The raising of Lazarus

LENT 5C | 6 APRIL 2025 | JOHN 1:11-45

The raising of Lazarus in this gospel marks a crucial point in John’s narrative. Theologically, it’s the last and most explicit of the so-called ‘signs’ that John speaks of throughout his gospel. The first is the miracle at the wedding feast at Cana, when Jesus changed water into wine, establishing beyond doubt that the gospel really is good news. In the Johannine lexicon, these ‘signs’ signal God’s purpose, namely, the imparting of life: not just physical life, but divine life, God’s own life, shared, in and through Christ, with us.

Ironically, it’s precisely the raising of Lazarus to life that seals Jesus’ death. On hearing of it, the panicked Pharisees take the chillingly pragmatic and essentially amoral advice of Caiaphas, the High Priest: “It is better that one man should die”, he tells them, “than that the whole nation should perish.” That quintessentially consequentialist counsel leads them jointly to settle on a final solution. “…from that day on”, the text says, “they planned to put him to death.”

The ultimate ‘sign’ that fulfils all the others is, of course, Jesus’ resurrection. What happens to Lazarus is not resurrection, but resuscitation, the temporary reversal of death and a return to life as it was. Nevertheless, the raising of Lazarus prefigures the resurrection of Jesus, and our own resurrection. It expresses the core message of John’s gospel: namely, that to encounter Jesus is to encounter the ultimate source of all life and love, that is, God Himself. And nowhere is that life and love – God, in other words – more vividly manifest, than in the ultimate paradox, the total generosity of the Cross.

That generosity is early evidenced at the very beginning of this episode, when Martha and Mary, Lazarus’s sisters, ask Jesus to go to their home at Bethany in Judea where, they tell him, “He whom you love is ill.” Jesus and the others knew full well that Bethany was dangerously close to Jerusalem, so that to go there would be to put their own lives at risk. But though he describes the disciples’ agitation, for once, he also emphasises their resolution: despite deadly danger, they resolve to go with Jesus to Jerusalem. Thomas speaks for them all in words unbearably moving: “Let us go also, that we may die with Him.”

And so, this episode in John’s gospel conveys the whole point and purpose of the Incarnation. Just as Jesus enters into mortal danger in order to restore life to a dead friend, so in the Incarnation, he becomes one of us in order to restore life to a dead world, a world of violence and rivalry, intent on self-destruction.

But he does more than give up his life for us: he gives his life to us; and in his willingness to sacrifice his life, in order to share it, he manifests the ultimate paradox of human flourishing.

But there’s more. For all its theological weight, there is in John’s gospel a pronounced personal dimension. Just as he shows the personal closeness of Jesus to his friend, Lazarus, so he draws each one of us into this gospel, by making the point of the Incarnation inescapably personal. And he does this by inviting us to identify personally with Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, and thereby acknowledge our own friendship with Jesus.

Jesus entered into mortal danger in order to save us from endless death, to impart to us his eternal, divine life, at the cost of his own human life.

Jesus wept for his friend, Lazarus, and he weeps for us, his friends. “See how he loved him”, the onlookers say: but those words are equally applicable to us. And as he called Lazarus to life, so Jesus calls us from whatever deadens us or imprisons us in the tombs of our own making, here and now.

So, coming as it does before the Passion of Christ, when Jesus makes good his costly choice to accept the consequences of being fully human in an inhumane world of our making, so that we might have life, this episode of John’s gospel invites us to contemplate the events of Holy Week, not as detached spectators, at a safe but rather in the full knowledge that all this is being endured for love of us, personally, to free us from the self-destructive spiral we call ‘sin’, and to bring us alive in Him.

Only love of this depth and intensity – literally, “Love divine, all loves excelling” – could do this: and it has been done and can never be undone. Whatever might happen, he has redeemed the world.