March 22, 2026

The Rev’d Michael J. Horvath – Gospel: John 11:1-45

John tells us that when Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Four days is a detail that matters, because in the ancient world people believed that the soul lingered near the body for a time after death. By the fourth day, death was no longer uncertain.

That is when Jesus finally shows up.

It is hard to read this story without noticing that Jesus delays. Mary and Martha send word to him while Lazarus is still sick, and the message they send is simple and direct: “Lord, the one whom you love is ill.” They assume that if Jesus knows, he will come. The Gospel even tells us that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, and then, in the very next sentence, it tells us that he stayed where he was for two more days. It simply lets the delay stand there, uncomfortable and unresolved, the way delays so often feel in our own lives when we pray for something that seems good and reasonable and urgent, and the answer does not come.

By the time Jesus reaches Bethany, Martha meets him on the road, and the first thing she says is not polite. It is not carefully worded. It is not the kind of thing you say when you are trying to sound faithful in front of other people. She says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Mary says exactly the same thing when she comes out to meet him later. The fact that both sisters say the same words makes it sound less like a prepared statement and more like the sentence they have been saying to each other over and over for days. If only he had come sooner. If only things had been different. If only God had acted when we thought God should act. There is nothing in the story that suggests Jesus is offended by this. He does not correct them. He does not tell them to have more faith. He listens to them. He lets them say it.

When Mary finally reaches him, she is weeping, and the people who came with her are weeping too, and the scene becomes almost overwhelming in its ordinary human sorrow. John says that when Jesus sees her weeping, and the others weeping with her, he is deeply moved and troubled in spirit. Then he asks where they have laid Lazarus, and they lead him to the tomb, and the Gospel gives us the shortest sentence in the whole Bible. Jesus wept.

It is such a small sentence that it is easy to pass over it without thinking about what it means. Jesus already knows what he is going to do. He has already told the disciples that this illness will not end in death. He has already said that he is the resurrection and the life. In a few moments he will call Lazarus out of the tomb. And still, when he stands there in front of the grave, he cries. The story does not present those tears as weakness, and it does not present them as confusion. They are there because love does not stay untouched in the presence of loss. The Son of God does not stand at a distance from human grief and offer an explanation. He stands in the middle of it and feels it.

It is hard not to think about that when we look at the world right now, because the world feels as though it is full of tombs. We see it in the endless images of war and violence across the globe — in cities reduced to rubble, in families fleeing their homes, in parents burying children, in people waiting for news that never comes. We see it in places like Gaza and Ukraine and Iran, and even closer to home in detention centers where lives are held in limbo and sometimes lost without notice. The details are different, but the grief feels the same, and every one of those stories seems to carry the same question that Mary and Martha asked on the road outside Bethany: Lord, if you had been here, would this have happened?

The Gospel does not give us a neat answer to that question. It gives us a God who weeps. That is not the answer we usually want. We want a reason that makes everything make sense. We want a plan that explains why suffering has to happen the way it does. We want a reassurance that if we just understood more, we would see that everything fits together. But the story of Lazarus does not go there. It shows us Jesus standing in front of a tomb, shaken by the grief of his friends, crying with them before anything is fixed. The tears come before the miracle. The sorrow is not skipped over on the way to the ending.

That matters, because most of life is lived in that space before the stone is rolled away. We live in the part of the story where people are still asking why, where the future is not clear, where the prayer we said last week has not been answered yet. We live in the part of the story where faith does not mean having everything resolved, but continuing to speak to God even when we do not understand what God is doing. Mary and Martha do not stop believing in Jesus, but they do tell him the truth about what they are feeling, and the Gospel treats that honesty as part of their faith, not a failure of it.

When Jesus finally tells them to take away the stone, Martha hesitates and says what anyone would say in that moment. “Lord, already there is a stench, because he has been dead four days.” Gospel refuses to pretend that death is tidy or symbolic. Lazarus is not mostly dead. He is not almost gone. He is gone enough that everyone knows what a tomb smells like after four days. Whatever resurrection means, it has to happen in the middle of that reality, not instead of it.

Then Jesus calls Lazarus out, and the miracle happens, but even then the story does not become magical or distant. Lazarus comes out still wrapped in the cloths that were used for burial, his face covered, his hands and feet bound, and Jesus turns to the people standing there and tells them to unbind him and let him go. It is one of the strangest details in the story, because Jesus has just done something no one else could do, and yet he leaves part of the work for the people around him. Resurrection may come from God, but the unbinding is given to the community. The ones who were weeping a few moments ago are now the ones who have to step forward and help this man learn how to live again.

That may be the part of the story that speaks most clearly to us right now, because we do not have the power to end every war or undo every injustice or raise every person who dies too soon. We stand, more often than not, in the same place as the people outside that tomb, looking at things we cannot fix by ourselves. But the Gospel does not ask us to explain the suffering of the world, and it does not ask us to pretend that everything is fine. It asks us to stand where Jesus stands, close enough to grief that we can feel it, close enough to love that we cannot stay indifferent, close enough to hope that we are still willing to help unbind one another even when the world feels as though it has been in the tomb for four days already.

Lent brings us to stories like this on purpose, because we are getting close to the part of the Gospel where Jesus himself will be the one laid in the tomb, and there will be another day when it looks as though death has the last word. The church does not rush past that moment, and this story does not rush past it either. It lets us see the tears before the miracle, the grief before the hope, the silence before the voice that calls a name out of the darkness. And it leaves us with the unsettling, stubborn conviction that the God who stands in front of the grave and weeps is the same God who refuses to leave the world there, even when it has been four days, even when it smells like death, even when everyone else has given up waiting. Amen.