Sculpture: Lazarus by Joseph Epstein, 1951. Now in New College, Oxford.

John the Evangelist tells the best stories.

Yes, he has a habit of placing long, theologically dense speeches on Jesus’ lips—speeches that can test the patience of modern listeners. Yet even there, John gives us lines that land with force: servants are not greater than their master, or by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another. Those still cut through the noise—perhaps especially for today’s political class.

But it’s really in his storytelling that John shines.

Everything he wants us to understand about Jesus unfolds through seven stories—what we call the signs of the kingdom. And these are among the most compelling narratives in the New Testament.

The raising of Lazarus is the seventh—and the turning point.

It is not just another story. It is the hinge on which everything swings toward what will unfold, just two weeks from now, over the course of a Thursday night and a Friday morning.

Let me offer a way into this story.

Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, once worked with Sigmund Freud before breaking away—like Jung—over Freud’s refusal to take the spiritual dimension of human life seriously.

Assagioli developed a way of listening he called bi-focal vision: the ability to attend simultaneously to two levels of experience—the personal and the transpersonal. The human, emotional story, and the deeper, spiritual one. Distinct, yet intertwined.

That turns out to be exactly what we need for John 11.

Because this is not just one story. It is two stories, woven together. A theological drama about the glory of God—and, at the very same time, a deeply human story of love, loss, and grief.

If we don’t learn to see both, we will misunderstand both.

So, the story so far. Jesus receives word: his friend Lazarus is gravely ill. The message comes from Martha and Mary.

And Jesus… does nothing.

Or at least, nothing that makes sense to us. He says this illness will not lead to death but will reveal God’s glory—and then he delays. Two full days.

By the time he finally sets out, Lazarus is already dead and buried.

When Jesus announces that it’s time to go to Bethany, the disciples are alarmed. Judea is dangerous territory. Last time, he barely escaped with his life. But they go.

Martha, ever the doer, is watching the road. She runs to meet him. Mary, the contemplative one, remains inside—until Martha quietly tells her Jesus has come. Then she too goes out.

Both sisters say exactly the same thing:

Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

And from here, the story splits—two strands, two levels, unfolding side by side.

First, the encounter with Martha. Here, Jesus speaks in the key of theology.

Martha’s words carry an edge—grief, yes, but also accusation. Why didn’t you come? And Jesus responds not with comfort, but with a question about belief. He presses her: Do you believe in the resurrection?

It’s not, frankly, his most pastoral moment.

But then he makes the claim that stands at the center of John’s Gospel: I am the resurrection and the life. Martha rises to meet him there: Yes, Lord, I believe.

On this level—the transpersonal, theological level—Lazarus’ death is not tragedy but opportunity. The outcome is already oriented toward the revelation of God’s glory. From that vantage point, there is no anxiety, no urgency.

But then—John shifts the lens.

Now, the encounter with Mary.

Same words. Same grief. Same accusation. But a completely different response. Jesus does not argue. He does not teach. He does not examine her belief.

He is overcome.

John tells us he is deeply disturbed, shaken, moved to the core. And then, the shortest and perhaps most powerful line in all of Scripture:

Jesus wept.

Here, we are no longer in the theological register. We are in the human one. This is not about glory—it is about love. About loss. About the raw, unfiltered reality of grief. And in this moment, Jesus is as vulnerable as anywhere in the Gospels.

He stands with Mary, not above her. And together, weeping, they go to the tomb.

And it is there—at the tomb—that the two strands come together.

The human and the divine. The tears and the glory.

Jesus weeps publicly for his friend. And then, just as publicly, he turns toward God: so that they may believe that you sent me.

What follows—Lazarus, come out!—is both.

It is an act of profound human compassion. And it is a revelation of divine power. It is love speaking—and glory breaking through. And Lazarus comes out. Still wrapped in the cloths of death.

If we stop the story there, it sounds like a happy ending.

But John won’t let us do that.

Because this is not a resolution. It is a trigger. Yes, some who see this come to believe. But others do not. Instead, they go straight to the authorities. And from that moment, the decision is made: Jesus must die.

The raising of Lazarus is not a detour around the cross. It is the event that sets the cross in motion.

And make no mistake—the cross is not just religious. It is political. The authorities justify their actions in the language of national security, of stability, of protecting the people.

Some things have not changed.

And one more thing.

What happens to Lazarus is not resurrection. It is resuscitation.

He comes back—but only to the same life he had before. Which means, sooner or later, he will die again. This is a temporary reprieve, a limited-time restoration.

For John, the point is not Lazarus. The point is trajectory. What begins here—in resuscitation—will end somewhere else entirely: in resurrection.

But that is not a truth we can grasp from a distance.

