Just One More Step

29 July 2025  John 11:19-27

Memorial of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus

“I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”

John 11:25

Martha of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Mary, believed everything the Pharisees did. And then she took one additional step.

The Pharisees and the Sadducees didn’t get along very well. The Sadducees thought faithfulness was a matter of reading closely and following just the Torah, the Five Books of Moses (Genesis-Deuteronomy). If it wasn’t in the Torah, it didn’t count. The Pharisees, however, were a good bit more broad-minded. Not only did they recognize the authority of many more scriptures – all the prophetic books and wisdom literature of the Old Testament – but they also were more theologically adventurous, and believed that the whole Old Testament implied a Resurrection at the close of the age, when all the righteous would be raised from the dead to live eternally in heaven. The Sadducees considered this reckless speculation, and it became a matter of intense, often bitter, argument. When St. Paul was brought before the Sanhedrin, he broke up the meeting by simply mentioning that he was on trial because of a dispute over the resurrection. The meeting turned into a brawl, and St. Paul was hustled out for his own protection (Acts 23:6-10).

Martha of Bethany believed everything the Pharisees did. When Jesus told her that Lazarus would rise again, she said what every Pharisee said: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (John 11:24). Then Jesus asked her to believe just one thing more: “I am the Resurrection and the Life…. Do you believe this?” She did.

The Pharisees were always much more popular than the Sadducees. When the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D. and effectively brought an end to the priestly and sacrificial system of the Jews, it was the Scribes and Pharisees who reconstituted Judaism, and created the Jewish religious structure that exists to this day. The Pharisees were awfully close to faith in Jesus. It was just one more step from where they were to where Jesus was. Even famous teachers like Gamaliel recognized how close they were – he later advised the Sanhedrin that opposing the Christians could be opposing God (Acts 5:39). The first century Christian church drew almost all of its members from the people who were already very close to believing in Jesus, and needed just one more step.

So, who are the people now who are just one step away?

Anthony Flew was one of them. For most of his storied career as a philosopher he was an atheist who believed there was no convincing evidence that God exists. When, however, he looked carefully at the implications of Big Bang cosmology, particularly the fine-tuning of the early universe, how the initial conditions were so delicately balanced that even the smallest change would make the emergence of life impossible, he concluded that the only explanation was a timeless, changeless, immaterial, personal and immensely powerful Mind (see his book There Is a God,2007).

All the people who believe that morality, in order to function as an effective guide for people and societies, has to be objective in nature, are also just one step away. Relativism – the belief that all moral statements are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint, and that no particular standpoint is privileged over any other – has been an abysmal failure. Not only is it self-refuting (it says that it is objectively true that nothing is objectively true), but it has led to social chaos, crises of meaning, and widespread mental illness. If morality is objective in nature, that implies the same timeless, changeless, immaterial, personal and immensely powerful Mind that Antony Flew finally saw.

Martha of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Mary, believed everything the Pharisees did. And then she took one additional step. We need to be seeking out those people in our time who are just one step away.