Take Off the Grave Clothes

John 11:38-44

August 23, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It’s the shortest verse in the Bible, just two words (or three in Greek), and so it’s the one we always went to when our Sunday School teacher asked us if we had memorized any Bible verses. Whoever spoke up first got to lay claim to John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” And, you know, we’d be so proud of ourselves, that we’d actually memorized a verse. But I doubt that any of us really knew what that verse meant or why it was significant that Jesus did, in fact, weep.

It’s a well-known and well-told story that we just read the very end of this morning. In fact, as John’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus, this story is really a turning point. It’s the moment when the religious leaders make up their minds that Jesus has to die. No other alternative. And the irony is that they decide to kill Jesus at the very moment when he restores life.

This morning we’re continuing our look at seven signposts that point toward how God intended the world to be from the beginning. So far we’ve talked about love, justice and freedom—things that help us actually make sense of the world, things for which God built a longing into us. I’ve been asking along the way: what if God’s people began to live these things out? Maybe the world would begin to be less crazy, less divided. Maybe it would make more sense. Today, we come to one that is a bit harder to define, but before we get to that, we need to visit a graveyard.

The famous first line of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is this: “Marley was dead: to begin with.” John could have used that line to tell his story of Lazarus: “Lazarus was dead: to begin with.” And there was no doubt he was dead. He had gotten sick, apparently suddenly, and died very quickly, so quickly that even when word was sent to Jesus, he wasn’t able to get back to Lazarus’ hometown of Bethany to help him or be with him. Of course, John tells us that Jesus intentionally stayed where he was two more days after getting word before he began the trip to see his friend (cf. 11:6). He even tells his disciples that he is glad they didn’t get there before Lazarus died, “so that you may believe” (11:15). Lazarus was dead: to begin with.

So Jesus takes his disciples back to Bethany, just on the other side of the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem, where he finds Lazarus’ sisters in various stages of grief. Martha seems to be in the bargaining stage, with maybe a hint of anger. She comes out to meet him before he gets to the house and says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask” (11:21-22). Mary stays back at the house until Martha tells her Jesus is asking for her (though in the text, he doesn’t ask for Mary so either Martha is lying or John forgot to write that part, but anyway). Mary says pretty much the same thing to him, seemingly caught somewhere between the anger and depression stages of grief: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (11:32). The stages of grief are not linear, by the way. Sometimes they happen all at the same time. Sometimes they are jumbled up. But what I think is important in the way John tells this story is that both sisters, in their own time and in their own way, take their grief to Jesus. And Jesus grieves with them. Jesus wept.

I have questions about why, in fact, Jesus wept. It’s not a loud wailing like John says Mary and Martha and the professional mourners are doing. No, this is Jesus standing silently with tears running down his cheeks, or maybe just a single tear. We don’t really know. Nor can we say for sure why he wept. I don’t think it’s because of Lazarus’ death; the sisters may have thought that but, I mean, Jesus knows he is going to raise Lazarus. It could be because of the grief he sees in the sisters and the friends. He weeps with those who weep, as Paul will later instruct us to do (cf. Romans 12:15). But even then he knows that weeping will turn to joy when they see their brother alive again. Some suggest that Jesus might be weeping because he knows that in a few days it will be him in the grave, that he’s weeping because of the death that faces him. But, again, he knows the rest of the story. The letter to the Hebrews says Jesus faced the cross with joy because he knows what it will accomplish (cf. Hebrews 12:2). I believe Jesus weeps outside the tomb of Lazarus because of the pain and grief and harm that death itself causes in the lives and hearts of those he loves. It was never meant to be this way, and even though he will soon raise Lazarus, Lazarus will have to die again. I believe Jesus weeps because of the ugliness of death, because of the way death destroys the beauty God built into this world (cf. Whitacre, John [IVPNTC], pgs. 289-290; Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 136).

Lazarus was dead: to begin with. Really dead. John makes sure we know that by saying that Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days (cf. 11:17). Jews still today bury the body the day after the death, and it was believed that once the body was in the tomb, the spirit stayed near the body for three days trying to regain entrance into the body. By the fourth day, the spirit would depart because at that point in the hot and humid Middle Eastern weather the face would be so decomposed that it would no longer be recognizable (cf. Barclay, The Gospel of John Volume 2, pg. 99). During those days, the family would be intensely mourning. You think our funeral meals are great? It’s nothing like the week-long feast that would be shared in the first century. The first three days were days of weeping, and for the whole week you could not put on shoes, wash yourself or engage in any business or study (Barclay 89). It was a week of intense mourning that was then followed by a month of lighter mourning. But the point here is that when Jesus shows up, the ugliness of death is everywhere. Lazarus was dead: to begin with.

