What Does It Mean To Be Alive?

John 11:1-7, 17-27, 32-45

What Does it Mean to Be Alive?

When we step into John 11, we step into one of the most emotional and hope filled stories in Scripture.

Lazarus—friend of Jesus, beloved brother, pillar of his community—becomes ill, and before help arrives, he dies.

His sisters grieve, his friends gather, the house fills with tears and casseroles and whispered prayers, and then, four days later, Jesus finally shows up.

And right away, this story presses a question on us—not just about what happened to Lazarus, but what it means to be alive.

And maybe even more urgently: what it means to be unbound because Lazarus doesn’t just get resurrected, he gets released--he gets set free.

And those are two different things.

You can be breathing and not be living.

You can be standing and still be bound.

You can walk out of a tomb and still carry the grave clothes of your past, and Jesus cares about all of it.

I once spoke with a man who told me that for years he woke up every morning, went to work, came home, ate dinner, watched TV, went to bed—and repeated that cycle day after day.

He said, “I wasn’t depressed, I wasn’t in crisis, I wasn’t even unhappy, but I wasn’t alive. I was just existing.”

Then one day, a friend invited him to volunteer at a community kitchen.

He didn’t want to go, but he went anyway.

And he said that night, as he was serving food, hearing stories, and laughing with strangers—he felt something he hadn’t felt in years.

“It was like someone opened a window in a room I didn’t know was suffocating me,” he said.

He had been breathing before, but that night, he started living again.

And I think that’s the kind of distinction Jesus is trying to show us in this story.

When Mary and Martha send word to Jesus—“Lord, the one you love is sick”—Jesus… lingers, he delays, he doesn’t rush.

And if you’ve ever prayed and felt like heaven put you on hold, you know exactly how Mary and Martha must have felt.

There’s a meme that says, “God never gives you more than you can handle. But sometimes I wish God didn’t trust me so much.”

Mary and Martha would have loved a little less trust in that moment, but John gives us a clue as to why Jesus waits to go to Lazarus in verse 4: “This illness is for God’s glory.”

And it’s not glory as in spectacle, but glory as in revelation—God revealing God’s heart.

And sometimes that revelation happens in the waiting.

Jesus’s delay is not neglect—it is the soil where faith takes root.

It’s where we learn that God may not move when we expect, but God always moves nonetheless.

And when Jesus finally does arrive, he doesn’t start with a miracle.

He starts with tears.

We are told: “Jesus wept.”

This is shortest verse in Scripture, and one of the most powerful.

Jesus doesn’t say, “Don’t cry, everything happens for a reason,” or “Just be strong.”

He doesn’t say, “Let me explain the theology of suffering.”

He cries.

The Son of God stands at the tomb of His friend and lets His heart break.

And in that moment, we learn something essential about being alive: to be alive is to feel.

To be alive is to let compassion move us and to keep our hearts open in a world that keeps trying to close them.

Some of us were taught that faith means being strong all the time, but Jesus shows us that faith means being real, being open, being human, being alive.

And then Jesus walks to the tomb, and suddenly the story becomes our story.

Because Lazarus is not the only one in a tomb: We all have tombs—places where life feels sealed off, where hope has been wrapped up and buried.

Some of us live in the tomb of shame, carrying old mistakes like chains.

Some live in the tomb of fear—fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of being seen.

Others live in the tomb of grief, where the loss of someone or something dear settles like a stone on the chest.

And some live in the tomb of exhaustion, where life has been so hard for so long that even good things feel suspicious.

A month or so ago, a young man came to the church asking for help with his utility bills.

He had just moved here from Maine because, he said, “things are cheaper in Tennessee.”

His rent here is half of what it was there, but he’s working a minimum wage job in a burger joint and still can’t keep up.

I asked him if his parents were still in Maine.

He told me his mother died when he was young, and he never knew his father.