Scripture: John 11:1-45

John 11:1–45 NIV

1 Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) 3 So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.” 4 When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” 5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, 7 and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” 8 “But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?” 9 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light. 10 It is when a person walks at night that they stumble, for they have no light.” 11 After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.” 12 His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” 13 Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep. 14 So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, 15 and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.” 16 Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” 17 On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. 18 Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, 19 and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. 21 “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 “Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.” 28 After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” 29 When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. 30 Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. 31 When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there. 32 When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34 “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. 35 Jesus wept. 36 Then 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 Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. 39 “Take away the stone,” he said. “But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.” 40 Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” 41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” 45 Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

3/22/2026

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

Prayer of Confession

Gracious and forgiving God, we confess that our bones are often lifeless and dry, consumed by fear and doubt. We forget Your promise of new life in Christ. Forgive us and fill us with Your Holy Spirit, that we may live for You. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: Out of the depths I cry to you, o Lord.

People: Lord, hear my voice and be attentive to my prayer.

Leader: Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

People: We come to worship the one who gives us life eternal.

Leader: Come, let us worship the Lord of life and hope.

All: We lift our hearts to the one who breathes life into dry bones!

The Sick and the Dead

When Is It Too Late to Pray?

When is it too late to pray? Are there points or situations, or even people, that are too far gone, that it's too late to pray anymore? The eternal optimists among us want to say that it's never too late to pray. But we know how time works against us every day. We know from the ball games, when the last buzzer sounds, it's too late to pray that our team will score an extra few points to get ahead and win. We know there are opportunities in life that have expiration dates, and once they're gone, they're gone. Praying about it is going to do little good. We may experience that most deeply in our grief, when we lose family and friends, when our prayers for healing stop and we have to learn new ways to pray.

Nobody wants to be in the front row seats of a funeral, because that is where we experience what it feels like to be too late to pray and be left dealing with the consequences that life and death bring to us.

This season of Lent, we've been learning about the effects of sin in our life and how Jesus engages that. Last week we learned that sometimes sin and suffering are connected. Sometimes suffering is caused directly by sin in our lives, but sometimes it is not. Suffering can sometimes even become a means of grace, a way that God works in and through our lives. Sin is not mentioned in our passage today. But the story of Lazarus is shrouded in death, and we know from Romans 5 and Genesis 3 that death is where all sin ultimately leads.

The New Normal

I'd go even further. We have dealt with sin and death for as long as humanity has existed, across every culture and civilization. It's become normal. Most of us think of sin like walking through a field of burrs, knowing that a few of them might prick at us and grab our attention, and most of them will stick to the back of our pants, and we won't notice them until we get home and try to change our clothes. If we live near that field of burrs, we may just feel like we'll never get all of them off of us. We'll just learn how to manage the best we can. We can say that we understand death is the ultimate consequence of sin in the world, but I think most of us, based on the way we live our lives, have come to believe that death is just normal. It's tragic and can sometimes be traumatic. When we look at a crowd of people, we don't walk around thinking that any one of them could die at any moment. But there comes a point when death becomes expected, even for those we love the most, and eventually even for ourselves.

We've already seen that Jesus has a different perspective on sin, and that we don't have to live our lives fighting a losing battle with it when we're with him. Our passage today shows us that the transforming work of Jesus doesn't stop with the sin, but deals with the consequences of it as well.

Already Too Late

Whatever illness Lazarus had took him down very quickly, and by the time his sisters reached out for help, it was too late to pray.

I missed that detail for years reading this story because I'm not good at math or geography, but I did a little research and found out that our passage begins just outside Jericho, where messengers from Mary and Martha meet Jesus and the disciples with news that Lazarus is very ill, asking Jesus to come to see him. Their home in Bethany is about a day's journey through the wilderness. So from the time the messengers left, it was a day's journey to reach Jesus and another day's journey back to Bethany. Jesus says he's going to wait where he is for two days. The disciples don't argue that point because, as much as they cared for Lazarus, they were run out of town the last time they were in his neighborhood, almost stoned to death by the Jewish leaders. The further away from Jerusalem they were, the safer they were.

