Jimmy Bae
Mar 8, 2026
There's a sweet spot in an Easter egg hunt. Hide the eggs too easy and kids don't care. Hide them too hard and they give up. But when you get it just right, when they have to search a little, the moment they find it actually means something.
I had this thought while hiding eggs for my daughter when she was three. Some volunteers at our church would just chuck eggs across the grass. Kids would sprint out, scoop them up in two seconds, and shrug. Then there were the psychopath volunteers who would literally dig holes in the ground and bury the eggs. That's not hiding. That's cruel and unusual punishment.
But somewhere in the middle, there's this place where the search makes the discovery worth it.
And standing there with a basket of plastic eggs, I got this picture of God. He's not hiding himself from us. He's hiding for us. The silence, the waiting, the seasons where it feels like he's nowhere to be found, those aren't punishments. They're setups.
That's exactly what's happening in John chapter 11.
Why We're in the Book of John
Quick context for anyone catching up. At Beloved, we've been walking through the Book of John together since the beginning. When people asked me early on what kind of church I wanted us to be, I said I didn't care if we had the best worship, the coolest social media, or the biggest community. I wanted us to be known as people who love Jesus like crazy.
And the only way that happens is by seeing how beautiful he is. You don't have to convince someone to love Jesus more if they've actually seen his goodness. John, more than any other Gospel writer, portrays Jesus with this up-close intimacy because he was in the inner circle. So every week, my only job is to make Jesus look more beautiful.
We're now closing out the first half of John, what scholars call the Book of Miracles. And this chapter is the culmination.
When Love Looks Like Doing Nothing
Here's the setup. Lazarus is sick, and he's about to die. He's one of Jesus' closest friends. Him, Mary, and Martha weren't just casual acquaintances. They were likely bankrolling Jesus' ministry. These were wealthy people. Lazarus had his own personal tomb, which was a luxury reserved for the rich. And Mary? She's the one who poured that bottle of nard perfume on Jesus' feet. That perfume, made from a grass harvested in southern India, one drop squeezed out per blade, shipped across the ancient world, was worth somewhere between $200,000 and a million dollars adjusted for inflation.
So when Lazarus gets sick, his sisters send an urgent message to Jesus. "The one you love is dying." And here's where it gets weird.
John writes it like this: "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days."
Read that again. Because he loved them, he did nothing.
That messed with me. But then it clicked. Sometimes God's silence does more for us than his intervention.
The Part of Your Brain That Grows When Things Are Hard
I know that sounds counterintuitive. We live in a culture that wants to eliminate all discomfort. And honestly, I've lived on both extremes. I grew up in an intense charismatic ministry where my favorite verse was "I beat my body and make it my slave" from 1 Corinthians 9:27. I never rested. Every free moment was given to ministry. That part of my brain that handles grit and perseverance? It was like a boulder.
Then I entered a season where everything was soft. All grace, all rest, process your trauma, don't push yourself. And that part of my brain shrank to the size of a pea. I couldn't do hard things anymore. I never did anything I didn't want to do. And instead of feeling free, I became a slave to my own desires.
There's actually brain science behind this. Researchers have found that a specific part of the brain, the part responsible for grit, perseverance, and delayed gratification, literally grows when you do hard things. And it shrinks when you don't.
John Piper once put it this way: the world defines freedom as doing what you want to do. But true Christian freedom is doing what you want to do and wanting what you ought to do. The truly free person actually wants righteousness from the deepest part of their heart.
So when Jesus delays two more days, he's not being cruel. He's growing something in the people he loves. The fruit of faith can only grow in the soil of silence. My daughter can only develop grip when I let her struggle. And you and I can only develop real faith, not in the moments when every prayer gets answered, but in the moments when we have nothing and choose to keep going anyway.
Two Sisters, Same Words, Different Hearts
Here's where it gets really interesting. When Jesus finally shows up, both Martha and Mary say the exact same thing: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died."
Same words. Totally different hearts.
Martha meets Jesus first, and she's composed. She gives theologically correct answers. "I know he'll rise again on the last day." She's saying all the right things. But if you read between the lines, she's guarded. She's managed. She's holding something back.
I think a lot of us do this with God. We grew up in churches where if you asked a hard question, someone shut you down. "Don't you dare doubt. Don't you dare be disrespectful to God." So we learned to repress everything. We say the right words, but our hearts are miles away. And then when a real crisis hits, all that unprocessed disappointment comes flooding back, and people walk away from their faith entirely. They never actually dealt with it. They just buried it under polite theology.
My best friends used to tell me this all the time. "Jimmy, I feel like I don't know you. You're so fake." And they were right. We'd have prayer meetings in high school, and everyone would share deep, heavy stuff. Then it'd get to me and I'd say something like, "I just want to love God more." And they'd be like, get out of here, dude.
