“Jesus Wept. Then the Jews said, “See how He loved him!” And some of them said, “Could not this Man, who opened the eyes of the blind, also have kept this man from dying?” (John 11: 35-37)”

It is possible that John 11:35 is one of the best known two-word sentences in the Western world. But what had upset Jesus so much? Here are some thoughts on why He wept, and what happened afterwards…

When Lazarus died, Jesus’s sovereign power over sickness was acknowledged on three separate occasions. First it was Martha, when she first went to meet Him: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (John 11:21) Next, it was Mary, saying exactly the same words in John 11:32, and finally it was the Jews, quoted above. Each revealed the same mindset: death was the end; Lazarus’s life was over, but Jesus could have preserved it if only He had been there earlier. Any reason we might give as to why Jesus wept can only be conjecture, but the one thing we know is that, unlike the others, He was not grieving over His friend’s death: Lazarus was going to live; that’s why He was there. I have seen commentaries that suggest that Jesus was weeping over the unbelief of those around Him. However He had been walking in the midst of unbelief throughout His ministry, whether in His disciples, the Pharisees, His home town, or elsewhere. I doubt if He would be crying over it now. What other reasons could there be?

What I do think is possible is that the death of Lazarus represented in a cameo of time and space all that had been lost at the Fall. As He, through whom and for whom all things were made, (Col 1:16) contemplated the idea of the already stinking corpse that He was about to face, and saw the devastation it was causing among people that He loved, He may well have wept over the ravages that sin and Satan had worked in His glorious creation. I don’t think He was weeping over Lazarus, so much as what he represented.

See How He loved him

“See how He loved him,” said the Jews. The problem was, the Jews couldn’t see at all. All they, and indeed all the mourners, saw, was the life of the flesh and how it had come to an end. They saw Jesus as the means of preserving the life of the flesh; postponing its end. The religion that they stood for was, and still is, an attempt at managing the life of the flesh to somehow make it acceptable to the God of eternal life, but it no more accessed the reality of that eternity than a snail could fly to the moon. I wonder too if Jesus was weeping because He, the true life, the resurrection and the Life, was standing right in front of them, and they were blind to the truth of who He was? The order of the signs in John’s gospel is never more eloquent than here: we are all born blind to the Life that Jesus longs to give and which religion is totally incapable of seeing; we are all entombed in sin and darkness, and what we see as life is actually just the pathway to death. Only He can open our eyes to who He is and call us out into the light. 

“Take away the stone”

Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.” (John 11:39) The word for “take away” (airō) used here to mean remove, has the following implication according to Strong’s Concordance: “to take upon one’s self and carry what has been raised up, to bear or bear away.” Its primary meaning is to raise up, to elevate, or to lift. Although Jesus spoke Greek, he probably said this in Aramaic, which was the everyday vernacular used in the region at the time. But one of the (many!) wonders of God’s plan for creation is that He arranged for the New Testament to be written in Greek, so that the richness of the language and the implications that can be derived from it would be preserved for the duration of history. When we think of that stone being “raised up” we think of Jesus being raised up, and when we think of it being “borne,” or “borne away,” we think of how Jesus bore our sins, and indeed bore them away. Jesus became sin for us, and in Him sin was nailed to the cross forever when He was lifted high. Taking away the stone suggests so much more than the emergence of Lazarus from the tomb: it’s a picture of the cross itself and our own freedom from the stink of death, and our passage through the door of eternal life.

“For the joy set before Him (Jesus) endured the cross, despising its shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2) Did Jesus see what He was soon to endure when He looked at the stone? John tells us that He was “groaning in Himself” when He came to the tomb. The depth of emotion His human self must have been experiencing as He considered this representation of the agony His flesh was soon about to endure, the glorious fulfilment of His mission, and His imminent return to His Father’s side, must surely have manifested in some way: groaning and tears are certainly not unlikely. At the tomb of Lazarus we see not only His power as the Son of God, but the vulnerability of the flesh that He had taken on. I think our response has to be that we try to live worthy of His tears.

