And the glory forever. Amen. If you would please turn within your Bibles to John chapter 11, beginning at the first verse, John writes, ‘Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent to him saying, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the son of God may be glorified through it.’ Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. Then after this, he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not 12 hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles because the light of the world is not in him.’ After saying these things, he said to them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.’ And the disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.’ Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ So Thomas, called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us also go that we may die with him.’
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray. Heavenly Father, your word is ever present, ever worthy to speak into our lives about the things in which it speaks. Open our hearts and open our ears to hear you speak to each of us individually and corporately. Help us to hear your word and enjoy the confidence of faith that it builds us up in. Help us to be encouraged in our hope and help us to understand even when it is most difficult. We pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
So next, John records an event that took place sometime after Jesus concluded his teaching ministry in Jerusalem. This story is very well known to us within Christian spheres today just as it was very well known surely during the first century. This narrative that we’re beginning contains the seventh and final sign demonstrating Jesus’s divine power here within John’s gospel, which is the death and resurrection of Lazarus, the most extraordinary of Jesus’s miracles before his own resurrection. This narrative also contains the fifth of seven I am declarations by Jesus, where he identifies himself with and as the Lord God.
But the inclusion of this story here in the gospel in scripture is problematic for those who try to deny the actuality of Jesus’s miracles. However, the evangelist John anticipates and preemptively negates or tries to negate their possible objections by giving us certain details that are woven throughout the narrative that help add more credibility to this story. John begins by explaining that now a certain man was ill: Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. He provides us with a place name and the names of three of its residents. These details are significant evidences because Bethany was a small village in close proximity to Jerusalem, only about two to five miles away on the other side of the Mount of Olives.
The village was prominent enough to be remembered and notable, but still small enough that its residents would all still know or at least be familiar with one another. Meanwhile, Mary was a very common name for Jewish women during the first century. Connecting her name together with those of her brother and her sister in this place created a very unique identifier. These four connected details are so specific that if the biblical narrative concerning Lazarus was untrue—untrue as a factual occurrence—then it would have been easily and publicly debunked as a fraud.
I mean, today, since most people who live in major metropolitan places like New York or Chicago don’t usually know or have a relationship with their immediate neighbors, there are altogether that many people in town. So a fraudulent story could be set there generically. No one would ever really be certain whether or not the story was true or false. It would be neither provable nor disprovable. Well, even now in a small town, a small city like here in Mansfield, Ohio, where many people are still somehow reasonably engaged within their community, at least engaged enough to follow the local news, there would be enough credible evidence to either support or disprove a story like this.
I mean, there would be the testimony of family and friends of the deceased. There would be a newspaper public record, an obituary. There would be funeral home records concerning their burial or cremation. There would be hospital, police, EMS, or fire department records noting his death and its cause. So there would be far too many details and evidences to possibly fake or to conveniently lose and disappear so as to cause reasonable doubt or to generate reasonable probability. And so if false, the story would be easily disproved; and if true, then there would be enough durable evidence to confirm the story later.
So similarly, turning here to scripture, if there was no family of siblings named Lazarus, Martha, and Mary living in Bethany during the time of Jesus’s ministry, then surely the residents of Bethany would have said so. And if there was no Lazarus living in Bethany at this time, or if he was and he had not gotten sick and died as described, then all of the social support for Martha and Mary that John will eventually describe would not have appeared, and the people of Bethany would have corrected the narrative. If Lazarus of Bethany had died, then everyone in town would have known. And if he was resurrected four days later, then surely everyone in town would have known that, too.
Yet if Lazarus of Bethany did not die and he was not resurrected, but that story was being claimed and told all around Jerusalem, Samaria, Galilee, and across the whole Roman Empire, then there would have been many people able to say something. There would have been a compelling counterargument made. So, even though John’s gospel was written decades after the fact, and although most of the eyewitnesses to Lazarus’s resurrection were surely deceased by the time of its publication—almost certainly Lazarus, Martha, and Mary were—the townsfolk of Bethany would still remember the truth about what happened.
