St. Lazarus

He is the man who died twice. The man for whom God wept. The man who lay four days in a sealed tomb, wrapped in burial cloths, while his sisters grieved and his friends wondered why the miracle worker from Nazareth had not come in time. And then Jesus came, and stood before the stone, and said the words that shattered the boundary between life and death: “Lazarus, come forth.”

The Tomb at Bethany

Lazarus lived in Bethany, a small village just outside Jerusalem, with his sisters Martha and Mary. The Gospel of John tells us plainly that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” — one of the few times Scripture names specific individuals as beloved friends of Christ. This was not a disciple following a teacher. This was a friendship.

When Lazarus fell ill, his sisters sent word to Jesus: “Lord, the one you love is sick.” But Jesus did not rush to Bethany. He waited two days. By the time he arrived, Lazarus had been dead for four days. Martha met him on the road with words that were equal parts faith and grief: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

What happened next is the shortest and most devastating verse in all of Scripture: “Jesus wept.” The Son of God, who knew he was about to raise his friend from the dead, stood before the tomb and cried. Not because he lacked the power to act, but because death itself — the suffering it inflicts on the people we love — moved him to tears. He wept not from helplessness but from love.

Lazarus, come forth! — Jesus Christ (John 11:43)

And Lazarus came forth. Still wrapped in grave cloths, still carrying the smell of death, he walked out of the tomb into the light. The crowd that witnessed it was divided — some believed, and some went straight to the Pharisees to report what had happened. The raising of Lazarus became the event that sealed Jesus’s fate. The chief priests began plotting not only to kill Jesus, but to kill Lazarus too, because his very existence was proof that could not be argued away.

After the Resurrection

Scripture says little about Lazarus after Bethany. But tradition fills the silence. According to the ancient sources preserved in both Eastern and Western Christianity, Lazarus was among those persecuted after the Resurrection of Christ. One tradition holds that he was set adrift in a boat with no oars — a common Roman method of exile — and landed on the island of Cyprus.

There, in the coastal city of Kition (modern-day Larnaca), Lazarus was ordained bishop by the Apostles Barnabas and Paul. He served the church in Cyprus for thirty years, shepherding a community of believers on an island that was itself being transformed by the Gospel. He never spoke of his time in the tomb. According to tradition, the only thing that could make Lazarus weep after his resurrection was the sight of unbaptized souls — because he had seen what awaited on the other side.

The Man Who Knew

What makes Lazarus extraordinary is not only what happened to him, but what he carried afterward. He lived the rest of his life as a man who had been dead and knew it. He had crossed the threshold that every human being fears most, and he had been pulled back. Every morning he woke was a morning that should not have been. Every breath was borrowed — not from fate, but from the voice of a friend who loved him enough to weep at his grave and then command death to let him go.

The early Church Fathers saw in Lazarus a living icon of baptism: the old self dies, is buried, and rises to new life. His grave cloths, unwound at Jesus’s command — “Unbind him, and let him go” — prefigure the liberation of every soul set free from sin. Lazarus did not earn his resurrection. He received it. And that is the Gospel in a single life.

A Witness That Cannot Be Silenced

Lazarus’s relics were discovered in Kition in 890 AD, in a marble sarcophagus inscribed with the words “Lazarus, four days dead, friend of Christ.” The Church of St. Lazarus in Larnaca, built by Byzantine Emperor Leo VI, still stands over the site today. In the Orthodox tradition, Lazarus Saturday — the day before Palm Sunday — celebrates the miracle at Bethany as the event that set the final week of Christ’s earthly life in motion.

This is why his story belongs on a billboard. Because the raising of Lazarus is not ancient history. It is the promise that stands behind every Christian funeral, every hospital bedside, every moment of grief when death seems to have the last word. It doesn’t. It never did. A voice once called into a sealed tomb, and the dead man walked out. That voice has not stopped speaking.