After two days, Jesus says, let's go back to Judea. Now the disciples are defensive and they say, they tried to stone you just a short while ago, and you want to go back? Just as he did with the blind man, Jesus speaks to them about the time to work and the light that God provides. He tells them, are there not 12 hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble because they'll see by this world's light. It's when a person walks at night that they stumble because they have no light. I imagine the disciples, like us, were confused about what he was saying or what that had to do with going back to Judea.

So then he tells them, our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I'm going there to wake him up. The disciples, again taking him literally and thinking about their own safety, say, well, if he's asleep, he'll get better, not realizing Jesus was trying to gently tell them that he had died. They didn't get it, so he had to tell them plainly, "Lazarus is dead." He tells them, "For your sake, I'm glad that I was not there so that you may believe. But let's go to him." Thomas, speaking to the rest of them and still thinking that it was foolish to go back there, puts aside his thoughts of safety and says, "Let's also go that we may die with him."

So they all travel one day through the wilderness to get to Bethany. When they get there, they find that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. So if you do the math on that, that means that Lazarus died before the messenger even got to Jesus. That means that when the request came for healing, it was already too late. ★ Too late to ask for help, even from Jesus. Does that mean that if they had sent for help earlier, Lazarus might not have died? We don't know. But that question arises from a place in all of us that believes death is normal and inevitable, and that our job on Earth is to pray and work as hard as we can to delay it as long as possible.

Faith Meets Grief

As Jesus arrives in Bethany, before he even gets to the town, Martha comes out and greets him. She says what we all think, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Whether that means they could have asked for help sooner or Jesus could have changed his travel plans, we can think of a dozen different scenarios for how it could have worked out differently. If you had been here, my brother would not have died. She goes on to say, "I know that even now, God will give you whatever you ask."

I want you to pay attention to the next interchange between Martha and Jesus, because she's coming to him with a desire in her heart that she can't quite put into words, something she wants to believe but doesn't know how to. I want you to see that there is nothing prescriptive in this. There's no formula that if we just pray and believe like Martha, we can expect certain results. It's not like that at all.

She starts off with this blanket statement saying, "I know that even now" (you can hear in your mind when it's too late to pray) "even now, God will give you whatever you ask." She's not requesting anything. She's hinting that maybe if Jesus really wanted Lazarus to be alive, he'd be alive. He could have done things differently. Maybe in some way she's questioning whether Jesus really wanted him alive or not. To tell Jesus, "I know that God will give you whatever you ask," is a little bit like saying, "Not my will, but your will be done," and then waiting to see what happens. As I said, it's not really a request, but Jesus understands what her heart is saying, even if her words aren't saying it. So he tells her plainly, "Your brother will rise again."

Martha doesn't take this as an answer to the request that she didn't actually make. She was trying to spiritualize the grief and loss and regret and hurt that she was feeling in that moment, standing in the presence of Jesus. So when he gave her a direct response and a promise that was an answer to her prayer that was prayed too late and not really prayed in the right words, she misunderstood it and thought he was spiritualizing right along with her.

Martha retreated to safe, familiar theology. Someday, at the last day, he'll rise again, just like everybody else. Death is inevitable. That final resurrection is inevitable. We've lost him for now. We do the same thing. When the gap between what we believe spiritually and what we experience physically feels too wide to cross, we default to what's safe. We still live in the field of burrs, where death happens to everybody eventually, and then someday we move on to a different world with different rules, a different life in heaven that holds more mystery for us than anything else.

But Jesus doesn't let Martha stay in that safe, abstract place. He bridges the gap between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and the physical reality that we live in, just in who he is, the one who came from heaven to earth, fully God and fully human. He doesn't say, "Yes, Martha, someday there will be a resurrection." He says, "I am the resurrection and the life, and the one who believes in me will live even though they die. Whoever lives by believing in me will never die." He asks her point-blank, do you believe this? She says, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.

