The story of Lazarus is famous partly because it contains the shortest verse in the whole Bible—“Jesus wept.” Not that this in itself is all that significant since chapter and verse aren’t really part of Scripture in itself. But as a verse, it is memorable, because in those two words are packed a whole lot of meaning for Christians. Jesus wept, which means, somehow, God wept, even though God is transcendent and unchangeable and immune to the kinds of passions and emotions that cause us to cry. Surely God, supreme source of life and light, does not feel pain or sadness or joy; surely God just is, like the sun, unmoved in his heaven.
And yet God is, somehow, moved. Jesus, who is God the Son, is moved even to tears by the death of his friend. He is moved by love. That is what the people watching say—“See how he loved him!”
God is love. We say that, quoting St. John, as if it makes sense. But of course it doesn’t make any sense. How could God be love? Do we really want God to be love if it means that God is somehow like our love? It sounds nice, because we like love, and we like the idea of love, but our love is so often selfish: I love someone because of how he makes me feel; I love someone because of what he does for me; maybe even I love someone out of some kind of obligation or duty. Is that what we want of God? Do we want to worship that kind of love? I don’t.
Nor should we. God is love, which means exactly that God is real love, the thing to which all our loves aspire but fall short, the good behind all the stupid things we do in the name of love. And God is love not because God is looking for an emotional fix, or because he feels obliged, or because he needs something that somebody else can provide; God is love because God is God, and because it is just in God’s nature to have a capacity for more than himself. To say God is love is the same as saying God creates. If there is anything at all that exists, it is because God is love, because God chooses and wants and desires to have fellowship with something and someone besides himself.
Jesus weeps for Lazarus, because that is how love works. Love, if it is real love, is invested. To love someone means that if something bad happens to him, it feels like as though it happened to you. You have identified your good with his good, and if something isn’t good for him, it’s not good for you, either.
I think this is the real point of the Lazarus story.
It’s not about Jesus going around to certain special people and raising them from the dead. It’s about Jesus’s absolute commitment to love. He will love us, and he will not let anything get in the way of that love, even death.
Here, a good reader might notice some pretty strong foreshadowing. If Jesus takes love as seriously as this, what will he do next? If he can really raise the dead, will he stop with Lazarus? How far can this love really go?
The answer is all the way to hell and back. There’s no place, no time, no thing, no person, who is beyond the reach of God’s power and love. Maybe even more than Lazarus, we see that in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones. We hear the end of that passage today, the promise of resurrection. Here we’re not talking about a man who’s just been buried; we’re talking about dry bones, lying abandoned for years, and God says, “I will open your graves,” and “These bones shall live.”
Even now, before we get to Easter, these stories are trying to show us what Easter is about. Jesus rising from the dead doesn’t mean that God is going to immediately prevent or reverse all the death and evil and sickness that we can and will experience in this life. It means that God will be with us and love us through all of that, and this love has the power to bring us through the worst to the place where we can fully receive God’s love and share that love in return.
Where do you see yourself in the story of Lazarus? Perhaps most of us would put ourselves in the place of the crowds—the onlookers who are just watching all of this happen. Maybe we’d put ourselves with the disciples, who are also, in a way, on the outside looking in. But what if we’re Lazarus? What if we’re the dead man, wrapped up in cloth, just waiting in the tomb for the call Jesus to come back to life? That seems a common Patristic reading of this story.
For all of us, there are no doubt parts of our life that may as well be dead. Scripture and tradition speak often of original sin as a state like death, but the whole idea of “mortal” sin is that it effects a kind of spiritual death. Even in a formal state of grace, there may be deadened areas affected by the darkness of ignorance or of old habit.
The point is simple: Jesus is calling. He’s saying to each of us, “Come out of the tomb.” He is not satisfied with our excuses, even if they’re pretty good, like being dead. He wants what is best for us. He will stick with us, even when we don’t stick with him. He is calling. Listen to him.