Jesus is With Us in Sorrow and Joy

Excerpted with permission from Every Day in the Bible by Mary Wiley. Copyright 2026, Lifeway Press.

John 11 is a chapter we could spend days or even weeks in. It’s a beautiful reminder of Jesus’s humanity and His care for His friends. These friends in chapter 11 are Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. John 11:3 says the women summoned Jesus by saying, “The one you love is sick.”

Now, Mary and Martha probably didn’t feel the love when they sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying and He didn’t come immediately. We don’t know what caused Lazarus’s death or why he lived with his sisters, but some scholars do speculate that he may have had a physical or mental disability that made it best for him to be in his sisters’ care.

Their living arrangement would not be the norm in Bethany, and I love that Jesus often shows His great love throughout the gospels for people who may be ignored or discarded in today’s world. We see story after story of Him caring for and healing those who can do nothing for Him in return, which is also our story.

Jesus had been threatened in Judea already, and the disciples were nervous about going to Bethany. Yet, fear would not stop Him. I love Thomas’s reply in verse 16. Thomas, who we know as the doubter, is the one who speaks up with faith, “Let’s go too so that we may die with him.” His commitment to Jesus was so great that death would not stop Him from following.

When Jesus arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days and Mary and Martha were insistent that he was already stinking. There was no explaining away this miracle of Jesus. Sleeping people don’t smell like dead people, and while we are not well acquainted with that smell in modern life, there was no missing it for those who knew it well in this ancient context without the modern sterility of hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes. Martha, in faith, believed Jesus could keep Lazarus from death, but Jesus was too late. She doesn’t yet know that Jesus can and will also raise Lazarus from the dead.

Martha expresses that she knows Lazarus will rise again in the resurrection at the last day, which was a teaching from the Prophets the Jews held, but she didn’t fully know Jesus was the Author and Forerunner of that resurrection, and it might not be so far away after all.

In Jesus’s seventh and final “I AM” statement, He says, “I am the resurrection and the life” in verse 25. In the CSB’s Connecting Scripture New Testament, it is noted that this phrase is out of order.¹ In Martha’s understanding, and the understanding of the day, life would come before resurrection, since resurrection only came after death. But here, Jesus reverses it and proclaims the truth of the gospel message: true life comes from the resurrection, because of the resurrection. We, like Lazarus, are dead in our sin, needing resurrection only Jesus can bring from our old way of life to new life in Him.

Jesus shares in the sorrow of death, even knowing His friend would soon be raised. He weeps. The entrance of sin into the world has brought death and decay into all aspects of life, and Jesus is deeply moved for His friends. Lazarus was taken by that brokenness facing a most unnatural end that was not the intention of God’s good design. But if Jesus knew what was to come, why was He sad?

Augustine says it this way: “Why did Christ weep except to teach us to weep?”² When our grief runs deep, we can find comfort knowing that our Savior wept in grief, experiencing the fullness of our experienced humanity. God truly took on humanity with all of its ills and frustrations, and His grief teaches us to also willingly face the full weight of grief when those we love suffer. The brokenness we experience is worthy of our mourning, and to grieve with hope is to grieve like Christ here, who did not breeze past the pain to focus on “but he’s in a better place” or “we’ll see him again." They would see Lazarus again in mere minutes, and still, Jesus wept.

They approach the tomb, and Jesus reminds Martha that she will see the glory of God if she believes Him, which is reminiscent of Moses’s request to see the glory of God in Exodus 33. Little did the sisters realize that, while Moses only got to see the Lord’s back, they looked Him squarely in the face even now, looking on the “radiance of God’s glory,” as Hebrews 1:3 says. To see Jesus is to see the full glory of God, which we read in John 1:14 and is also mentioned in 2 Corinthians 4:6.

They see the glory of God in Christ and will understand it even more fully in Lazarus’s resurrection, and of course, later in His own. Lazarus would be raised, and yet, again he would later face death. Jesus would face death on the cross and be resurrected through the power of the Spirit, defeating death, ascending to the right hand of the Father where He awaits the day that death is ended for all of us as well.

Can you imagine the joy Mary and Martha experienced on this day? The awe they had at this amazing sign from Jesus? Many of those who witnessed this miracle were also eyewitnesses to other important moments throughout John. John is showing us how blinded people were to the glory of God in Christ, because the response of many in the crowd who witnessed Lazarus raised was to forget about this miracle entirely or to plot to kill Jesus like the Pharisees who feared that they would lose their power over the people of Judea because of Him.

The Spirit had not yet come, so their eyes had not yet been opened, but I have to believe that Mary and Martha got it. Their beloved brother was back from the dead because Jesus made it so. And I have to believe Lazarus got it, after he tasted death and was raised to life. The Passover was approaching, and it was only about a week or two before Jesus would be crucified as the spotless Passover Lamb.

This moment was the inciting event for His arrest because He stirred up the Pharisees so much with this miracle, they decided they had to do something to stop the spread of His influence. And yet, the Pharisees had no real power over what would happen in the next week. God’s plan was unfolding moment by moment so that we, too, can experience a resurrection like Lazarus’s as we move from death to live in Christ.

If you are in Christ, you have died with Him and also been raised with Him, and the life you live is no longer one of decay and brokenness, but abundance and wholeness. This is the good news of the gospel: it is a message of resurrection, not that we wait for, although there will be a resurrection in the last days, but one we experience now. You have been raised. Do not live as the dead, bent toward decay. Live as those whose life is hidden in Christ alone!