The Story of Lazarus

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 22, 2026, by Revd Richard Carter

Reading for address: John 11: 1-45

Our Gospel today tells us the story of a death.  To begin with, it is a story with which anyone who has gone through a tragic bereavement can readily identify: the beloved brother of Mary and Martha, Lazarus, has died.  It is the sickening reality of irreversible loss.  Jesus has arrived on the scene too late.  The desperate hope and prayer that something could possibly change, the hope of some miraculous reprieve or intervention, has ended in despair.  Jesus’ late arrival serves to highlight the failure of God.  Jesus himself seems powerless, not the saviour for which they have waited, but one of the grieving.  He weeps. And, as often happens at a time of death, alongside this sense of powerlessness we see the beginning of anger and blame – when we are so unable to prevent a tragedy then we often blame ourselves, feel we have failed, or find someone else to blame.  Here, the accusation is negligence: couldn’t this Jesus who had opened the eyes of the blind have arrived in time? couldn’t he have prevented this man, who he claims to love, from dying? How often after a death we have heard this. Could we have done more? Whose fault was it? Why did the doctor the ambulance the NHS the family fail? Why did God fail to save the beloved?

This death is real and palpable.  It is like all real death, irreversible.  The life has gone out of Lazarus.  A cold dead body in a cave, blocked up by a stone.  Dead,  flesh, dulled blank eyes, no breath. If you have ever seen a dead body you will know what is like when the Spirit leaves the body- it’s no longer the person you knew it’s a body without the person inside.  We are told that he has been dead for four days; they warn Jesus not to open the tomb for fear of the stench. Not only is Lazarus dead but his body is decomposing. The horrifying physical reality of death.

The problem for us with the next part of the Lazarus story is that in real life this next bit never happens. Up to this point we can identify with the grief of Mary and Marta and the grief that longs to turn back the clock- that says to Jesus- you should have been here- Why couldn’t you have prevented this from happening? But the thing about death in real life is that it is so irreversible. The literal raising of Lazarus never happens in our own lives however much we may want it. You simply can’t call the dead back to life again can you?  Isn’t that why grief is so incredibly painful because however much you long for them you can’t have them back the way they were before. You can’t reverse time.

If we read today’s Gospel simply as a miracle which reverses human mortality I don’t find it real or helpful. Somehow this story is bigger- it’s not a reversal of death. We cannot overcome death by going back into the past- we can only go  through death by going on loving- loving into something bigger, not avoiding death but somehow unbinding death so that it has no dominion.

I was thinking about this a lot as I tried to prepare this reflection and as I was thinking about this Lazarus story I met one of those who had just been taking part in the Being With the End of Life Course which has been taking place every Thursday night at St Martin’s. For those of you who don’t know about this course- it is one of the Being With courses that our vicar  Sam has written for those who have experienced loss or grief- and for those of us, how shall I say, who for whatever reason have decided it is important for themselves that they think and reflect upon what the end if life means for them. It is after all possibly the biggest question that every single one of us will one day have to face. Anyway I had heard from many of those taking part in this Being With the End of Life ten weeks, what a life changing experience it had been and how the group meeting together talking and listening to one another had grown in depth and understanding and deep empathy as they had reflected and spoken openly about loss, and grief, and what their faith means. The person who met me after the 10^th and final meeting of course had really been suffering because of the grief  which followed the death of a sister she loved very deeply and her own increasing feelings of loss and vulnerability in older age. She told me that this Being With the End of Life Group had been an amazing experience- to be able to talk about death- all that she had been holding within- and the way grief had somehow isolated her- “its such an important subject she said and yet we never get the chance to share our own inner feelings and to realise others experience this same painful journey too.” She told me she had had the last of their sessions and in this last session they were given nine words…. Nine words that took them she said “from despair to hope, from death to life from darkness to light.” As this person spoke to me I could see how peaceful but also excited- she seemed and how much the journey of those nine words had meant to her and the group. So when she had gone I looked up in the course book what those nine words were.

