This is a gospel we wish we could have been there for, to see someone being raised from the dead. If you were directing a film, you couldn’t have set it up better: the crowd gathered around the tomb, the stone being rolled back, the dead man staggering out in his burial garments, maybe squinting at the sunlight.
Even in Jesus’ own resurrection, we don’t have anything like this: so dramatic that John’s gospel says this was what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus had gone too far. Someone who could create a scene like this could do anything.
But as for what happens before this great moment in the story — I wonder if we would have welcomed the opportunity to be there. Because the death of Lazarus, and his funeral, and Jesus’s absence when he was needed most, might seem all too familiar.
This is a realistic scene we’ve just heard about, a real funeral, where there is crying, and frustration, and even, just like at happens sometimes at a real funeral, a few harsh words and accusations. How could this have happened? Why? And where was God during all this? Was he deliberately staying away, just to prove a point? Jesus even says as much about why he wasn’t there, and frankly, we’re entitled to feel angry with him, putting his so-called friends through so much suffering.
So no, it’s not a scene we would particularly want to see. And yet we see it all the time. Senseless illness and death and bereavement. You don’t need to think too hard to think of situations where someone you know could have said to God, as both Martha and Mary did say to Jesus, if you had been here, Lord, this would not have happened. And yet, you weren’t here.
But into this scene comes a miracle. Not Lazarus coming out the tomb, of course, although that’s clearly a miracle. The miracle here is how Jesus feels about all this suffering.
There are any number of ways he could have reacted. We might have expected him to provide the theological explanation: about how this death needed to happen as part of the story, that everyone was made a better person by it, about how suffering is really a helpful thing for our character, if we see it in perspective. We do this sometimes: We say suffering is God’s mysterious will. But Jesus doens’t say this. These are his friends. He knows they won’t buy it.
Or, we might have expected him to tell everyone not to be sad, to tell everyone that God loves them, that all this suffering is only temporary. We do this sometimes, too: We try to convince people that God is always right there, that relief is just a prayer away. Jesus doesn’t do this either. He knows these people; he knows their suffering is real and serious, and that they don’t want to be told it’s all play-acting. It isn’t.
Instead, Jesus does something that most of the translators of this passage can’t even describe in words. Some say he is shaken; some say he is deeply moved; one says the only way to translate this Greek word is to say that an involuntary groaning and wailing burst from him. He is groaning because he knows that nothing explains the reality of the death of such a good friend. No explanation, except that Jesus himself was willing to experience that death himself.
That involuntary groan is the only thing that fits the problem of Lazarus, the only thing Jesus could have said that has the ring of truth in a world with so much suffering in it. It does seem to us in bad times that God does nothing when we really need him; and Jesus doesn’t say we’re crazy if we feel that way. Yet he also says that God is not up there somewhere looking at us dispassionately, watching to see how we handle all this suffering. Jesus doesn’t ignore our suffering, he doesn’t sentimentalize it, he doesn’t explain it away. He says that in some mysterious way God not only cares individually about our situation but feels our feelings, embraces us in our suffering. He is on our side in the struggle against darkness.
Jesus is a God who is so close to us that he rejoices when we rejoice and weeps when we weep. It’s hard for any of us to put our trust in a God who doesn’t prevent all the misery we hear in this story. But that same God loves us enough to die alongside of us, just to show us that love overcomes everything. That God is the one we want to have with us always.