How to Miss a Resurrection

Reading: John 11.1-45 (The Raising of Lazarus)

Lent has a way of sneaking up on us. One minute we are bravely giving up chocolate, or gin, or doom-scrolling the news, and the next minute the lectionary calmly drops a story about a dead man walking out of a tomb. Which escalates things rather quickly. You think Lent is about self-improvement. Jesus seems to think it is about resurrection.

And the strange thing about the Lazarus story is that almost nobody in it understands what is going on. Not the disciples. Not the sisters. Not the mourners. Not the religious authorities. Everyone is confident about something. But almost everyone is confident about the wrong thing.

Take the disciples first. When Jesus says they are going back to Judea, they immediately start talking about danger. “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you.” In other words: this seems like a very bad career move. Their instinct is self-preservation. Which is understandable. The mind set on the flesh, as Paul might say, is mostly concerned with survival. Keep your head down. Avoid trouble. Don’t get killed.

Thomas, bless him, has already worked out how this is going to end. The others are still vaguely optimistic. Thomas has moved straight to the funeral arrangements. “Let us also go,” he says, “that we may die with him.” Thomas is the patron saint of people who assume the worst but turn up anyway.

Then we meet Martha and Mary, the grieving sisters.

Both say the same line to Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Which is one of the most painfully honest sentences in the Bible. And also one of the most trusting. It is the sentence spoken by anyone who has ever prayed and then watched things fall apart anyway.

And Jesus does not give them an explanation. Notice that. He does not offer a tidy theological lecture about the mysterious purposes of God. He does not say, “Well actually, suffering builds character.” He does something far more unsettling.

He weeps.

The shortest verse in the Bible is also one of the most revealing. The Son of God stands outside a tomb and cries. Which means that whatever Christianity is, it is not a religion of polite emotional distance. God is not the calm manager of a cosmic spreadsheet. God grieves.

And for a moment, nothing happens. The tomb is still closed. Lazarus is still dead. The mourners are still standing there wondering why Jesus arrived four days too late.

And then Jesus does something extraordinary: he calls Lazarus out of the tomb. And Lazarus comes out, still wrapped in burial cloths like someone who has accidentally arrived at the wrong party.

But the really interesting reaction is not from Lazarus. The interesting reaction is from the religious authorities – in the verses just after those we’ve heard this morning. Instead of saying, “Good heavens, a man has been raised from the dead,” they say something like, “This is getting out of hand.”

They call a meeting. Possibly with an agenda. Because when God raises the dead, the first thing religion likes to do… is form a committee. And, if possible, appoint a sub-committee to look into it. A resurrection has just happened, and the official response is to form a board of inquiry.

“What are we to do?” they ask. “This man is performing many signs.” Which is the bureaucratic way of saying, “Something extraordinary is happening and it is extremely inconvenient.”

And the conclusion of the meeting is not “Let us reconsider our understanding of God.” The conclusion is “We had better kill him.”

This is one of the great ironies of the Gospel. The people who are absolutely certain they understand God are the very people who cannot recognise God when he is standing in front of them raising the dead. Which should make us just slightly nervous.

Because religious certainty is a very seductive thing. It feels solid. It feels righteous. It feels like finally being the person in the room who knows what God thinks.

But in the Gospels, the people who are most certain about God are very often the people who miss the miracle entirely. They are so busy defending their idea of God that they cannot see what God is actually doing.

This is where Paul’s words to the Romans suddenly start to make sense. “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” The mind set on the flesh is not just about bodily appetites. It is about control. Certainty. The need to keep reality tidy and predictable. The mind set on the flesh says: everything must make sense within my system. And I need to become deeply preoccupied with the behaviour of other people.

But the Spirit of God has a deeply irritating habit of refusing to fit inside our systems. God keeps turning up in places where we were quite sure he wouldn’t. Among the grieving. Among the confused. Among people who say things like “Lord, if you had been here…” and are not quite sure what they believe anymore.

And the Spirit does something even more disturbing. It brings life where we have already decided there can only be death.

Jesus stands outside the tomb and shouts one sentence: “Lazarus, come out!”

Which is not just a command to one man two thousand years ago. It echoes into every locked-up corner of human life. Into despair. Into grief. Into the places where we have quietly concluded that nothing new can happen.

“Come out.”

But notice one final detail. Lazarus walks out of the tomb, but he is still wrapped in burial cloths. And Jesus says to the crowd, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Resurrection, it turns out, is not a solo performance. The community has work to do. Someone has to unwrap the bandages.

Which might be the most practical thing the Church is ever asked to do. Not to explain resurrection. Not to manage resurrection. Simply to help people step out of the things that still bind them.

And that is where Lent quietly leads us. Not toward spiritual heroics or moral perfection, but toward the unsettling possibility that God is still calling people out of tombs.

Sometimes the tombs are grief. Sometimes they are fear. Sometimes they are the small, suffocating certainties we have built around ourselves.

And sometimes the voice we hear in the darkness is the same voice that called Lazarus.

“Come out.”

Which is wonderful news. And slightly alarming. Because if God is still raising the dead, then none of us are nearly as finished as we thought we were.

Amen.