Here is a spoiler alert. I encourage you all who are interested to take part in this whole journey and not just jump to this 9 word conclusion which I cannot do justice to in this address. Rather see what I tell you here as a trailer to do the whole course: the 9 words which she had been given were these;

1. Gone
2. Over
3. Never
4. Here
5. Now
6. New
7. Again
8. Always
9. Forever

As I looked at the journey of those words it was a kind of revelatory moment for me too because I realised these are the words that unbind the Lazarus narrative.  As I said the story of Lazarus has never made sense  as a one-off miracle. There are too many things that don’t add up. If Jesus knows he can raise Lazarus from the dead with a word- why then does Jesus himself cry and show such grief. And if faith in Jesus involves raising people from the dead in a literalistic way – how does that help anyone because it actually never happens, well not in my experience anyway. Don’t we all have to face death one day including Lazarus and his sisters?

But what if this story is not about a one-off miracle but actually the story of us all when we put our trust in the Jesus and the God of love. Can we  not also be led by Jesus, with those who love Lazarus, on that same journey- through the grief of a death we agonise over indeed through our own death too.  We begin with the first three words gone, over, never: Why are they are gone? Is their life really over? Is the beauty and their presence ended forever? Is all that we loved and experienced permanently deleted- never again? How brutal that never again. And like Mary and Martha is it not  completely understandable in the pain of this grief to ask where was Jesus. Why did he not stop this? Why didn’t he heed our prayers? Why was he not here at the hour of our greatest need?  But now the next words- Here Now, New- Jesus is here now. He has arrived. He is present at the centre of the story. And the story has shifted from blame and accusation and the agony of loss that can’t be changed, into a sense of now. Jesus present in this moment now. In this moment of unbearable pain and regret Jesus is calling us into that present. He is sharing our suffering, our grief, raw love and loss but by his presence  this love moves from something past tense to something with us and within us now. Jesus has arrived and is weeping too, sharing the outpouring of anger and regret and grief that Martha and Mary pour out. And somehow in this place of grief something is being made new. It is not all over- a new story is being created in the place of the story of decomposition and death. There is an again– the again not just for Lazarus but for us all. From the very graphic reality of human death Christ calls the name of Lazarus.  – just as later, three days after his own death, he will call the name of Mary: a name reaching beyond and across death; a name called by the one who knows each of our names and knows us both in life and death and beyond death.  He calls the name of the one who is dead.  He calls in love, calling through the divide, into the dark cave which had been blocked and which you thought could never be opened… calling into life.  “Lazarus, come out!”  Words to each one of us “Come out!”… Come out of the darkness, come out of all that you thought had bound you and crushed and destroyed love forever, come out of grief, come out of guilt and your sense that you can never be forgiven, or ever love again.  Come out of death.  Breathe the breath of Christ’s life.  Imagine those grave-clothes holding and binding you in regret and victimhood and loss and making you believe that you will never be free again.  These words are spoken to you: “Unbind him, let him go free!” unbind her, unbind us let us go free.  That is the very essence and nature of God’s love for us.  This is the Gospel.   Jesus by his presence with us is calling us into the always- into the forever.

There where the stone blocks us, when the grave-clothes, of death, or loss or longing or regret bind us, when it may seem that there is no beyond or no future, there at this grave Christ’s calls us –to realise that here at the grave the stone has been rolled away and he is calling us out of the tomb of death and all that binds us. John, the evangelist, who tells us this story, as he contemplated his own experience of the death and resurrection of Christ was to know deeply, beyond all human reason, that same revelation of God’s love: life and death not as two divided and separate worlds – the one blocking and locked to the other, but as one reality: a new heaven and a new earth, inseparable; heaven opened on earth and earth opened and one with heaven.

This is surely the meaning of the way of the cross. Not that there is no cross but that through the way of the cross the greater love of God opens for us – a love that conquers even death. A love that unbinds us and sets us free. A love that will not let us go. Jesus is calling us into life again, and  always and forever.

The next two weeks in our Christian year we will be following Jesus on that way of the cross. It will be a journey to Calvary which seems to be the end of all we believed in.  The story of Christ does not avoid or bypass the agony of life, grief and  death and yet it moves through and beyond that pain and opens up an even bigger story – a story that we can only comprehend through love. It is the story of how love is stronger than death. It is the Gospel.  It is the journey of resurrection. A journey we too must live. Unbind us Jesus Christ. And let us go free.