March 22, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS AND SERMON
First Reading: Ezekiel 37:1-14
1 The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. 2 He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” 4 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. 5 Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. 6 I will lay sinews on you and will cause flesh to come upon you and cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”
7 So I prophesied as I had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them. 9 Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” 10 I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
11 Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 And you shall know that I am the Lord when I open your graves and bring you up from your graves, O my people. 14 I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.”
Second Reading: Romans 8:6-11
6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Gospel: John 11:1-45
1 Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. 3 So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” 4 But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This illness does not lead to death; rather, it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 5 Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, 6 after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
7 Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” 8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” 9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble because they see the light of this world. 10 But those who walk at night stumble because the light is not in them.” 11 After saying this, he told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” 12 The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” 13 Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. 14 Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. 15 For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” 16 Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”
17 When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. 18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some two miles away, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”
28 When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” 29 And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet come to the village but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. 32 When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. 36 So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”
38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 41 So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
45 Many of the Jews, therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.
Sermon: Lazarus: Five Things You May Have Never Known
Grace to You, and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
“Five Things You May Have Never Known About the Lazarus Story.”
Now, as I share today’s message, I do so in the spirit of renewed humility. I don’t have all the answers. Obviously, when it comes to life after death, I see this more of a pilgrimage that I invite you to join me on as we walk this journey, these 40 days of Lent.
Even before today, probably, all of you know the story of Lazarus: He dies. Jesus is summoned to prevent him from continuing to be ill, to heal him. Jesus waits. After four days, Lazarus dies. Four days pass, and then, for the sake of revealing God’s glory, He brings Lazarus out of the tomb.
That is the story we know, and that, of course, is the story you just heard. That said, if you’re like me, there are probably a lot of things you don’t know about the Lazarus story. For example, Lazarus is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. There is a parable about another Lazarus in the Gospel of Luke. But otherwise, neither Matthew, Mark, nor Luke mentioned this character. Lazarus is only in the Gospel of John.
Moreover, in the Gospel of John, Lazarus never speaks. He says nothing, of course, during the story that we heard, and, after he’s brought back from the dead, he says nothing thereafter.
His resuscitation, moreover, is the seventh sign in the Gospel. Now, a sign is a deed of power pointing to Jesus, and we’ve read about several of them over the course of our Lenten journey together. The first, you may know, is when he turns water into wine. Why seven? Because seven is the number of God. God takes six days to create the world, and on the seventh day, as you know, God rests. Accordingly, in the Gospel of John, we have the book of signs, which contains seven signs, in the first 12 chapters. And this is the crowning sign, the crowning miracle, that reveals Jesus as the giver of life, and that precipitates his own death.
Now this morning (“Thanks be to God,” you may be saying to yourself), I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of things that you or I may not know about the Lazarus story. Instead, I’d like to condense this list to five basic points. Why? Because I want to invite each of you to join me as we probe the narrative more deeply. I want to invite you into the narrative world of the story, so that at the end, I can reveal to you the true gospel that occurs, as the last of our five points.
So, buckle up. Hold on. I’m going to take you for a brief ride as we talk about “five things you may not know about Lazarus” and the story we have concerning him in the Gospel of John:
Point one: Lazarus, not John, may be the author of this gospel. Let me repeat that: Lazarus, not John, may be the author of this gospel. Now, let me explain. As some of you may know, the titles of the Gospels and the other writings in the New Testament were added by the church in the second century. They don’t appear in the oldest copies we have. Traditionally, the church identified John, the apostle of Jesus, who is mentioned in the other gospels—the brother of James, the son of Zebedee. Traditionally, the church identified John, this apostle, as the author of the fourth gospel.
The trouble is that the text the fourth gospel never says who wrote it. It does, however, claim to be based on the testimony of “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
So in today’s story, we are told, or rather, we see how that, for Martha and Mary, they tell Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love, is ill.” It stands to reason, therefore that Lazarus is “the beloved disciple,” which, as I said before, makes sense, because Lazarus, like the beloved disciple, never appears in any of the other gospels.
Could it be, then, that the Gospel as based on the testimony of Lazarus is really not the Gospel of John, even though John was one of the 12, but rather the Gospel according to Lazarus—and if so, how might that change the way you read this text? That’s point one: Lazarus, not John, may be the author of this gospel.
Point two, Jesus describes in this story the experience of death by referring to it euphemistically as “sleep.” By referring to it euphemistically as sleep, he says, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I’m going there to awaken him,” in verse 11.
So, what does he mean when he compares death to sleep? By comparing the two, is he’s saying indirectly that the soul is unaware of itself after the body dies, the way we are unaware of ourselves in a state of dreamless sleep? Or is he saying, like the body, the soul ceases to exist altogether?
In Genesis, we read how humanity has been barred from immortality because of the desire to be like God. God disallows them from eating from the Tree of Life. So could it be, therefore, that sleep is the most appropriate metaphor for what lies beyond the grave?