It is one we can only understand by walking the road that lies ahead. By following Jesus into Jerusalem. Into conflict. Into suffering. Into death.

Only then will we know the difference.

So for now, we pray:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy before he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it no other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A few years ago, in a review in The New York Times, the philosopher Alain de Botton reflected on Albert Camus’ famous 1947 novel The Plague. Camus believed that plagues—what we now call pandemics—are not simply medical events. They are moments when a deeper truth about the human condition becomes impossible to ignore.

What plagues reveal, Camus suggested, is something that is always true: human beings are radically vulnerable. At any moment our lives can be interrupted—by illness, by accident, or by the actions of our fellow human beings.

Once we recognize that truth, another question quietly emerges. If life really is this fragile—if none of us is immune from suffering—then perhaps the most important question is not why suffering happens, but how we choose to live with one another in the midst of it.

In Camus’ novel, the citizens of the Algerian city of Oran struggle to accept this reality. Like many modern people, they assume that disasters of this magnitude belong to the past. Surely modern medicine and technological progress have changed the rules. Surely the plagues that devastated earlier centuries cannot happen to us.

Camus dismantles that illusion with unsettling clarity. In terms of the unpredictable fragility of human life, history marks no real progress. We remain just as vulnerable as our ancestors were.

As de Botton summarizes Camus’ insight:

“Being alive always was—and always will remain—an emergency.”

Those words land differently today than they might have only a few years ago. The daily terror of the COVID pandemic may now lie behind us, but its aftershocks remain. Our sense of stability has been shaken. The world that once felt predictable now feels far less secure.

We have been reminded—rather abruptly—that the structures on which we build our lives are more fragile than we like to admit.

And so many of us quietly find ourselves asking a simple question:

Where can we stand when the ground beneath us keeps shifting?

It turns out that this question is not unique to our time.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. The disciples immediately ask a question that seems instinctively human:

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

It is a revealing question. The disciples are trying to impose moral order on suffering. They want a cause. They want someone to blame.

If misfortune can be explained—if it can be tied to sin or failure—then perhaps it can be contained. Perhaps it can be kept safely at a distance. If suffering happens because someone did something wrong, then perhaps the rest of us can reassure ourselves that we are safe.

It is a question as old as humanity—and as modern as today’s headlines.

Whenever tragedy strikes, we instinctively search for explanations that shield us from confronting a deeper truth: that we too are vulnerable.

But Jesus refuses the premise entirely.

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” he says.

In other words, you are asking the wrong question.

The man’s blindness is not a moral puzzle to be solved. It is simply part of the brokenness of the world we inhabit.

Throughout his ministry Jesus repeatedly challenges the human impulse to divide the world into categories of deserving and undeserving, pure and impure, sinner and righteous. Religion itself can become a tool for maintaining these distinctions—and when it does, it hardens the human heart.

Camus saw a similar pattern in The Plague. In the novel, a parish priest declares the epidemic to be God’s punishment for human sin. But the town’s doctor refuses that explanation. Rather than searching for meaning in suffering, he focuses on confronting it.

When asked how one fights a plague, he gives a simple answer:

“The only way to fight the plague is with decency.”

Pressed to explain what he means, he replies that “Decency means doing my job.” In other words: showing up for others. Caring for others. Refusing to let fear harden the heart.

The Gospel story moves toward a remarkably similar insight. When Jesus heals the man born blind, the miracle is not only physical. The man receives more than sight. His understanding deepens. At first he simply knows that someone named Jesus healed him. Then he begins to see Jesus as a prophet. Finally he recognizes that the one who healed him stands within the very life of God.

The miracle becomes a journey from blindness to sight to insight.

Meanwhile those who are most certain they already see—the religious authorities—remain spiritually blind. Confident in their explanations, they never move beyond judgment.

And that raises an uncomfortable question for us.

If our eyes were truly opened, what might we see?

Perhaps we would see that the fragile condition Camus described is simply the human condition itself. Perhaps we would see that suffering is not something that happens to “them” rather than “us.” Perhaps we would see that we are bound together by our shared vulnerability.

And if we could truly see that, something remarkable might happen.

Fear might loosen its grip. Our hearts might soften. And we might discover the same insight shared by both Jesus and Camus’ doctor.

In the face of uncertainty and suffering, our calling is not to explain the world, control it, or judge it. Our calling is simply to live with courage and decency.

Not the illusion that faith protects us from suffering. Not the fantasy that progress has eliminated our vulnerability. But a deeper hope rooted in solidarity and compassion.

Because in the end the truth the man born blind discovers is also the truth we are invited to see:

We are all in this together—equally fragile, equally dependent on grace.

And perhaps the most faithful response to that fragile condition is simply this:

to show up for one another,
and to do the work that lies before us—with human decency.