There is a particular kind of grief that doesn’t just hurt — it accuses.

It’s the grief that looks toward heaven and says: you knew. You could have. You didn’t.

This Sunday we sit with one of the longest, most emotionally raw stories in all four Gospels — the raising of Lazarus. And if we let it, it will reach right into the places most of us keep locked.

Martha doesn’t wait at the door. She walks out to meet Jesus on the road. And the first thing she says to him is not a greeting. It is a verdict.

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

I want to stay with that sentence for a minute. Because I think a lot of us have said some version of it. Maybe not out loud. Maybe only in the car on the way home from the hospital, or at 3am when the silence got too loud. If you had been here. If you had answered. If you had come through just this once.

And here’s what the story doesn’t let us smooth over: Martha’s anger is not misplaced. Jesus got the message. He heard Lazarus was sick. He waited two more days before he went anywhere. John tells us plainly — Jesus loved this family, and he waited. That’s not a translation problem. That’s the text.

The Question We Actually Need to Ask

We tend to preach the raising of Lazarus as a story about what Jesus can do. And yes — the miracle is real and it matters. But I think the more urgent question is what you do in the four days before it.

What do you do when God shows up late and your brother is already in the tomb? When the window you were watching has closed? When the smell has confirmed what you were afraid to believe?

This story is for everyone who has prayed and gotten nothing. Everyone who waited for the thing that never came on time. It is not a story about easy faith. It is a story about what love looks like when it arrives too late — and what it does anyway.

God Shows Up and Cries First

There’s a moment in this story I have never been able to get past. Mary falls at Jesus’ feet weeping. The crowd is weeping. And Jesus — who already knows what he’s about to do, who knows the tomb is about to open — weeps with them.

The shortest verse in the Bible. Two words. Jesus wept.

He doesn’t manage the grief from a distance. He doesn’t offer an explanation. He gets inside it with them. Love does that. It enters the pain before it fixes anything. I don’t entirely know what to do with a God who cries. But I think I need it to be true.

The Part Jesus Hands to Us

The miracle happens. Lazarus walks out. Still wrapped in grave clothes, still smelling like the tomb, blinking in the sun. And Jesus turns to the crowd and says something that I think is meant for us just as much as it was for them.

“Unbind him. Let him go.”

He could have finished the job. He doesn’t. He hands the unbinding to the community.

There are people in every congregation who have walked out of their own tombs — survived addiction, abuse, incarceration, shame, the kind of grief that should have ended them. They’re here. They made it. And sometimes the church celebrates the miracle and then stands back while they shuffle around still wrapped in grave clothes. Still wearing the labels. Still treated like they smell like where they’ve been.

Resurrection makes the unbinding possible. The community has to actually do it.

That’s the word for this Sunday. Come and see what it looks like when we take it seriously.

Grace and peace,

Father Lee+