Lent V: A sermon in conversation with the reading of the Gospel.
The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to John.
People: Glory to you, Lord Christ.
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.
Remember: Mary was the one who anointed Jesus with perfume and washed his feet with her hair.
Remember.
That story of Mary anointing Jesus is actually told later in the Gospel of John, not until the next chapter, but we know it, of course. Those hearing this story this morning remember it.
Mary is the one who, in her bones, knew what was coming, even when the men didn’t. Ignoring the shock and condemnation that would come from her taking the feet of a man, of this man, her friend, and washing them, anointing them the way that they would soon be washed and anointed for the tomb. Mary said, in that gesture, I grieve. She said, your life is sacred. Your death is sacred. And Jesus knew.
And on this day, this morning, in this story, Jesus faces death – not his own, not yet, but the death of his friend, Lazarus.
So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” But when Jesus heard it, he said, “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.”
So ten chapters earlier, the Gospel of John that we are hearing from today begins with some of the most beautiful words from the New Testament:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.
John’s Gospel, from beginning to end, holds together Jesus the man and Jesus the Messiah, Jesus living three decades on this earth with us, and Jesus living from before time with the Creator of the universe – together in a beautiful, heartbreaking and very real balance. Over and over, John shows us, describes a Rabbi, the Son of God, a friend – a fellow traveler who knows himself to be, and reaches out to us, as the stuff of the earth.
In the Gospel of John also are seven famous “I am” statements, statements that connect Jesus to the earth he came to live in, statements that he uses to describe himself in the language of the everyday, in the language of life and nourishment:
I am the bread of life.
I am the door.
I am the good shepherd.
I am the true vine.
I am the way and the truth and the life.
I am the resurrection and the life.
I am the light of the world.
Today, this morning, Jesus says of Lazarus: “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.”
I am the door, Jesus said.
Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having 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 trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.”
After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
This is a powerful passage to read this close to Holy Week. The disciples are discovering there is more to this following Jesus thing than miracles and healings and inspiring sermons. There’s rumbling in the streets and in the synagogues – there is darkness around the bright edges of Jesus’ journey – while they are close to him, they feel the light of love, of new life, of a world about to change – but if they look back out into that world, it is more dangerous than it was before. Part of that world is not ready to change. The poor, the sick, the outcast, the shamed – they are ready for Jesus, for this new word of hope and justice and compassion – but those who are comfortably in power are not.
The disciples don’t understand Jesus’ apparent recklessness, his crazy idea to go back to the town that tried to kill him, but they trust him and his optimism, his wisdom, and so they will follow. Even if it might mean – and of course Thomas is the one to voice all of their doubts – even if it might mean they will die too.
The Roman Empire’s shadow is growing longer, and it is in the shape of a cross.
When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, “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.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “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. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
Four days is an important length of time when it comes to death in the ancient Jewish faith. The spirit they believe leaves the body after three days, so if Lazarus has been dead four, he is really, really dead. And yet – just like the male disciples, who follow Jesus back into danger even when it doesn’t seem to make a bit of sense – Mary and Martha believe what they can’t yet understand. They believe in Jesus’ certainty and wisdom, and they believe in a someday resurrection.
What Jesus is giving them, though, on this day, is a resurrection in the here and now. A return to life in the midst of life – a return to living in the middle of the day, Lazarus waking up as if from sleep, loosing the cloth that binds him. This is resurrection in real time. Not resurrection on the last, distant day.
When [Martha] had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.
He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
I’ve always had mixed feelings about this reading. Part of it is Martha and Mary’s accusations – if you’d been here, Jesus, he would not have died! This is your fault. Why didn’t you come sooner?
And it’s also partly that sentence – in our translation, Jesus began to weep. I know, it’s a glimpse of Jesus’ humanity – Lazarus was Jesus’ friend. Jesus was weeping because of the death of Lazarus, and because of the grief of Lazarus’ family and loved ones.
But… Jesus knew Lazarus wasn’t going to stay dead for much longer. He showed up knowing what he was going to do, knowing that Lazarus was not going to stay in the tomb, that Mary and Martha’s grief and the grief of everyone there would soon change to joy, that Lazarus would be returned to the land of the living.
Jesus was about to prophesy to the bones, to the breath, to the mortal man in the grave. And he knew what would happen.
“Jesus arrives at the home of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, and asks,
‘Where have you laid him?’”
And “they said to him: ‘Lord, come and see.’”
Where else do we hear those words?
In just another week or so, we’ll hear them at the tomb in the garden, when the women come to grieve over Jesus and find him gone. Where have you laid him, they will ask the angel, the gardener, Jesus himself, depending on the telling – and the angel will tell them:
You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. Go, tell his disciples…
Come and see.
So why does Jesus weep?
I believe he weeps because at the grave of his friend, he stands at his own grave. He knows, suddenly and clearly, what his friends will feel and fear – he knows their weeping before it happens. And yes, he knows he will rise again, just as surely as Lazarus is about to – but in the interim, there will be darkness, and not only for him. Jesus wept because he knew and held the heartbreak of the present and the heartbreak that was to come – and because he knows they are not the final word.
Presbyterian theologian and minister Frederick Buechner wrote that Jesus “wept because his friend was dead and he had loved him. Beneath that he wept because, as Mary and Martha both tactlessly reminded him, if he had only been present, Lazarus needn’t have died, and he was not present. Beneath that, he wept perhaps because if only God had been present, then too Lazarus needn’t have died, and God was not present either, at least not in the way and to the degree that he was needed. Then, beneath even that, it is as if his grief goes so deep that it is for the whole world that Jesus is weeping and the tragedy of the human condition…”
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
“Lazarus,” writes theologian and United Methodist elder Alyce McKenzie – “Lazarus is us.”
“Lazarus is the ‘one Jesus loves’; he represents all those whom Jesus loves, which includes you and me and all humankind. This story, then, is the story of our coming to life from death in this present moment, not just in a future event.”
Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.
Like Lazarus, we are unbound, set free by our faith.
“Lazarus is us,” is all and each of us, called by name from the darkness of death and despair and grief, called back to life and light because of this man who wept – for his loved ones, for himself, for the world. Knowing that that grief would not be forever and that death would not be the end.
Lazarus is all of us. And resurrection is not a distant, faraway promise, but an actuality, each and every day, from Lazarus to Easter to the end of time – from those dry bones all the way to today and beyond. We are all unbound, not just in a distant future time, but in the here and now, freed to live in God’s love and in Jesus’ way.
And in the here and now of today, even as we move toward Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, the vigil overnight with Jesus in the garden, the darkness of Good Friday, we are moving also toward Easter and to the opening of another tomb.
We are Lazarus, unbound from death.
Amen.
Sermon given on Lent V, March 22, 2026 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Staunton.
Image: Raising of Lazarus, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1896.
