Lazarus, Come Out

In a village called Bethany, about two miles outside Jerusalem, there was a house where he was always welcome. Two sisters lived there, Martha and Mary, and their brother Lazarus — and they were his friends. When he came up to Jerusalem he stayed with them; Martha did the cooking and worried about it, and Mary sat and listened to him, and Lazarus was simply his friend. There were not many places where he seemed to have somewhere to go home to. This was one. And Lazarus fell ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, who was away over the Jordan, and the message was short. They did not ask him for anything. They just told him: “Lord — look: the one you love is ill.” And when Jesus heard it he said, “This illness is not toward death. It is for the glory of God — so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” And then he did the strangest thing. He loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus — and when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed where he was for two more days. Not because he did not care. Because he loved them. Two whole days, in a house across the river, knowing.

And then he said to his followers, “Let us go back into Judea.” And they were appalled. He had only just got out of there. “Rabbi — they were picking up stones to throw at you the other day. And you want to go back there?” And he said, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? Anybody who walks in the daytime does not trip over, because he sees the light of this world. It is walking at night that makes a man stumble, because the light is not in him.” And then he said, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. But I am going there to wake him up.” And they said, in enormous relief, “Lord — if he has fallen asleep, he will get better.” They thought he meant ordinary sleep. He had meant that Lazarus was dead. So then he told them plainly: “Lazarus has died. And for your sake I am glad I was not there — so that you may trust. But let us go to him.” And Thomas — the one they called the Twin — turned to the others and said, “Let us go too, so that we may die with him.”

By the time they got there Lazarus had been in the tomb four days. People said then that for three days a soul stayed near the body, and after that there was no hope left at all. Four days meant finished. Everybody in Bethany knew what four days meant. And when somebody told Martha that Jesus was coming, she got up and went out along the road to meet him — and Mary stayed sitting in the house. And the first thing Martha said to him was the thing she had been turning over for four days: “Lord — if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And then, without a pause: “And even now, I know that whatever you ask God for, God will give you.” And Jesus said, “Your brother will rise.” And Martha said what any careful, faithful person of her people would have said: “I know he will rise, in the resurrection, on the last day.” Somewhere, someday, at the end of everything. And Jesus said to her: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who trusts in me will live, even if he dies; and everybody who is alive and trusts in me will never die at all. Do you trust this?” Standing in a road, outside a village, four days too late. And Martha said, “Yes, Lord. I have come to trust that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was coming into the world.”

Then she went back to the house and called her sister quietly, so that the room full of visitors would not hear: “The Teacher is here, and he is asking for you.” And Mary got up in a hurry and went out — and everybody in the house got up and followed her, because they thought she was going to the tomb to cry there. And when she came to where he was, she fell down at his feet, and said the same sentence her sister had said, word for word: “Lord — if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And she cried. And all the people who had come out of the house with her were crying. And when Jesus saw her crying, and all of them crying, something went through him like a shudder — anger, and grief, all at once. Not at them. He was looking straight at death, in a road outside a village, with his friends weeping all round him, and he was angry about it. And he said, “Where have you put him?” And they said, “Lord, come and see.” And Jesus cried. He knew perfectly well what he was about to do. He was minutes away from calling the man out of the grave — and he stood there in the road and cried with them first. And the people watching said, “Look how he loved him.” And some of them said, “Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have done something so that this one did not die?”

So they came to the tomb. It was a cave in the rock with a stone laid across the mouth of it. And Jesus, still with that anger in him, said, “Take away the stone.” And Martha — practical Martha, who had said all the right things in the road — said, “Lord, by now he smells. He has been in there four days.” And Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you trusted, you would see the glory of God?” So they took the stone away. And Jesus looked up and said, “Father, thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me. But I said it out loud because of the crowd standing here — so that they may trust that you sent me.” And then he shouted, as loudly as he could, into the mouth of a cave: “Lazarus! Come out!” And the man who had died came out. He came out with his feet and his hands still wrapped in the strips of cloth they had buried him in, and a cloth over his face, shuffling out of the dark into the daylight in front of all those people. And Jesus said: “Untie him, and let him go.”

A great many of the people who were standing there that day trusted him after that. And some of them went straight into Jerusalem and told the Pharisees exactly what he had done.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees called the council together, and they said, “What are we doing? This man is doing sign after sign. If we let him go on like this, everybody will trust him — and then the Romans will come, and take away our place and our nation.” And one of them, Caiaphas, who was the chief priest that year, said, “You know nothing at all. You have not worked out that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, than that the whole nation should be destroyed.” He meant it as cold arithmetic: one troublesome man against a whole country. But he did not know what he was really saying. Being chief priest that year, he spoke better than he knew — because Jesus was going to die for that nation, and not for that nation only, but to gather into one all the scattered children of God. And from that day on they planned how to kill him. So Jesus stopped walking about openly, and went away with his followers to a town called Ephraim, out on the edge of the wilderness, and stayed there. And the Passover came near, and the roads filled up with people going to Jerusalem for the feast. And they stood about in the temple looking for him and saying to each other, “What do you think? Will he come to the feast at all?” Because the chief priests had given an order: anybody who knew where he was had to report it, so that they could arrest him. That is what raising Lazarus cost him. He had known what going back into Judea meant — his own followers had told him so on the road — and he went, because two sisters he loved had sent him a message about their brother.