An event like this, described, would become ingrained into the local cultural mythology because people tend to remember stories from the past that were told by our parents or by our grandparents in our youth. We should reasonably expect that there would have been stories in Bethany like somebody saying, ‘I remember the day when Lazarus walked out of his tomb.’ Sure, it happened on a Tuesday at 1:00. I had just finished my lunch and I was sitting out on my front porch when here comes Lazarus walking down the street even though I had just helped to roll and close the tomb up four days ago.
Stories like that would be confirming the tale. Or if there might have been stories like, ‘Yeah, I heard that story, but it’s completely untrue.’ Lazarus, he was never sick. He did not die, and he certainly wasn’t raised from the dead. My daddy told me that Lazarus and Jesus just simply pulled a big prank on everyone. ‘Cause first Lazarus went and he hid out in the next village over for a couple of days. And then his sisters, they stuck him into an empty tomb during the night, the day before Jesus arrived. And when Jesus got here, he put on some really big show crying for his friend. He told them to go ahead and move the stone, and then out walked the still living Lazarus, perfectly healthy and fine. What a great joke!
But if somebody was hoping to perpetuate a fraud—a fraud of this magnitude especially—they would not invent details that would be so easily refuted or disproven. So the story of Lazarus is true, and we may be just as confident in the historicity and actual nature—the factual nature—of Lazarus’s death and resurrection as we are in the historicity, inherency, and authority of the scripture that it’s found in.
But who were Martha, Lazarus, and Mary? More specifically, who were they to Jesus? This is the first mention of them by John, and he writes, ‘It was Mary who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was ill.’ The casual way that he mentions them implies that John expects his audience to already be familiar with them. This suggests that they were well known to first-century Christians, certainly by reputation of the story at a minimum, but also perhaps as leaders within the Christian community.
Judging by our modern reactions to claims about near-death experiences—whether they are positive or negative alleged visions of heaven or hell—we would reasonably expect that Lazarus experienced a degree of notoriety and fame being the recipient of such a wonderful miracle. But Lazarus was not the one used as John’s point of reference. It was Mary. While the event that he uses as his reference has not yet happened in John’s gospel, this suggests as a way of a foreshadowing comparison that what Mary will do will be even more impactful and memorable than even Lazarus’s resurrection from the dead.
Meanwhile, the two sisters are notably mentioned in the other gospels, the older synoptic gospels. Luke records a story about them, and we know it very well because he’s highlighting their devotional differences. Luke writes, ‘Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house, and she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teachings. But Martha was distracted with much serving. And she went up to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion which will not be taken away from her.”
See, within this example, Martha demonstrated her devotion to loving service through the responsibilities of hospitality, while Mary demonstrated her devotion to learning more about God by focusing her attention on the Lord whom she also loved. Both women, and their different devotions, were good and commendable despite any disagreement or opposition. One sister was not better than the other. Both women serve Christ very well in their own unique ways.
But as important as their example was in the other gospel, I doubt that that story was part of John’s intention. Instead, by referencing Mary’s future activity in the past tense, the evangelist here establishes our present context without diminishing what she will soon do. And by recording the personal character of the sisters’ communication to Jesus when the sisters sent to him saying, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill,’ John emphasizes the fact of their existing relationship and the closeness of it as being familiar and familial.
The love that the sisters write of is phileo love, which is often considered to be brotherly love and is a type of emotional love that’s born out of mutual affection and high regard. But while it’s never expressly defined, the relationship between Jesus and this family in Bethany is surely as close as those friends who become as family. The sisters’ notification to Jesus as being mere notification and not an express request is more evidence of the closeness of this relationship, demonstrating their natural expectation, assuming that Jesus would come to their brother’s aid without him needing to be asked.
Similarly, we would each assume or expect that somebody that we love or who loves us would urgently and automatically come as soon as they were informed about our illness, especially if they had the capability of doing something about it to help. But Jesus, when he heard the news about Lazarus, responded oddly, saying, ‘This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God so that the son of God may be glorified through it.’
