Remove the Grave Clothes

 

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. 

 

Like  a scene from an old zombie movie, Lazarus didn’t just come out of the tomb. He was bound and wrapped. Cloth tied his hands together and kept his legs wrapped from moving. He had no freedom from the grave, it held him captive. And the grave clothes were tied as a symbol of his prison. Yet Jesus called to him, and he found his way out. 

 

But the way John begins this story, reveals the one who truly found freedom in this moment. 

 

John 11:1-2 says this, 

 

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (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.) 

 

Interesting. If you know the order of events here, at the time of Lazarus’s death, Mary hadn’t done this yet. So why does John place this detail out of order here? 

 

Perhaps the answer to that is in their interaction with Jesus when he arrived on the scene in Bethany. 

 

Both Martha and Mary have a similar statement to Jesus when they see him, 

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They have both resigned themselves to the fact that Jesus could have, yet he didn’t. He could have saved Lazarus from death, but he failed to come to them. He left them alone to figure it out without him.