Lazarus has now been in the tomb for four days. Jesus probably set out for Bethany once he knew in his spirit that Lazarus had died, and took three days to walk the 20 miles. Four days is significant because, in rabbinical tradition at the time, the soul of a deceased person would linger for three days, but finally depart when the body starts to decompose. This is not scriptural, but it was a common superstition at the time. The fourth day means all hope is lost. The soul is gone, there’s nothing to be brought back.

To fully grasp what happens in this text, we need to understand the established Jewish grieving process of the time. This scene typically played out in the house of the family who had lost their loved one—the first week would be spent in the house, sitting on the floor, and people in the community would bring food and come and be with the family in their grief. The body would be buried on the day of death, but the ritual of mourning went on for a week.

But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t go all the way in. There’s a house where people would customarily make an appearance; he’s not there. This is our first hint that there’s something different about what Jesus is doing. He’s not following the cultural norms. He’s holding himself outside of the grieving process, so that Martha has to come to him—and that is a break with etiquette.

When she sees Jesus, Martha tells him. “You could have prevented this. You could have saved him.” Her voice is full of grief here, but there is also a glimmer of faith. She really does believe Jesus could have done a miracle. But she’s facing the past, she’s not thinking about what he’ll do now—only what he might have done if he had come sooner. There are two sides in tension here: The grieving sister and the disciple of Jesus.

Martha is not really seeing Jesus yet. She gives him a good theological answer about resurrection, rather than hearing what he’s actually saying. The great 17th-century theologian Stephen Charnock gave us this piece of advice: Whenever we think about God, we need to tell ourselves, “This is not God; God is more than this: if I could fully understand him, he would not be God; for God is incomprehensibly above whatsoever I can say, whatsoever I can think and conceive of him.”

Theologians refer to this as the incomprehensibility of God.

“I am the resurrection and the life” means that Jesus makes tragedies come untrue and makes dying things go on living—and that this character that we find in everything he touches is not an effort that he makes—it’s not because he knows the technique—but an intrinsic feature of who he is.

In other words: “I am not only capable of bringing Lazarus back from the dead, but I cannot fail to give eternal life to everyone who believes in me—because life is what I am.”

He has now “visited” the family, like you’re supposed to do. He has tried to comfort them, and his words seem to have made an impact on Martha, as we see in v.27. But Jesus still does not go to the house of mourning.

His business is with a lifeless body in a tomb. He is the resurrection. He doesn’t belong under a veil of tears. It’s time to empty out the tomb. He is going to plant his feet in front of death and take back the one he loves. It’s been maybe six days now since he first heard the word of Lazarus’ illness; now the time has come.

We naturally look backward and say, “You could have prevented this,” and look forward and say, “Someday it will be OK.” Jesus meets us in the present tense: “Here. Now. Look at me. I am with you. I am everything you need. I am everything you want. I am right here.”