The Story
Lazarus is sick. His sisters send word to Jesus — not a request, just a statement loaded with expectation: 'Lord, the one you love is sick' (John 11:3). The Gospel is explicit about the relationship: 'Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus' (John 11:5). Friends in the most ordinary sense. And when he hears the news, he stays where he is for two more days.
The delay is the scandal of the story. Thomas, with the fatalism that defines him, says: 'Let us also go, that we may die with him' (John 11:16). But Jesus has already told them what he intends. 'Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe' (John 11:14-15). He is glad. For pedagogical reasons. While his friend's body cools in a tomb.
By the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been dead four days. Jewish tradition held that the soul lingered near the body for three days. At four days, death was irreversible. Martha meets him with an accusation shaped like faith: 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask' (John 11:21-22). Even now. The theology holding on by its fingernails.
Jesus tells her: 'Your brother will rise again.' Martha assumes he means the general resurrection at the last day. Jesus corrects her with what may be the most staggering claim in the Gospels: 'I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die' (John 11:25). Not I will cause the resurrection. I am the resurrection. Present tense.
Then Mary comes. She falls at his feet and says the same words: 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died' (John 11:32). Jesus sees her weeping, sees the mourners, and the text says he was 'deeply moved in spirit and troubled' (John 11:33). The Greek — embrimaomai — means something closer to a snort of fury, the sound a horse makes before charging. This is not gentle sadness. This is rage at death itself.
'Where have you laid him?' They show him. 'Jesus wept' (John 11:35). Two words in English, the shortest verse in Scripture. He knows what he is about to do. He weeps anyway. The God of the universe, standing at the grave of his friend, finding death intolerable even when he holds the keys to it.
At the tomb he says: 'Take away the stone.' Martha objects: 'Lord, by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days' (John 11:39). They roll the stone away. He prays aloud — for the crowd's sake, he says, not his own. Then he shouts. He cries out with a loud voice: 'Lazarus, come out!' (John 11:43). Augustine noted that if Jesus had not specified the name, every grave on earth would have opened.
The dead man comes out. Hands and feet wrapped in linen strips, a cloth around his face, shuffling because he cannot see and cannot move his arms. Alive, but still bound. Jesus gives the last instruction: 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go' (John 11:44). He does the impossible thing — the calling back from death — and then hands the unwrapping to the people standing around with their mouths open. The resurrection is his. The unbinding is theirs.