The Delay That Wasn't Neglect: What Jesus's Wait Teaches Us About Love

From the sermon preached on September 20, 2026

James Baldwin once wrote, in The Fire Next Time, that the Lord never seems to get there when you want him to, but when he arrives, he's always right on time. It's a line about waiting on something you can't control or rush, whether that's an overdue answer, a diagnosis, or just a prayer that hasn't been resolved yet. The frustrating part isn't only the waiting. It's not knowing whether the delay means something is wrong, or whether it means nothing at all. That tension sits at the center of a story in the Gospel of John where Jesus hears that a friend he loves is dying, and does not go.

This past Sunday at Apostles Church Uptown, Pastor John Starke preached "Love's Delay," part of the church's ongoing series through the Gospel of John, "The Unavoidable Jesus," from John 11:1-16. Jesus receives word that Lazarus is sick, and instead of leaving immediately, he stays two more days where he is. Before we get to the miracle itself, which comes next week, it's worth sitting with the wait, because Jesus's behavior here is nearly as surprising as the resurrection that follows it.

Before the sermon gets to Lazarus at all, it starts somewhere else: with the question of what kind of God we're even talking about. In an ancient pagan worldview, the gods were competing, moody, and had to be managed through the right sacrifice at the right time, an arbitrary universe where the best you could hope for was a good transaction. In a modern materialist worldview, we're just conveniently arranged atoms, chemicals and electrons, which makes it hard to ground love, meaning, or justice in anything real. Even a deistic view, a God who set the world in motion but stands at a distance, can explain order and design, but not love.

The biblical view is different from all three. It's a world that has order, that can be studied and reasoned about, but it's also filled with presence. Psalm 25 describes God's ways as "steadfast love and faithfulness" (Psalm 25:10), which means God isn't whimsical or absent. He intervenes. He's present. But if that's true, why does it often feel like he waits? Our prayers go unanswered. Our longings go unfulfilled. Christians have wrestled with that exact tension for centuries, and John 11 puts us right inside it, in the story of a God who loves deeply and still, somehow, delays.

When Mary and Martha send word that "he whom you love is ill" (John 11:3), the natural expectation is that Jesus leaves right away. Instead, John tells us plainly, "So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was" (John 11:6). That small word "so" is doing a lot of work. It reads as cause and effect: because Jesus loved them, he stayed.

The distance itself explains part of the strangeness. Bethany was about 95 miles (150 kilometers) from where Jesus was staying, and a traveler on foot in that era could cover roughly 20 to 25 miles (40 kilometers) a day, which meant the trip took three and a half to four days either way. Lazarus apparently died not long after the message was sent. So even if Jesus had left the moment he heard, Lazarus would still have been dead for close to two days by the time he arrived. The miracle was always going to happen after death. The only question was how long after.

By the time Jesus arrives, it has been four days, long enough that the body had begun to decompose, which is part of why the crowd resists when Jesus later asks for the stone to be rolled away. Scholars have connected the four-day delay to an ancient belief, recorded in the rabbinic text Leviticus Rabbah, that a soul lingered near the body for three days after death before departing once decay set in. Whether or not that specific belief was in Jesus's mind, the effect of his timing is the same: no one watching could later claim Lazarus had simply fainted or been misdiagnosed. The delay didn't make the suffering mean less. It removed every alternate explanation for what came next.

The story opens with intimacy, not theology. Mary is identified as the one who anointed Jesus's feet with perfume and wiped them with her hair (John 11:2), an act so personal that it made some onlookers visibly uncomfortable elsewhere in the Gospels. This is a household where Jesus is family, not a teacher passing through.

That intimacy is part of why the sisters' message lands the way it does: "Lord, he whom you love is ill." A cynic could read that as favoritism. Doesn't Jesus love everyone equally? He does. But there's a difference between knowing that in general and experiencing it up close. It's the same dynamic behind the author of this Gospel referring to himself only as "the disciple whom Jesus loved," not because the others were loved less, but because nearness to Jesus tends to produce exactly that feeling of being singled out. The longer you know him, the more specific his love feels, even though it was never exclusive.