Jesus asks to see where Lazarus is buried, so they lead him to the tomb. The tomb would have been a natural cave or a space carved into the hillside with a big stone rolled in front of it. Unlike today, you didn’t occupy your tomb longer than a year. After a year, the family would collect your bones, put them in a box and the tomb would be ready for someone else to use it. I know, sounds gross, but nevertheless that was the custom. The tomb was simply a place for the body to decompose, and that’s why Martha reacts badly to Jesus’ request for the tomb to be opened. She thinks maybe Jesus wants to look at Lazarus’ face one more time, but she knows what will happen if they roll back the stone. “Lord,” Martha says, “by this time there is a bad odor” (11:39). That’s what all the spices and perfumes they put on the body were for—not to preserve the body somehow but to try to hide the smell. I think I point this out every time we look at this story because I just love it so much, the way the King James Version translates Martha’s words here: “Lord, by this time he stinketh.” This is the same Martha who, just a few moments ago, said she believed that Jesus was “the Messiah, the Son of God” (11:27). Doesn’t she believe that the Son of God could be a stink-remover (cf. McKnight, John, pg. 181)? Jesus doesn’t ask that. He asks something else, very pertinent to our task this morning. Jesus says, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” (11:40).

The glory of God. He doesn’t say they are going to see a body raised. He doesn’t say they will see their brother again, although all of that is true. No, Jesus says what they are about to see is “the glory of God.” Have you ever seen the glory of God? I bet you have, but you might not have recognized it. Psalm 19 tells us, “The heavens declared the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge” (19:1-2). Have you looked at the sky lately? Did you look at it today? Then you’ve seen the glory of God, whether you realized it at the time or not. The heavens declare the glory of God. Have you looked at a mountain or a stream running through a meadow or a genuinely beautiful painting or listened to a marvelous piece of music? The whole world declares the glory of God. The creation declares the glory of God. The work of his creation declares the glory of God. One of the things we often visit when I’m taking groups on trips is European cathedrals and they are huge, filled with art and gorgeous stained glass windows. They didn’t build them that way to show off or to waste money. Some of the most magnificent were built over hundreds of years because it took that long to do it right. They were built that way to declare one thing: God’s glory and God’s beauty. Because the glory of God points us toward a signpost that helps make sense of the world: beauty. As Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, “Beauty will save the world.”

The original Hebrew word for “glory,” maybe the word Jesus actually spoke while standing at the tomb of Lazarus, is kabod, and originally it meant “weighty or awesome.” It’s difficult to define, but we will give it a go because generally it refers to “anything and everything that reflect or embodies that strange, powerful, hard-to-pin-down sense of something more, something greater, something more intimate than what you would get from a chemical or mathematical analysis” (Wright, Broken Signposts, pg. 98). Or, we can say it refers to the “stunningly beautiful presence of God.” When God shows up, beauty erupts. In the New Testament, the word is doxa, from which we get the word “doxology,” a response of praise, a word of worship, a sense of the goodness of God. Some of us grew up singing what we called “the doxology:” “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly hosts, praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.” It’s not complete without the “amen.” It’s the glory of God, and when we see it, when we experience it, the world is different because the glory of God is beautiful. And beauty will save the world.

And that glory, John has told us in words we read every Christmas Eve, became flesh and blood. “The Word became flesh,” John writes, “and made his dwelling among us.” The Message translation says he “moved into the neighborhood.” But listen to what John says next: “We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). And even though Isaiah told us he would have “no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2), still the beauty of the glory of God surrounded Jesus wherever he went. And still does. “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” he asks Martha. I’m not exactly sure that he’s specifically referring to what he’s about to do when he says that because he himself is the glory of God. But, nevertheless, so that they might see him, so that they might see that glory, that beauty, he does what he does next.

So Lazarus was dead: to begin with. And Jesus wept. He wept for all the brokenness and ugliness that sin and death had and have brought into the world. “Show me where you have laid him,” Jesus says, and they take him to the tomb with the big stone in front of it. “Take away the stone,” Jesus says. And do you notice that no one mentions the smell once they roll the stone back? There’s no mention of people covering their noses or gasping from the stench. What John tells us about instead is Jesus’ prayer. And what he prays is interesting, too. He doesn’t so what we would do: ask for the power to raise Lazarus. No, all he does is pray out loud to reinforce to those who are listening that he and the Father are connected. Now, I often complain that a lot of our praying—mine included—is telling God things he already knows. But then I see that’s exactly what Jesus does here. He even says he is praying “for the benefit of the people standing here” (11:42); that’s not what prayer is supposed to be about! But I’m not going to tell Jesus that! I’m not going to argue with how Jesus prays. Anyway, after that brief prayer that is mostly for the crowd, Jesus issues one command: “Lazarus, come out!” And when Jesus calls your name, you’d better respond, right? So Lazarus comes out. He walks out the tomb, or rather, probably sort of hops because his body would have been wrapped in a shroud from head to toe with a separate piece called a “sweat cloth” wrapped around his face (cf. Card 137). And when Jesus sees him, he gives a final command to those nearby: “Take off the grave clothes and let him go” (11:44) because the stink of death has been overcome by the beauty of life.