At the Tomb

As Jesus extends a hand to her to let go of that inevitability of sin and death, she takes it and takes one step toward him. Then she goes back into the town and calls her sister Mary, says the teacher's here and is asking for you. When Mary hears that, she gets up and goes quickly out to him. Jesus still hasn't made it into town yet. When Mary reaches him, she falls down at his feet.

You know what she said? "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." The same words Martha started with. She recognized it was too late to pray, her mind and heart going through all the what-ifs. As he watched Mary weep and the Jews from Jerusalem who had come to comfort Mary and Martha gather around them, he asked where the tomb was. They took him there.

In that crowd of grief, Jesus was overcome and he wept, not just over the death of Lazarus, but over the grief and hurt and loss that his sisters and his friends who were left behind faced. Those others in the crowd, with almost the same words as Martha and Mary, said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?" Even the crowd felt it. In their hearts, they knew it was too late to pray. Jesus, still overcome with that grief himself, goes up to the entrance and tells them to take the stone away from the tomb. Martha is still trying to follow Jesus as best she can, even here in her time of grief, but she's not comfortable with what's happening. She says, "By this time there's a bad odor in there because he's been in there four days." Jesus says, "Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?" So they obeyed him, and they took the stone away.

Then Jesus looks up and prays, "Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me." ★ Nobody there had dared to pray for what was about to happen. Martha hinted. Mary wept. The crowd questioned. But Jesus reveals that the conversation between heaven and earth had already been going on without them. Then he calls out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out." The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped up with those grave clothes, the cloth around his face. Jesus tells them, "Take off the grave clothes and let him go."

The Light and the Life

The passage about the man born blind and this account of Lazarus are both accounts of people who had suffering in their life and consequences that made everyone believe there was no hope left for them. In both cases, Jesus told his disciples that during the day, when you have the light with you, you keep working and you walk without stumbling. It's not too late to work until the night comes and the light is gone. He also told them, "While I am with you, I am the light of the world," which was his way of saying, while I'm still with you, it's not too late. Not only is he the light that allows us to see, but he's the life that allows us to live, breathe, and move. But knowing that doesn't always make it easier.

I think you and I know what it's like to be in the place of Mary and Martha, those giving and receiving those funeral meals when we feel like it's too late to pray what we'd really like to pray. We find ourselves almost begrudgingly surrendering and saying, "Lord, your will be done," because the things that our heart wishes, our mind can't put into words, and we're not sure we have the faith to pray that even if we could find the words. So, Lord, your will be done. That's not a formula. It is the prayer Jesus gave us. But in this account, as is often true in our own lives, it's not the first prayer we pray. It's the last prayer we pray when we've tried everything else.

But what Jesus does here is not an answer to prayer. It's something bigger. He finds these situations, he finds these people that are too far gone, and he gives them new life. He goes ahead and answers those prayers that neither they nor anyone else would dare to pray, and he does it because that's who God is.

He didn't come to eliminate the consequences of sin. That is something we would pray for. He didn't come to delay the consequences of sin. That's also something we might pray for. Instead, he came to walk through those consequences with us. He shows us that when our end comes and we face death, and we will, we won't face it alone because Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. ★ He gets the first word and the last word. Death doesn't get to keep us.

Reflection Questions

Is there something in your life right now that feels too late to pray about?

What is it that your heart wishes you could ask God for, but your mind won't let you put into words?

Who around you might be carrying that same feeling right now, and how could you stand with them this week?

Closing Prayer

Lord, thank you for the lives you give us and the beauty and joy we get to experience in every good day and in every good memory. Despite our sin and failures, you bless us more than we deserve.

Today we remember that our days are numbered and that the night approaches when we cannot see and we stumble. When we cannot rely on ourselves or the world around us anymore, you remind us that we were always made to rely on you.

Help us to put our trust in you and your love for us beyond our understanding, beyond what we are even willing to hope for in our times of struggle. Take our hands and lead us through life, through death, and into the resurrection you bring to us. In Jesus' name. Amen.