Loose Him and let him go!

So the stone was rolled away, the light of life penetrated the darkness, the spirit of Lazarus responded to the call of God, resurrection life defeated death, and Lazarus walked free, wrapped in his grave clothes. “Loose him,” said Jesus, “and let him go.”

Over the years, I’ve heard – and responded to – some great teaching on being loosed from the graveclothes. They have typically represented enemy strongholds, past sin, addictions etc; and the picture of other people removing the grave clothes has represented the idea of members of the body of Christ ministering to one another. But I would like to suggest another layer of symbolism, and it’s around the idea of the graveclothes themselves. The abundant life we have in Jesus, the life of the Spirit, is not the life of the flesh. The flesh has to die with Christ on the cross, and we need to be born again, born of the Spirit, to enter into Life. Because unless we are born again, all we have is the tomb, and all the life we have is the flesh that is decaying. I saw a joke the other day, which went something like this: “Avoid organic foods! You need all the preservatives you can get!” Unless we have the Life of Christ in us, we wrap ourselves in graveclothes to preserve the existence that is coming to an end, as well as the circumstances that support it.

The psalmist understood this: “My flesh and my heart fail, But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26) God wants us to be loosed of all that we cling to in the tomb, because “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” (2 Cor 3:17) and “Whatever is not of faith is sin.” (Romans 14:23) So I would say that Lazarus’s graveclothes don’t just represent addictions, bondages and the like, but everything we cling to so that we can remain secure in the world instead of trusting God for our portion. And we are not free of graveclothes in the church, either: religion can keep us bound in habits and traditions and locked into our own agendas instead being free to follow the Spirit’s direction. When Jesus sent out the disciples two by two without money in their pockets and without even a change of clothes, He was demonstrating the principle He taught in the sermon on the mount: that our Heavenly Father knows our needs, and will give us the Kingdom, if we would but trust in Him.

So do we have any graveclothes? Because they’re not a good look, and more importantly they impede us in our walk with Christ. Jesus didn’t tell those standing around just to remove the graveclothes: the command was directed towards setting Lazarus free. I think we can say with some certainty that His words carried authority in the spiritual as well as the temporal realm, and that we can hear and apply them to ourselves today as we stand together with our brothers and sisters to spur each other on in our walk.

Let my people go

The resurrection of Lazarus undoubtedly looks forward to the resurrection of Christ Himself as well as being a picture of the believer’s freedom from bondage to sin and new life in Christ, but it also looks back to the time when God’s people were in bondage to Pharaoh, and He issued the same instruction through Moses: “Let my people go!” I can’t help but feel that the echo of that first command from thousands of years beforehand will have resonated in Jesus’s heart as He spoke those eternal words of release. And from our point of view today, I think there is a lesson we can learn from the time when they were first spoken to Pharaoh. Sometimes we can speak a word of command, or pray a prayer of faith – whatever the circumstance and particular weapon of our armoury we are seeking to use – and nothing happens. Or maybe we are interceding for a person or a situation, and we don’t know whether our prayers are being answered or not, but we just pray and move on. But when Jesus taught us to “ask, seek, and knock,” He was using a present continuous tense: “Ask and keep asking; seek and keep seeking…” etc. He was actually teaching us to persist in prayer. It took seven plagues and the total ruination of Egypt before Pharaoh obeyed God’s command – and that was only when he realised that his own life could be destroyed along with his kingdom. Whatever spiritual “pharaoh” may be keeping those graveclothes in place for us isn’t necessarily going to roll over and let go the minute we release the command: we may well have to persist, just as Moses did.

The difference for us today is that we don’t have to wait for God to perform another mighty wonder, because everything has been accomplished at the cross and we already stand in the Passover liberty that has been purchased for us. Our challenge is to totally and unswervingly believe it, whatever appearances might say to the contrary.