The God Who Waits
Jesus stayed two days before he went to Bethany. What that delay says to anyone praying into a silence that has gone on far longer than two days.
There is a sentence in John 11 that is easy to read past, and it is the sentence the whole chapter turns on.
When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was (v. 6).
Jesus is told that a man he loves is dying. He says the sickness is not unto death. Then he does nothing for two days. Not because he has not heard, and not because he is busy. John is explicit that he stayed on purpose.
If you have ever prayed into a silence, you already know why that sentence is hard.
The delay is not a mistake in the story
Most of us have a working assumption that a delay in the answer means something has gone wrong. Either we have not prayed correctly, or we have not prayed enough, or God is not listening, or — the version people rarely say out loud — we are not the sort of person who gets answered.
John will not let that reading stand, because he tells us the delay before he tells us the reason. He wants the reader to sit in the two days first.
And the reason, when it comes, is not that Jesus was indifferent. It is in verse 15: And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe.
What the wait is not
The passage rules out some things that we tend to assume about waiting.
It is not a verdict on your faith. Martha and Mary both say, in effect, you were late. Martha’s line — Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died (v. 21) — is not a model of composed trust. It is grief with an edge on it, and Jesus does not correct her tone. He answers her with himself.
It is not a punishment being served. Nothing in the chapter suggests the family is being taught a lesson through loss. They are not being disciplined. They are being loved in a way that includes the delay.
It is not proof that prayer does not work. The chapter ends with a tomb opening. But it also ends with Lazarus dying again later, because that is what resurrection signs do — they point past themselves. John is not offering a formula. He is showing you who is in the delay.
What the delay made room for
Two days in Bethany bought something that an immediate healing could not.
By the time Jesus arrives, Lazarus has been dead four days. There is no ambiguity left to explain away, no possibility that he was merely sleeping, no space for the careful sceptic to say the illness had turned on its own. The delay removed every escape route, so that what happened next could only be called what it was.
That is worth sitting with. Sometimes the wait is not the withholding of the thing; it is the making of a room big enough for the thing to be unmistakable when it comes.
But notice that this is written afterwards. Nobody in Bethany knew it during the two days. They were not waiting with an explanation. They were waiting with a message they had already sent and no reply they could see.
Psalm 13 was written from inside the wait
Scripture does not pretend this is easy. How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? (Psalm 13:1). That is a prayer, and God saw fit to keep it.
You are allowed to say that. The psalter is full of people who said it, and one of the things John 11 shows is that saying it does not disqualify you from the answer.
Praying while you wait
Three small things that help, drawn from the chapter itself:
- Keep sending word. The sisters did not wait for a better argument to bring to Jesus. They sent the message they had: he whom thou lovest is sick. Name the person, name the need, and keep naming it.
- Say the true thing. Martha said if thou hadst been here. She did not dress up her disappointment as acceptance. Neither should you.
- Hold the question open. Martha had the resurrection filed under “the last day”. Jesus put himself in the middle of her theology and asked her to believe it now, before she could see anything. That is the harder prayer, and it is the one the chapter asks of us.
The wait is real, and it is not short. But the one who stayed two days on purpose is not absent from it. He is the reason it is two days and not two years, and he is already on the road.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain.
