Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Today’s gospel is, at its heart, about the act of believing. In John’s gospel, belief is never a noun, never a static possession to be stored away. It is always a verb — a living, active, ongoing commitment to who Jesus is and what God is doing through him. And in the raising of Lazarus, that act of believing is brought to its most dramatic test.
Let us begin with what is perhaps the
most startling detail in this long passage: Jesus deliberately delays. He
receives the urgent message from Mary and Martha — “Lord, he whom you love is
ill” — and he stays two days longer where he is. He is not indifferent. We are
told plainly that he loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet he waits.
Why? He tells us himself: “This illness
does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God
may be glorified through it.” And then, almost shockingly, “For your sake I am
glad I was not there, so that you may believe.”
God’s timing is not our timing. The delay is not abandonment. It is, in fact, preparation — an invitation to a deeper believing than the disciples, Martha, and Mary had yet imagined possible.
Martha meets Jesus on the road. Her
words are grief-stricken but also theologically precise: “Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give
you whatever you ask of him.” Even now. There is a faith clinging to life in
those two words, even though the rawness of her loss.
Jesus responds with what is, in John’s
gospel, the climax of his great “I am” sayings. There are seven of them in this
gospel — seven, the number of completeness and divine fullness in the
scriptures. “I am the bread of life.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the
good shepherd.” And now, here at the tomb, the seventh and final declaration:
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
This is the summit. In the Bible’s symbolic language, seven signifies wholeness, a finished work. These seven “I am” sayings together constitute Jesus’ complete self-revelation as the human face of divine fullness. And the resurrection and the life is the fullest revelation of all: Jesus is not merely a prophet who speaks of life, nor a healer who restores health. He is the very source and substance of life itself.
Notice, too, where this declaration
falls in the sequence of Jesus’ seven signs — his miraculous works in John’s
gospel. The first sign was the turning of water into wine at Cana (John
2:1–11), a quiet, almost hidden act of abundance at a wedding feast. The signs
grew in scope from there: healing the official’s son, the paralyzed man,
feeding five thousand, walking on water, giving sight to the blind. Each sign
pointed beyond itself to the glory and identity of God’s Son.
And now the seventh sign: the raising of Lazarus. The climax of the signs matches the climax of the “I am” sayings. Both sequences find their fullness here, in this moment, before this tomb. It is as if the whole of John’s gospel has been building to this point: the demonstration that Christ holds sovereignty over death itself.
Martha understands resurrection. She
believes in it. “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last
day,” she says. She has the theology right. She knows the tradition, the hope
of Israel. But Jesus gently reorients her: resurrection and life are not only a
future promise for the end of time. They are a present reality, standing right
in front of her.
This is one of the most important
correctives in the New Testament. We Christians are indeed a resurrection
people — we live in hope of the life to come. Jesus himself promises in John
6:40: “This is the will of him that sent me, that everyone which sees the Son,
and believes in him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the
last day.” That promise is real and sure.
But the raising of Lazarus insists that God’s power to bring life out of death is not only reserved for the final judgment. It is available here. Now. In the midst of grief and stench and stone-sealed tombs. God is already in the business of resurrection. Our dead places do not have to wait for eternity to come alive.
Then comes one of the most tender
moments in all of scripture. Mary falls at Jesus’ feet, weeping. The crowd
weeps with her. And Jesus — the one who is the resurrection and the life, the
one who already knows what he is about to do — is “greatly disturbed in spirit
and deeply moved.” And then: “Jesus wept.”
The shortest verse in the Bible. And one
of the most profound.
The crowd says, “See how he loved him.”
But there is more being said in those tears than personal grief over a friend.
The Son of God weeps in the face of death. He does not remain aloof from human
sorrow. He enters into it. He who is the resurrection and the life allows
himself to be undone by the weight of mortality, by the tears of those he
loves.
In the passion narrative we are now approaching, in Holy Week, this same Christ will enter his own death. The Lazarus story is a manifest prefiguration of what is to come: the death of Jesus and the new life that will burst from the sealed tomb on Easter morning. Lazarus comes out still bound in his burial cloths. Jesus will leave his burial cloths behind, neatly folded.
But before the miracle, there is
resistance. Martha, still grieving and perhaps frightened, protests when Jesus
orders the stone removed: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been
dead four days.” It is an entirely reasonable objection. There is no good
reason to open that tomb. There is nothing left inside but death.
Jesus says: “Did I not tell you that if
you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
This is the shape of faith in John’s gospel. We do not first see the glory and then believe. We believe, and then we see. Faith is not the reward that follows evidence. It is the posture that opens our eyes to the evidence that is already there. The stone has to be moved before Lazarus can come out. And sometimes, we have to be willing to roll away the stone before we know what God will do next.
What are the sealed tombs in our lives?
What are the places that have been shut, that stink of old death, that we have
stopped approaching because there is surely nothing left there worth hoping
for? A relationship that ended badly. A vocation that collapsed. A grief we
cannot seem to get through. A part of ourselves we have buried because it hurt
too much to keep alive.
The God who raised Lazarus is the God
who stands before those sealed places in our lives and says: take away the
stone.
Not because we have it all figured out. Not because we are certain of what will happen. But because the one who calls himself the resurrection and the life is present, and he is not finished with us yet.
In John 20:29, after the resurrection,
Jesus says to Thomas — the same Thomas who here at the Lazarus story said, “let
us also go, that we may die with him” — “Blessed are those who have not seen
and yet have come to believe.” That word is addressed to us too. We have not
seen the raising of Lazarus with our own eyes. We have not watched the stone
rolled away or heard the voice cry out. But we are invited into the same act of
believing that John’s entire gospel exists to evoke.
We are a resurrection people not because we have all the answers about what comes next. We are a resurrection people because we have staked our lives on the one who says “I am the resurrection and the life” — and who has shown us, in Lazarus, in his own rising, and in countless small resurrections in human lives across twenty centuries, that this is true.
So today, as we enter the final stretch
of Lent and turn our faces toward Jerusalem, let us ask ourselves: Where do I
need to hear the voice of Christ calling me out of the tomb? Where is God
asking me to take away the stone, even when I am afraid of what I might smell
when I do?
The resurrection and the life are not waiting for the end of time. He is here. He is calling. And he says to us, as he said to those standing around Lazarus: “Unbind him and let him go.”
Amen.
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