she did not know she could feel) she takes Your hand, "I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."

She is covered in tears. She releases Your hand and walks away, thinking of water and earth and green shoots and how those green shoots can lull her to sleep after more than a week of standing watch over her dying brother and receiving mourners. She walks ahead, to their home, the second street after the blue-curtained doorway, and the smoke rising.

You stand a moment, your hands at your sides. You lift your head upward, Your eyes full.