Now, firstly, during ancient times like this, having no rapid system of communication, a person would not send a message to someone to inform them about a minor illness because reasonably the person would have probably recovered by the time the messenger got where it was going and before the person could travel back. Such a message might be sent if it was a critical concern and the recipient needed to be informed urgently—such as so that they could come quickly to help or to make their peace and say goodbye. Those two options are the most reasonable reasons for why the last two options were pursued. That’s why the sisters would have sent this message to Jesus because clearly they believed that Lazarus was deathly ill, and they hoped that Jesus would come save their brother by healing him.
Secondly, although it is true that God’s glory is displayed and increased in ways that we do not ordinarily expect, hearing a person say—even hearing Jesus say—that Lazarus is sick for the glory of God and that he is sick so that the son of God may be glorified through it would be naturally unsettling. At best, it would sound insensitive, and at worst, it would sound self-serving and maybe even harmful. It certainly would not be the comforting sort of response anyone would want to hear.
But unless we doubt the righteousness of Christ, we have to remind ourselves that when Jesus confidently declared, ‘This illness does not lead to death,’ he was speaking prophetically. Jesus did not speak in unknowing error. He was not wrong. Nor did Jesus knowingly speak a lie. He spoke truth. Because this illness of Lazarus did not lead to death; it led through his death to him being raised from the dead by Jesus.
Now, next, to show that Jesus was not being callous, the evangelist explains Jesus’s emotional situation, writing, ‘Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.’ And so while the sisters implored and impressed themselves upon Jesus’s feeling of phileo love for Lazarus, John explains that Jesus had a greater agape love for Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. Jesus had unrequited, selfless, sacrificial, and abounding love for his three friends in Bethany. Therefore, because he stayed two days longer—because he agaped them—he stayed longer in the place where he was. Jesus chose to intentionally not immediately go to them.
Jesus not only did not rush to their aid precisely because he loved them, but instead he waited two whole days before he set out for Bethany. Jesus delayed because of the love he has for his friends. And while the desire of Martha and Mary was immediate and the need of Lazarus was urgent, Jesus’s delay reminds us that when we trust God, we also trust God’s timing. When we trust the Lord with all of our cares, our worries, and our fears, trusting him for our good provision and with our lives, trusting that he will act for our good, then we also trust God to act in his time, according to his purposes and his plan.
The evangelist reminds us that we cannot make Jesus act according to our schedule or plan, according to our wants and desires, except when they are in accord with his own. Then after this, Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ And the disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?’
See, the disciples tried to remind Jesus about what had just recently happened during the feast of dedication—the furor he stirred up—which caused him to relocate out and away from the region of Judea because the Jewish leadership was out to get Jesus due to his alleged blasphemy because of his claims about being the son of God. And the disciples knew that going back into Judea, especially so close to Jerusalem, would be dangerous. They were concerned for Jesus’s life and for their own as his followers. They believed that it was too great of a risk—that it was provocative. Perhaps they thought that Jesus had been in agreement with them, which is why he delayed, but that now he had changed his mind.
But it was not their place to understand what God had planned yet. And so Jesus responded to their doubt and fear, saying, ‘Are there not 12 hours in a day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble because he sees the light of the world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles because the light is not in him.’
See, back in the ancient world of the first century, they did not divide days into 24 60-minute hours. Instead, it was divided into two unequal portions of day and night, with each portion being subdivided into 12 equal parts. Portions that would change length depending on the season of the year. But chronology aside, the point that Jesus was making is that daytime was meant for work and for traveling safely, while nighttime was meant for rest. We should be going and doing during the daytime and staying and resting at night.
So applying this principle to his ministry, Jesus was arguing that while he lived, it was the daytime, and therefore it was still time for him to be working. Echoing what he had said earlier in John 9:4, saying, ‘We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work.’ Jesus could not stop and rest or stop doing the Father’s will even though the day—the time of his earthly ministry—was nearly over because it wasn’t over yet.
Applying this same principle to our present ministry as Christians, both individually and corporately, because we carry the light of Christ within us, we should continue to serve Christ by serving and loving others in grace, sharing the gospel with urgency—even and especially because the day is getting later. We should be even more motivated, more driven, and more diligent about evangelizing Christ to the world the later it gets since we believe and know that Jesus is returning soon, just as he has promised. We just only know when the sun is going to set.
