Lazarus has been dead for four days. His sister Martha meets Jesus on the road and says: if you had been here, he would not have died (v. 21). Jesus responds with one of the most extraordinary statements in Scripture — and then immediately turns it into a question: “Do you believe this?” He does not say “I will raise him” or “there is a resurrection coming.” He says: I am the resurrection. The promise is not an event on the calendar; it is a person standing in front of you on the road.

From the writers we read together

Clay Jones

professor of apologetics, author of Why Does God Allow Evil?

Jones writes about theodicy — the problem of evil and death — and his answer passes through John 11 on the way to the empty tomb. He reads the raising of Lazarus as a sign, not a permanent solution: Lazarus will die again. The sign points to the permanent anastasis that Jesus will accomplish in his own body three chapters later. Jones's argument is that the problem of death, which is the hardest version of the problem of evil, receives not an explanation but a defeat: Jesus does not explain why Lazarus died; he walks into the tomb and calls him out.

Jesus weeps before the tomb (v. 35) — the shortest verse in the Bible. Jones uses this detail carefully: the one who claims to be the resurrection weeps over death. He is not indifferent to it, not above it, not performing grief for the crowd. He weeps because death is the enemy (1 Cor 15:26) and he is about to fight it. The “Do you believe this?” is not a quiz. It is the most important question anyone can be asked — standing on a road outside a tomb, with a dead person inside and the resurrection standing in front of you.