The Raising of Lazarus: Jesus Wept

Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, falls ill in Bethany. His sisters send word to Jesus: Lord, the one you love is sick. Jesus receives the news and stays where he is for two more days. By the time he sets out for Bethany, Lazarus is dead.

Martha goes out to meet him on the road. Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now, she says, she knows God will give Jesus whatever he asks. Jesus says: Your brother will rise again. Martha understands this as apocalyptic theology — the resurrection at the last day. Jesus says something more immediate: I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live.

Mary comes, falls at Jesus' feet weeping, says the same thing Martha said: if you had been here, my brother would not have died. And Jesus, seeing her weeping, and the crowd weeping with her, is disturbed — the Greek word embrimaomai suggests a kind of angry agitation, a deep disturbance — and asks where they have laid him. Come and see, they say. And then the shortest and most weighted verse in the New Testament: Jesus wept.

The crowd sees it: See how he loved him! But some say: could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind, have kept this man from dying?

They go to the tomb — a cave with a stone across the entrance. Jesus says: Take away the stone. Martha protests: he has been dead four days, there will be an odor. Jesus reminds her of what he said. The stone is removed. Jesus looks upward and prays aloud — not for himself but for the crowd, so they will believe. Then: Lazarus, come out!

The dead man comes out, his hands and feet still bound with the strips of burial cloth, his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus says: Unbind him, and let him go.

In John's Gospel, this is the miracle that triggers the final decision of the authorities to kill Jesus. The sign that demonstrates his power over death sets the events of the Passion in motion.