The Fifteh Sunday in Lent – Mark S. Winward
Lazarus and the Lord of Life
In the Gospel of John, the story of Lazarus—the brother of Mary and Martha—serves as a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. When Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has already been dead for four days – and that’s far from accidental. In first-century Jewish thought, it was believed that the soul lingered near the body for three days, hoping to re-enter it. However, once the body began to decompose on the fourth day, the soul was said to depart for good. By waiting until the fourth day, John ensures readers understand Lazarus wasn’t merely unconscious or resuscitated; he was definitively, irreversibly, dead.
The Anatomy of the Tomb
To understand the scene, we have to appreciate how burials took place in first century Palestine. Lazarus would have been buried in a rock-cut tomb, typical of those found throughout the Judean hills. These tombs functioned as family property. The body of the deceased was prepared, wrapped, and laid upon a burial bench within a stone-hewn tunnel to decompose. Around a year later, family members would return to gather the bones and place them in an ossuary—a stone burial box—which was then stored on shelves alongside other ancestors. The entrance to these tombs was often sealed with a massive, wheel-shaped “rolling stone” fitted into a stone channel. This is also the exact type of tomb we see later in the Easter story.
“I AM” and the Authority of Life
Despite her deep faith, Martha struggles to grasp the power of Jesus. She complains that if Jesus had been there, her brother wouldn’t have died – yet she clearly doesn’t expect a miracle so extra-ordinary. Jesus responds with one of the most profound “I AM” statements in the Gospels: “I AM the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”
For a first-century Jew, this was a staggering claim. The phrase “I AM” echoed the sacred name of God—Yahweh—revealed to Moses at the burning bush. Jesus isn’t simply claiming to be a middleman who grants life; he is claiming to be life itself. Jesus makes it very clear eternal life isn’t just a “benefit” we receive from God; it is the natural byproduct of being in a relationship with him. When he calls Lazarus forth, he doesn’t offer a quiet prayer or pleas with the heavens. He issues a command of raw, sovereign authority over the grave: “Lazarus, come out!”
Symbols vs. Reality
John tells this story to prevent us from watering down Jesus’ resurrection into mere metaphor. For the author of this Gospel, Jesus isn’t a metaphorical figure. He is the Light of the World who brings actual sight to the blind; he is the Resurrection who brings a literal dead man out of a literal grave.
Despite this extraordinary miracle, this story isn’t really about Lazarus’ resurrection but who Jesus is. It unveils a vision of Jesus exercising lordship over death, shattering our preconceptions about how the world works. Like the shock Mary and Martha must have felt, we are confronted with a power that refuses to play by the rules – that the dead stay dead.
The Modern Denial of Death
In contrast to the ancient world, our society does its best to sanitize and deny the reality of death. Most Americans have never witnessed a death firsthand. Unlike the ancient Jews who physically handled the bones of their loved ones, we bury our dead in plush, car-like coffins and maintain cemeteries that look like manicured botanical gardens. I often wonder if this denial makes the experience of traumatic death even harder for us to process. While grief is a natural response to loss, our cultural habit of pretending death isn’t there – especially for the young and “invincible” – leaves us ill-equipped when the reality of death finally arrives.
A New Creation
Even within the church, we often lapse into a watered-down version of our faith’s hope. N.T. Wright famously challenged the popular “clouds and harps” view of heaven, calling it a “distortion and serious diminution of Christian hope.” Wright argues that the biblical truth is much more grounded: resurrection is a real moment in history where the deceased are remade—a “life after life after death.” It isn’t about escaping the world to sit on a cloud; it is about the “new creation” described by Paul and the author of Revelation.
The raising of Lazarus is the great foreshadowing of this Christian blessed hope. It grounds our faith in the concrete. As Paul writes in Romans 6, “If we have been united with [Christ] like this in his death, we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.”
Conclusion: More Than a Metaphor
The story of Lazarus is recorded to give each of us the strength to face the reality of the grave. It tells us that Jesus’ power isn’t sentimental symbolism; it is a reality we can lean on both in the hope of the world to come and in our relationship with Him today. Now I appreciate the concept of resurrection is a “hard pill to swallow” for many people. But if this story is a mere myth, then our hope for anything beyond this life is founded on nothing but myth. Paul is blunt about this in 1 Corinthians 15: “…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile… we are of all people most to be pitied.”
But if you believe in a life beyond this world, you have already acknowledged that there is much more to reality than meets the eye. If death isn’t the final word, then a universe of miraculous possibilities opens up. As Philip Yancey suggests, we have two ways to look at history. We can see it as a long string of wars, squalor, and tragedy, where Easter is just a “fairy-tale exception.” Or, we can take Easter as the starting point—the one incontrovertible fact of how God treats those He loves. If Easter is the “preview of ultimate reality,” then hope flows like lava beneath the thin crust of our daily lives.