One of the scenes in the Gospels involves a man whose words were never recorded. Lazarus is first introduced in the Gospel of John as one Jesus loves—and one who is sick. The illness had silenced Lazarus to the point where it was Mary and Martha who had to send word to Jesus. “Lord, the one you love is sick.” When Jesus heard the news of his friend’s condition, he immediately replied: “This sickness will not end in death.” A few days later, Lazarus was dead.(1)

There are times when I read this story and I long to say in response, “But it did end in death.”  Before the story of Lazarus was a story fully marked by the scandal of resurrection, it was first a story marred by the force of death. Lazarus still walked through the pain of his illness; he still faced the uncertainty of dying; his loved ones, the sting of grief. Mary and Martha still mourned at the grave of their brother for four days. And Jesus himself wept.

Even for those who are able to see resurrection as their certain hope, death is still a jarring occurrence. The journey toward death was harsh and shocking to Lazarus, his family, and his friends. But it was not the final word. There is a voice that can be heard even through the last shriek of death.

Author and professor James Loder tells the story of his younger sister’s transforming encounter with death and life. From an early age, it was evident that Kay would be a child marked by struggle. Loder describes her as “a troubled young girl living in a middle-class family in which there seemed to be no trouble at all.”(2) Yet off and on throughout her childhood, she would suddenly break into tears and fall into bouts of genuine discontent, such that she was having great trouble both at home and in school.  When she was fourteen, their father was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Nine months later, on the night before he died, Kay and her brother took a walk together in the rain. As they walked quietly together, they came to a lake. Both slowed at the sight of it and its various reflections in the light. On the other side of the lake was a figure that stopped them both completely. Remarkably, there seemed in front of them the silhouette of a Christ-like figure; he was carrying a burden as he walked in the rain. They were both transfixed. “Do you see what I see?” Loder asked. “Yes,” came the hushed reply of his sister.

After that evening life was somehow different for her. Their father passed away, but the vision of Christ in the midst of it was somehow more permanent. Kay’s life took an entirely different turn. She sailed through school and pursued theater with the idea of bringing God into it. Loder explains that it was never easy for her; in fact, “it was very hard,” he said, “but always there was the vision…. [S]he was continually ripped off. Her material was stolen, and she died at the age of thirty-nine. [Yet] even in dying, her great love of God and the power of the vision gave death to death; in love she was married to the Lord for life and for life after death.”(3)

We don’t know how Lazarus reacted to his own death and subsequent resurrection. The gospels do not offer us a single word from the mouth of the one who was raised. In fact, the man at whose grave Jesus wept is known only in the gospels as one who listened. Amidst a crowd drawn by sorrow to a graveside in Bethany, Jesus called out in a loud voice: “Lazarus, come forth!” And the dead man indeed came out, his hands and his feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

There is something about suffering and despair that brings some to strain our ears for the voice of God. Where we have written God off as silent, where we have lived with the suspicion of a distant or demanding ruler, there is a compulsion within our pain that forces us to listen again. There is an image of Christ who carried the same burden. And it is met with the promise of one who speaks: This sickness will not end in death.

Jill Carattini is senior associate writer at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 11:1-45.

(2) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 228.

(2) Ibid., 229.