Continuing to explain their present reality, Jesus told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him.’ And the disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will surely recover.’ See, they misunderstood Jesus literally when he was speaking figuratively. They thought Jesus meant that Lazarus was merely sick and that he would recover on his own without needing miraculous intervention. But since during this era of history sleep was not commonly used as a metaphor for death, it was only used that way in the sense of ‘then David slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David.’
So it’s really not strange that the disciples took Jesus literally. But now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he meant taking rest in sleep. And Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus has died, and for your sake, I am glad that I was not there so that you may believe.’ But let us go to him. See, the idea of death as a metaphoric sleep is really a Christian cultural attitude. But to Jesus, death was and is as temporary as sleep. Death was and is not the end for him, nor for those who believe in and trust in him for their salvation. And as Jesus would soon do for Lazarus, he will one day do for each and every one of us, but permanently and eternally.
Otherwise, as Paul tells us, ‘If the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.’ Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. And if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. The miracle of Lazarus’s resurrection is evidence that supports our hope of eternal life, while the resurrection of Jesus confirms our hope in his promise of life.
But the disciples’ misunderstanding highlights the most popular misunderstanding concerning our sin and its rightful consequence because we wrongfully assume that we are only made sick by our sin. When truly, apart from a Christian’s union into Christ, every person is dead in their sins. The Apostle Paul explains, ‘And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.’
Despite humanity having originally been created good, we no longer are. As it’s written, ‘No one is righteous, no, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God. All have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good. Not even one.’ See, we are not born morally good, nor is anyone good deep down in their heart. Prophet Jeremiah tells us that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? We cannot choose the good; we can only and always choose evil because we are born into bondage and under the tyranny of the devil.
Our sin and sin’s natural consequence is far worse than any of us want to admit or to consciously understand and accept until the Holy Spirit opens our eyes—the eyes of our heart—and we recognize the truth about ourselves, leading us to repent in faith. And therefore, we each need Jesus to awaken us from our false sleep and sin to true life in him.
Finally, like his earlier statement concerning Lazarus’s illness, it is for the glory of God that the son of God may be glorified through it. Jesus tells his disciples, ‘For your sake, I’m glad I was not there so that you may believe.’ Considering these two statements in life of what Jesus said about the man born blind before he gave him sight—that it was not this man who sinned, but his parents, so that the works of God might be displayed in him—this leads us to expect that what Jesus will soon do, what he will do next, will be another sign of his divinity, proving the truth of his claim that my sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand—proving definitively that he and the Father are one.
So how should we respond to Jesus and his response to Lazarus dying? What was the evangelist trying to show and teach us through this narrative?
First, we should remember always that God is sovereign and is in control of all things. The Lord of life is also the Lord over our sickness, our healing, and our dying. All things work towards the accomplishment of his purposes and his glory, even the things that cause us to respond with sadness. We are reminded that we cannot see how everything fits together and we will not understand things fully in this life. The wise of these tragedies in our lives is a call to greater faithfulness and are opportunities for us to lean upon and trust Jesus Christ even more.
Second, Jesus loves us. We are encouraged to remember that even when bad things happen to us, Jesus still loves us. He does not, though, promise us safety and security in this life, nor that we will not have troubles. Instead, he promises that he will be with us through our troubles and in our times of tragedy. Jesus will not remove us from these things just as he will not remove us from the world, but he will carry us through them. The psalmist wrote, ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.’ Christ has promised that we should not fear because he will never leave us alone or abandon us or forsake us. He will provide us with a solution, and he will provide for our restoration, though not always as we expect.
Third, the Lord is not slow to act. He moves and he does things precisely when and how he purposes to. We cannot hurry God. He does not act on our timetable. His schedule and his plan are far better than ours ever could be. He is and will always work all things together for good for those who are called according to his purpose—for those who truly love him and whom he loves. So, we are called to be patient—though hard as that is—to be patient as we trust him and wait upon him.
Fourth and finally, believe the works. Believe the testimony of sacred scripture and remain steadfast in your hope that Christ will raise you up and will bring you to himself in glory. Amen.