This shapes how the sisters approach him, and it's meant to shape how the reader approaches him too. They don't come with a formal petition. They come on the basis of being loved: "he whom you love." In a city that runs on transactions, whether it's a landlord, a job review, or a subway swipe, that's a different posture for prayer. Coming to God because you've earned a response is a different thing entirely from coming to him because you already are loved.

Verse 4 gives Jesus's own explanation, at least in part: "This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it." A more literal reading of that verse is that the illness will not "finally" lead to death, which matters, because Lazarus does in fact die. Jesus isn't promising the absence of death. He's promising that death won't have the last word. Later, in verse 14, he adds, "For your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe."

That could land strangely with the disciples. They had already followed Jesus for three years. Wasn't their belief established? Martin Luther's line applies here: a Christian is always becoming a Christian. Salvation isn't a single transaction that ends the story. It's the start of a long road of deepening trust, and Jesus is inviting his closest followers into a kind of faith they hadn't needed yet, the kind that can hold on when the outcome isn't visible.

Psalm 25 gives language for that exact posture. David prays, surrounded by enemies, "Make me to know your ways, O Lord. Teach me your paths" (Psalm 25:4). David already had access to God's written commands. What he's asking for isn't information. It's the ability to walk faithfully through circumstances he can't control or predict. That's the tension every believer eventually meets: can I trust him in the situations that go beyond the situations where I already know how to trust him? For a lot of people in this city, that's not an abstract question. It's a diagnosis you didn't expect, a lease that fell through, a relationship that ended without warning, a job search stretching past a year, and it's fair to still wonder in the middle of it whether God has actually forgotten you.

This is where the sermon pushed past the miracle itself. Jesus didn't travel to Jerusalem only to resurrect Lazarus and comfort two grieving sisters. That was the first stop. He went to Jerusalem to die for them, and for us, only a few chapters later. The disciples even try to stop him from going, since people had just tried to stone him there: "Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?" (John 11:8). Thomas's response is almost resigned: "Let us also go, that we may die with him" (John 11:16).

Think of a parent who saves the best gift for last on Christmas morning. The earlier presents are real and good, but they aren't the point. A child unwrapping a shirt is meant to look past the shirt to what's still under the tree. In the same way, every good gift in this life, a steady job, a marriage, a healthy child, is real and worth gratitude, but it's a blip compared to what Christ's death and resurrection accomplished. If that's true of the gifts, it's also true of the losses. Suffering is meant to be seen through, not just endured. Your calculation of God's love can't be made only through the lens of your circumstances. It has to be made through the lens of the cross too. Mark 10:29-30 promises that whatever is surrendered for Christ's sake will be returned many times over, not despite the loss, but through it.

Lazarus's death and resurrection don't stand alone in this story. Bethany sits right next to Jerusalem, and Jesus knows that walking toward his friend also means walking toward his own arrest. So Lazarus's story gets placed deliberately inside the larger story of Jesus's own death and resurrection, only a few chapters away. Mary and Martha's grief, and by extension your grief and mine, gets folded into that same larger arc. Diminishments become enlargements, not because the pain wasn't real, but because it isn't the final word.

If any of this sounds familiar—the waiting, the unanswered messages from God, the sense that you're being asked to trust something you can't see the end of—you don't have to sort it out on your own. Apostles Church Uptown gathers Sunday mornings on the Upper East Side at Regis High School, 60 East 85th Street. Community groups meet throughout the week in East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, and the Upper West Side: small groups of people trying to walk through exactly these kinds of impossible-feeling circumstances together. Come as you are, mid-question, mid-delay, mid-whatever you're currently waiting on.

The disciples thought Jerusalem meant the end of Jesus's ministry. It wasn't. It was its most meaningful moment. His death didn't diminish his power, it detonated it into resurrection, first for Lazarus, and then, in the fullest sense, for everyone whose story gets folded into his. Whatever you're waiting on right now, the delay is not proof that he has stopped loving you. All his ways, even the confusing ones, are steadfast love and faithfulness.

Did this raise questions about who Jesus is and whether he can be trusted? Taking the next step starts with a simple visit. Plan your visit below:

Or start with our weekly newsletter, which follows this sermon series and shares about the life of our church. Sign up here.