I had trained myself my whole life to be composed because I thought it made me likable. In reality, it made me unreachable.
That's Martha. She's polite, but she's far.
Mary, on the other hand, is completely undone. She falls at Jesus' feet, weeping, saying the same words but with her whole chest. It's almost disrespectful. It's messy. It's raw. And it's exactly what moves the heart of God.
God's One Weakness
Psalm 51 says it's a broken and contrite spirit that God will never deny. If God had a weakness, I think that would be it. A broken, honest prayer from one of his kids. He can't resist that.
And it's not just Mary. Look at the Psalms. Psalms 88 and 39 are the only two songs out of 150 that don't end on a hopeful note. Psalm 88 literally ends with, "Darkness is my closest friend." No resolve. No happy ending. And God chose to put those prayers in his book. He's saying, I'm not just the God of people who have it together. I'm the God of the honest, the broken, the ones whose prayers don't sound pretty.
Look at Job. The man complained to God constantly. His prayers were messy and sometimes borderline disrespectful. But you know what? He kept talking to God. And at the end of the book, God rebukes Job's three religious friends, the ones who showed up with all the correct answers, and tells them to ask Job for forgiveness.
I know that feeling. When I was going through my worst seasons, panic attacks, anxiety, a soul so empty I couldn't raise my hands during worship, the people who helped me most weren't the ones with answers. It wasn't the guy who said, "Have you tried reading your Bible more?" It was the person who looked at me and said, "Me too."
Henri Nouwen once said that the greatest gift we can give a struggling friend isn't solutions or answers. It's our presence. Just sitting beside them and saying, me too.
Keep Talking to Him
Here's what I want you to take from this. Keep talking to Jesus when he's not speaking. Keep talking to him when it feels like he's hiding. Keep talking to him even if your prayers feel angry or ugly or theologically incorrect. Don't take your hands off the wheel.
Psalm 40:1 says, "I waited upon the Lord, and he heard my cry." It never says how long that person waited. But they waited, and eventually God turned around.
I'm learning this with my own daughter right now. She used to tell me when she spilled milk or made a mess. But the way I reacted, all that frustration, taught her to hide things from me instead. And one day I looked at her face and thought, she's not going to talk to me when she's a teenager. I'm going to lose her in ten years if I keep this up.
I prayed that night and told God, take away everything else, but let me have a good relationship with my adult daughter. Let that be the measure of a faithful life. And I started shifting how I parent. I told her, when you get in trouble, I don't want your first thought to be, "I can't tell my dad." I want it to be, "I need to call my dad." Keep talking to me. Even when you think I'll be mad. Keep talking to me.
I think God is saying the same thing to us through this passage.
I Am the Resurrection
The last thing John is doing in this chapter is foreshadowing the cross. When Jesus decides to go back to Bethany, he knows it's dangerous. That was the first place in his ministry where people tried to kill him. Thomas is so convinced Jesus is walking into death that he tells the other disciples, "Let us also go, that we may die with him."
Jesus can only raise Lazarus because he himself is willing to trade his life for death. And every physical miracle in John points to a spiritual truth. He feeds the 5,000 to show he satisfies spiritual hunger. He heals the blind man to show he cures spiritual blindness. And when he says, "I am the resurrection and the life," it's not just about bringing Lazarus back. He's saying, I heal spiritual death. I will give my life in exchange for yours.
When I was praying through this passage, I got honest with God. I said, if you're the resurrection, why didn't you resurrect John the Baptist? Why didn't you resurrect my dad? And I started going down the list of people I wished he'd bring back.
Then I felt him ask me, "If I brought your dad back, what would you do?" And I said, I'd hug him. I'd show him my daughter. I'd show him my wife. I'd ask him if he was proud of me.
And I felt Jesus say, everything you're hoping to get from that moment, you can find in me.
There are two Greek words for life: bios, which is biological, material life, and zoe, which is this heavenly, eternal quality of living meant for right now. When Jesus says "I am the resurrection and the life," he's talking about zoe. He's not just promising something in the distant future. He's offering a quality of life, his presence, his words, his nearness, that's available today.
I sat in that prayer time and felt the Holy Spirit speak over me the things I'd been waiting to hear from my dad. You're doing a good job. You're a good dad. That passage came alive to me in a way I wasn't expecting.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
Two things from this chapter. First, be honest with God. Whatever you've been hiding behind composure and correct answers, he's inviting you into a real conversation. Ugly prayers count. Broken prayers count. The ones that don't resolve at the end count.
Second, he is the resurrection. Not just someday. Now. Whatever you're grieving, whatever you're longing for, whatever words you're desperate to hear, he's not silent because he doesn't care. He's working something in the waiting.
If you're in the New York City area and you're looking for a church that's okay with messy, honest faith, we'd love to have you at Beloved New York. Come as you are. Seriously.
