Loose Them and Set Them Free: Your Role in the Miracle

There is a moment in the Gospel of John that most people rush past on their way to the headline. Lazarus is raised from the dead. Jesus weeps. The stone is rolled away. These are the images that capture our attention, and rightly so. But buried just beneath the surface of this extraordinary account is a command that changes everything about how we understand our purpose as followers of Christ. After Lazarus walked out of that tomb, still wrapped from head to toe in grave clothes, Jesus did not unwrap him. He turned to the people standing nearby and said, "Loose him, and let him go."

That single instruction carries the weight of a lifetime's worth of calling.

Before we get to that moment, we have to sit with the discomfort that leads up to it. When word reached Jesus that his dear friend Lazarus was gravely ill, he did not rush to Bethany. He waited two more days. By the time he arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days.

That number is not accidental. The cultural belief of that era held that the soul could potentially return to a body within three days of death. After three days, hope was finished. The situation was, by every human standard, completely and permanently beyond repair. God did not show up on day one or day two or even day three. He showed up on day four, when every last thread of natural hope had been cut.

This is how God often works. Not because he is indifferent, but because he is establishing something that no human explanation can take credit for. When the miracle comes on the fourth day, no one can say it was a coincidence. No one can say the doctors might have been wrong. The glory belongs entirely to him.

Martha and Mary both met Jesus with the same words: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." There is grief in those words, but there is also a quiet accusation. You knew. You could have come. You did not. This is a prayer many of us have prayed in our own language, in our own seasons of loss. Where were you, God? Why did you not show up when I needed you most?

Jesus does not rebuke them for it. He meets them in it. And then he says something that reframes the entire conversation.

When Martha told Jesus that she knew Lazarus would rise again in the resurrection at the last day, she was not wrong. She had good theology. She had been faithful. She knew the scriptures. But Jesus pressed deeper. In John 11:25-26, he declared that he himself is the resurrection and the life, and that whoever believes in him will live even in death. He was not pointing her toward a future event. He was pointing her to a present person.

This is a distinction that matters enormously. It is possible to know the right things about Jesus and still miss who he actually is. It is possible to be deeply involved in ministry, to show up faithfully, to serve consistently, and still relate to Jesus primarily as a concept rather than as a living, present, active person. Martha believed in the resurrection. She had not yet fully grasped that she was standing in front of it.

Jesus asked her directly: "Do you believe this?" It is the same question he asks every generation. Not do you believe the doctrine. Not do you know the story. Do you believe this, right now, in the middle of your grief and your confusion and your unanswered questions?

When Jesus arrived at the tomb, he told them to remove the stone. This was not a small ask. Moving a burial stone was physically demanding, and by Jewish law, contact with the dead brought ritual defilement. There were real costs to obeying. But the people who felt the inner pull to act went ahead and moved it anyway. Jesus spoke the miracle. Human hands opened the door to it.

Then came the moment that is so easy to overlook. Lazarus walked out, alive, but still completely bound. His hands were wrapped. His feet were wrapped. A cloth covered his face. He was alive but could not yet see, could not yet move freely, could not yet step fully into the life that had just been restored to him. And Jesus said to those standing there: loose him, and let him go.

He did not do it himself. He called the people around Lazarus to do it.

This is where the story becomes personal. When someone comes to faith in Christ, something genuinely miraculous happens. They are made alive. As Paul describes in Ephesians 2:1-10, they were dead in their trespasses, walking according to the patterns of this world, and God, rich in mercy, made them alive together with Christ. That is entirely his work. No human being can take credit for it.

But the grave clothes do not always fall off on their own.

New believers often walk out of their spiritual tombs still wrapped in old habits, old thinking, old wounds, old ways of seeing themselves and the world. They are alive, but they need patient, loving hands to help remove what death left behind. That is the work Jesus assigned to the people standing at the tomb. That is the work he assigns to us.

It requires patience. It requires a willingness to walk alongside someone who may still carry the smell of where they came from. It requires resisting the urge to demand that people clean themselves up before we invite them in.

Ephesians 2:10 makes clear that we are God's workmanship, created for good works that he prepared in advance for us to walk in. The miracle is his. The loosing, the guiding, the nurturing, the loving, that is ours.

The stone has been rolled away. The voice has already called out. Now comes your part. Loose them, and let them go.