As I said earlier, according to John, this event is what cements the resolve of the religious leaders to get rid of Jesus, to crucify him. Odd that something so beautiful would lead directly to something so ugly and horrific. And yet, on the other side of that most unjust event in history is the most beautiful occurrence: Jesus was raised from the dead and lives forevermore. So in many ways, Lazarus’ raising points toward Jesus’ resurrection with one exception: Lazarus had to die again. Jesus never will. And, as Paul reminds us, Jesus’ resurrection is the promise of our own (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20).

“We are all of us hardwired for beauty…[because] It is a pointer to the strange, gently demanding presence of the living God in the midst of his world” (Wright 92-93). And the most beautiful thing in the world is still when someone is set free, when the grave clothes of their old life are removed and the new life begins. There is an undeniable beauty when Jesus calls us out of the grave of sin and death into what he called “life abundant” (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:56). He told his disciples, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Chaplain Robert Brown was leading a Bible study on this story on a troopship during World War 2 when a young man interrupted the study. He told them he believed that story was pointing toward him. He told them how he had entered the military right out of high school and found himself bored and lifeless. Then he got in some bad trouble, trouble only God knew about but still trouble. He felt guilty and that his life was over. He could never face his family again, he thought, until he heard the story of Lazarus. He told those gathered on that ship, “I know that this resurrection Jesus was talking about is real here and now, for he has raised me from death to life” (cf. Barclay 102-103). The man’s troubles weren’t over, but his life was becoming beautiful because of Jesus. I am thankful every day for the beautiful life God has given me. I know myself; I know what I would be like without Jesus. And yet, every day Jesus is making me more and more like him. Sometimes I can’t see it, but when I look back over the years I know it’s true. There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a life transformed by Jesus Christ. “Take off the grave clothes,” Jesus says, “and let him go.” He says that every time someone comes to him and he replaces those grave clothes that represent death and sin with a new life full of hope and joy and peace. I’m hopeful I’m not just really talking about me right now, but about every person in this place this morning. And if he hasn’t set you free, he can today and he will if you will let him. He will make your life beautiful.

And then, I believe, our calling is to join Jesus in bringing beauty to the world. I was thinking this week of the first time I visited the city of Rome. I guess I expected a pristine, beautiful city with untouched ruins of centuries past. And there are some protected ruins, but there’s also just as many that have been painted on with graffiti and, let’s just say, not so nice artwork. I remember emailing back home saying how Rome was not what I expected and why would people do that? I guess I’ve come to expect such treatment of our cities, but I thought there would be more respect for a place like Rome. And this is not an anti-graffiti message. I’ve seen some beautiful artwork disguised as graffiti, street art. It’s about the message. And without the transforming work of Christ, all we have to offer is ugliness. There’s certainly plenty of that around today, and not just in so-called artwork. In music, in speech, in interactions—followers of Jesus are called to add beauty to the world, not ugliness. Why have the musical compositions of Bach survived? Because everything he wrote was written as an act of worship. At the end of each of his musical works, he put the letters S. D. G., which stand for Soli Deo Gloria—to God alone be the glory. Why have the great works of art survived the centuries? Because so many of them were painted in order to give God honor, celebrating the stories of the Bible or the creation. Five to seven billion people flock to the Sistine Chapel every year to view artwork created to the glory of God. Beauty is a signpost meant to lead us back into God’s presence, and as the world becomes more beautiful, God’s glory will be seen more and more. Beauty points beyond even death toward a hope only God can provide (cf. Wright 110).

Songwriter Sara Groves calls grace “an invitation to be beautiful.” She writes these lyrics: 

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces

Calling out the best of who we are

And I want to add to the beauty

To tell a better story

I want to shine with the light

That's burning up inside (“Add to the Beauty,” 2005).

So the question for us is this: do we want to add to the beauty? Can we be people who help take off the grave clothes of our world? In everything you do this week, are you adding to the ugliness of the world or to the beauty? Glorifying yourself or glorifying God? The world will only become a better place when God’s people intentionally and constantly add to the beauty. Let’s pray.