The Raising of Lazarus

I was present at the first breath ever drawn — I moved over the dust before it was a man, and I was the wind God breathed into it that made it a living soul. So I tell you plainly that death has never once impressed me. It is a wound in creation, not a wall, and I have always known which side of it I stand on. But I will not pretend I felt nothing in Bethany, because I do not stand outside what Jesus feels; I am the love between the Father and the Son made present in him, and when he loved, I loved, entirely, with no distance left over for indifference.

He loved that house — Martha's bustle, Mary's stillness at his feet, Lazarus's plain friendship, unadorned by any miracle asked or story told about him elsewhere in the Gospels except this one, because this one was enough. When the sisters sent word that the one he loved was ill, I watched him receive it and not move. Two days he stayed where he was. I know how that reads to a hurried world — delay, indifference, even cruelty — but I was inside that waiting with him, and it was not delay. It was the patience of a gardener who does not dig up the seed to see if it is growing. He said it plainly to the disciples: this illness does not lead to death, but to the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it. He knew. He had known since the message left Bethany. And still he wept.

By the time he arrived, Lazarus had been four days in the tomb — four days, the number that mattered enormously to the people standing there, because it was believed the soul lingered near the body for three days and departed on the fourth, once decay had visibly begun. There would be no argument afterward that this was merely a fainting, a mistake, a man not truly dead. I let that detail stand in the story like a stone no one could roll away by doubt.

Martha came out to meet him on the road, grief and faith tangled together in the same breath — Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you. I filled her heart in that moment with more theology than she knew she was speaking, and he gave it back to her whole: I am the resurrection and the life. Not I bring the resurrection. I am it. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. Do you believe this? And she said yes, the same yes Peter had said on another road, the yes I am always waiting to hear from a grieving heart before I move.

Mary came after, and fell at his feet with the same words her sister had used, and this time she was weeping, and the Jews who had come with her were weeping, and I want you to understand what happened next as plainly as it is written, because nothing in all of Scripture undoes the old lie that God is distant from human sorrow so completely as this: he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. He asked where they had laid him. And Jesus wept.

Two words in your Scriptures, the shortest verse there is, and I have never let it be forgotten, because it is the hinge of everything I want humanity to know about its God. He was not weeping because he doubted what he was about to do. He knew Lazarus would walk out of that tomb within minutes. He wept because death is still death even when it is about to be undone, because love grieves what it will heal, because the God who was about to conquer the grave first entered fully into the grief of it, and I was the love doing the entering.

They came to the tomb, a cave with a stone laid across it. 'Take away the stone,' he said, and practical Martha, still more grieving sister than believer in that instant, warned him of the smell — four days, Lord. He reminded her: did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God? They rolled the stone away. He lifted his eyes — I carried that gaze upward as I always do — and thanked his Father aloud, not for himself, but for the crowd standing there, that they might believe the Father had sent him.

Then he cried out with a loud voice — I have never heard a voice do what that voice did — 'Lazarus, come out!' And I moved. Not gently this time, not as at Cana in a quiet miracle no one saw happen. I moved as I moved over the waters at the world's first dawn, calling order back into a place order had left, calling breath back into flesh that had none. And the one who had died came out, bound hand and foot with linen strips, his face wrapped in a cloth, walking, dead and not dead, obedient to a voice stronger than the one that had claimed him four days before. 'Unbind him, and let him go.'

I will tell you what this sign cost. Many who saw it believed. And others went to report it, and from that day the council resolved that Jesus must die — that it was expedient for one man to die for the people. The raising of Lazarus, the greatest of his signs, became the very thing that sealed his own tomb, three miles up the road in Jerusalem, not many days later. He gave his friend four more years of ordinary life and took onto himself, knowingly, the death that would buy an eternity of it for everyone else. I do not know a love with a higher price tag than that, and I have watched every love there has ever been.

The Record

The raising of Lazarus is recorded only in John 11:1-44, positioned as the seventh and climactic sign in John's Gospel, immediately preceding the Sanhedrin's decision to kill Jesus (John 11:45-53) and his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Bethany, the setting, lay about two miles from Jerusalem on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives; a site traditionally identified as the tomb of Lazarus has been venerated there since at least the fourth century, described by the pilgrim Egeria and later incorporated into the town's Arabic name, al-Eizariya ('place of Lazarus').

Jesus's declaration 'I am the resurrection and the life' (John 11:25) is one of the seven 'I am' statements in John's Gospel and is proclaimed at every Catholic funeral Mass as part of the entrance rite, applying the promise made to Martha directly to the deceased and the mourners. 'Jesus wept' (John 11:35) is cited by patristic commentators, notably St. Augustine, as evidence of the true, unabridged humanity of Christ united to his divinity — grief and omnipotence coexisting without contradiction. The four days in the tomb, exceeding the folk belief that the soul remained near the body for three days, is understood as removing any possibility of mistaking the sign for resuscitation from a merely apparent death, distinguishing it from Jesus's earlier raisings of Jairus's daughter and the widow of Nain's son. The episode is the Gospel reading for the Fifth Sunday of Lent in Year A and stands as a direct anticipation of Christ's own Resurrection.