163: Tom Rundel: Power Has No God: The Raising of Lazarus

Mar 25, 2026

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Jesus is a wanted man. He’s been run out of Jerusalem twice, nearly stoned to death, and is hiding in the wilderness when word arrives: your friend Lazarus is dying. What he does next—and how long he waits before doing it—will raise more questions than it answers. In this message from John 11, Tom Rundel explores the theology of delay, the geography of exile, and the difference between the kind of love that shows up when it’s convenient and the kind that enters a tomb. Grounded in the Greek text, Black theology, liberation thought, and honest pastoral experience, this sermon asks: Where does God actually live? And who is supposed to do the unbinding?

Key Take Aways

God refuses the abstraction. The God of Israel knows proper names and local addresses. When the text moves from 'a certain man was ill' to naming Lazarus and his town and his family, it is making a theological claim: the God of Scripture sees specific people in specific places, not categories of suffering.
Bethany is not incidental—it is the gospel. The town where Jesus performs his greatest miracle is the town built to house people politely exiled from the seat of power. God doesn't anointed in Jerusalem's temple. God is anointed in the group home for the sick and the marginalized. This is not the consolation prize of the gospel. It is the gospel.
Phileo love has a ceiling. Tribal love—built on shared connection, affinity, and mutual benefit—withdraws when you become inconvenient, too loud in your grief, too different in your evolution. When Lazarus became sick and dependent and unable to reciprocate, Phileo couldn't hold him. It never can.
Agape is different in kind, not just degree. Agape love is not built on what you share with the other person. It is built on the character of the person who loves. It moves toward the other at personal cost. It transforms the identity of the one who receives it. According to philosopher John Vervecky, this is Christianity’s singular contribution to the evolution of human moral consciousness.
The delay is not a bug in the story. Jesus knew. Jesus loved. Jesus stayed. And Lazarus died anyway. The text doesn't resolve this—it sits inside it. The invitation is not to find a theological answer to the delay but to examine what kind of love we actually want: a controlling love that prevents suffering, or a humble love that enters grief and stands at the tomb.
'Jesus wept' is not a footnote. It is the theological center. Embodied compassion precedes resurrection. God does not manage the moment from a safe distance. God enters inside it. And when Jesus says 'I am the resurrection and the life,' the 'I am' is the divine name—not a future promise but a present-tense encounter.
We build our own Bethanys—communal and interior. Communities build systems that push the sick, the poor, the doubting, and the different to the margins and call it order. Individuals exile parts of themselves they fear won't be accepted. The story of Lazarus says: may it not be that way.
The miracle belongs to God. The unbinding belongs to us. Jesus raises Lazarus. Then he hands the work to the community: 'Unbind him and let him go.' The church is not the source of resurrection life. It is the community that removes the grave clothes—of injustice, exclusion, shame, and old systems of merit—from the people God has already made alive.
The kingdom doesn't arrive in halls of power. Every time Jesus escapes Jerusalem and lands somewhere else, the pattern is the same: the place of power cannot receive what love is doing. The kingdom rises from the margins—from Bethany’s humble streets, not Jerusalem’s religious machinery.
What looks like the space between death and resurrection is actually the condition for growth. The old framework has collapsed. The new one has not yet arrived. Most of our faith operates in that threshold. It is not an obstacle to growth. It is the condition of it.

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