Dorothy Sayers wrote that what we believe is not merely “the theory we most desire or admire, (but) the thing that, consciously or unconsciously, we take for granted and act on.” In other words, faith stands behind all of our obedience and unbelief behind all of our sin. What a man really believes will show up most clearly in what he does, not in what he passes off as his philosophy.
The body of Lazarus was laid in a cave behind a stone, where, according to tradition, it would decompose for a year before his bones would be put into an ossuary (bone box) and deposited in the wall. After four days (in the spring), decomposition would be well under way.
The famous verse in this passage—v.35, “Jesus wept”—is only a part of the picture of Jesus’ emotions that are captured in a few short words here. It also says he was “deeply moved”—a word that actually connotes anger or inner turmoil, not just grief—and “greatly troubled.” There is also a difference between Mary’s loud, demonstrative wailing and Jesus quietly shedding a tear—they are not the same kind of weeping, though in English they are usually the same word.
A good question to ask ourselves at this point is, why did Jesus weep? He clearly knows what is about to happen—in a few moments he will be embracing his old friend, back from the dead. So it’s not simple grief over Lazarus. Commentators have suggested many possible reasons; three are worth considering:
Jesus says things like, “Come to me, all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.” He never runs away from his people’s pain in the gospels. He moves toward suffering—to heal, to comfort. He says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Matthew Henry put it succinctly: “The sickness of those we love is our affliction. The more friends we have the more frequently we are thus afflicted by sympathy. The multiplying of our comforts is but the multiplying of our cares and crosses.”
No one seems to be watching him with the kind of expectation they would have felt if they really believed in him. Jesus looks around at the “living” and sees a deeper illness leading to an irreversible kind of death—and that spiritual sickness is unbelief. Nothing grieves him more.
God created the world to be a place where life flourishes, where his creatures never stop living and enjoying their relationship with him. But we sinned and let death into the world. Now he is face to face with the ugliness, the desolation that came as a result. If anyone was ever troubled by the mere fact of death, by its existence, it would be Jesus, the Author of Life, the One who is Life Himself.
In other words, Jesus is both angry and full of lament at the facts of sin, death and unbelief. And so he weeps.
Isaiah 5:14 speaks of the appetite of the grave and says it has opened its mouth wide. Death and decay are not polite topics, but we need to be confronted with the ugliness of sin, which is death. Sin smells like death to those who are spiritually alive. Death and all of its stomach-turning consequences are the physical representation of the stench that is sin.
When the stone is rolled away from the cave, there is a gaping hole in the face of the rock, and it is quite literally the mouth of the grave. Jesus is standing in front of the one place no one has ever come out of before. Never in the bible was anyone called out from a tomb.
The power of Jesus displayed in this story is explicitly the power of life. He does not have to exert some extraordinary effort to raise Lazarus, he simply speaks to him. And a few weeks later, Jesus will die, too. And then he will rise. And his rising changes everything.
Resurrection is part of your story, whether you believe or not. In John 5:28–29 Jesus says, “An hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.”