Now, for my part, this is beyond my pay grade. I don’t know whether or not either of these or another option is correct. But consider my namesake, the prophet Daniel in the Old Testament. This text seems to imply that the interim between the last breath and the general resurrection of the dead is one of extinction, that is, extinction of consciousness. Listen closely:
“Many of those” he writes, “who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to everlasting shame and contempt.” [Daniel 12:2]
Death, in other words, seems to be final and real for this author. Only by being raised from the dead on the last day will body and soul be reunited in a new life.
But what if to die to sleep, as Shakespeare says, means perchance to dream? What if a remnant of consciousness persists after we die? I mean, Scripture frequently compares death to sleep. We see that in this text. We see it in the story of Lazarus. We see it in the book of Revelation. We see it in first Corinthians 15. We see it in Psalm 13. But there are other verses in the Bible that suggests something of us persists post mortem as well.
For example, according to 1 Peter 3, after Jesus dies, he visits spirits in captivity. Or again, if you go to Psalm 65, there’s a reference to Sheol, where the author says there is no memory of God, but that the personality in some state continues to exist.
My point here is simply that whether we imagine death to be dreamless sleep, or some kind of consciousness that persists after we die, neither of them has the last word.
Neither of them has the last word. Jesus, in this story overcomes death and/or sleep on the last day.
Point three: And this may sound bizarre to some of you—Lazarus really died.
Let me repeat that, because it’s so astounding. Lazarus really died. You’ll notice that two places in the reading, Lazarus is said to have been in the tomb for—how many days?—four days. Jesus allowed this, we’re told, so that people couldn’t say Lazarus wasn’t truly dead. Why would they say such a thing? Well, it was popular belief that the soul and body were finally separated after three days with no hope of resuscitation. In other words, Jesus waited four days to show that, beyond a doubt, he brought Lazarus back to life.
Point three, then is simple. Lazarus really died. He was in the tomb for four days to glorify Jesus as the giver of life.
Now, something interesting here: When my mother passed away, my brother opened the door to the house. And my brother, who speaks Spanish fluently, works with a lot of Hispanic or Latino communities. And the belief there is that after the body dies, the soul needs a way to depart. So, people in that culture will open doors or windows to allow that to happen. And that seems to have been the belief among Jews at this time: that the soul lingers around the body for three days, after which it departs, leaving the body no hope of being resuscitated.
So, Jesus comes along, waits four days so the people know that Lazarus was truly dead and so that he can really glorify God and himself as the giver of life accordingly.
Point four: Lazarus technically wasn’t resurrected. He was resuscitated. Lazarus, in other words, was restored to ordinary life, which means, Lazarus will die again. The resurrection, on the other hand, involves eternal life. The resurrection in Jesus anticipates a new creation, where death will be no more.
Beyond that, there’s no transformation of Lazarus appearance. People still recognize him after his resuscitation. But if you go to the stories about Jesus and His resurrection, he’s often mistaken for somebody else or not immediately recognized, because his appearance has changed. So, when Mary encounters Jesus outside of his tomb, according to the Gospel of John, she mistakes him—for who?—the gardener!
So, in this case, we’re not technically speaking about resuscitation. Lazarus was simply restored to ordinary life. Resurrection, by contrast, involves eternal life, where the person is transformed as part of God’s new creation. Lazarus was resuscitated, not resurrected. Wow.
Okay, we’ve talked about four things you may have never known about the story of Lazarus.
Point one: The author of this text, the testimony as the basis for this text, may have been “the Beloved Disciple.” And “the Beloved Disciple” may have been Lazarus, the author of, or at least the testimony whose basis became, the fourth Gospel.
Point two: Jesus may be describing what death is life by comparing it to sleep. The question is whether sleep here is dreamless or whether there are dreams to come. Either way, his resurrection brings us to new life, and, you might say, awakens us from this state.
Point three: Lazarus really died. He was in the tomb four days for the sake of glorifying Jesus as the giver of life.
Point four: Technically speaking, Lazarus was resuscitated, not resurrected.
But, Point five—and this is the big surprise—is what I’ve been waiting to tell you all about. So, are you ready? And would you like to buckle up? This is going to be a four-ticket ride, so hold on:
Each of you is Lazarus in this story.Each of you is Lazarus in this story. Why? Because, like me, you are all going to die. Each of you is Lazarus in this story.
As one commentary puts it, “Lazarus represents every believer who loves Jesus, and more importantly, is loved by Him, whom the Lord will raise upon the last day.
So take his hand as he lifts you out of darkness in the cave into light, saying to each one of you and to me, ‘Child of God, you were not meant for this. You were not meant for death. You were meant for life here and beyond.’”
So, take my hand. Arise out of your tomb. You and I in the story are Lazarus, and what Jesus did for him, he promises to do for each of us, every single day, by calling us to new life, as well as on the last day, by calling us to life in the world to come.
This is by far the most important point of the story, one you and I may have missed, but one I hope we will never forget.
In Jesus’s name, Amen.