What Does Jesus Mean When He Says, "I Am the Resurrection and the Life"?

From the sermon preached on September 27th, 2026

The writer Julian Barnes opens his memoir on death with a line that has stuck with a lot of people who read it: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." It is an honest ache, the sound of someone who has ruled out faith but still can't quite make peace with the silence underneath it. Barnes goes on to argue that death is simply nothingness, and that the only truthful response to nothingness is something like a quiet "oh no." He is trying to be rational about it. He can't quite manage it. Into that exact ache, standing at a friend's grave, Jesus says something Barnes never considered possible: that death does not get the last word, because he is the resurrection and the life.

This past Sunday at Apostles Uptown, Pastor John Starke preached from John 11:17-44 as part of the church's series, The Unavoidable Jesus. The passage is one of the most striking scenes in the Gospel of John: Jesus arrives at the tomb of his friend Lazarus four days after his death, meets the grief of Lazarus's sisters Martha and Mary, weeps, and then calls Lazarus out of the grave.

Before you read further, it's worth sitting with the question the sermon kept circling back to: not just what you believe about Jesus, but what Jesus actually thinks about your death.

When Martha meets Jesus outside Bethany, she is grieving and a little guarded. "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21). When Jesus tells her, "Your brother will rise again," Martha answers the way many of us would at a funeral: "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day" (John 11:24). It's true, and it's also a way of keeping the hope safely in the future, at arm's length from the present grief.
Jesus doesn't leave it there. He answers, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live" (John 11:25). Notice the tense. Martha is talking about a future event. Jesus is speaking in the present tense about himself. This isn't a new idea for him. Earlier in John's Gospel he says that all things were made through him and that "in him was life" (John 1:3-4), that he has "life in himself" (John 5:25), and that he came to give life to the full (John 10:10). He isn't claiming to know a lot about resurrection. He's claiming to be the source of it, the way a seasoned New Yorker might joke, half-seriously, that a certain designer simply is Vogue. Except Jesus means it literally and eternally: nothing outside him gives him life, and everything alive owes its life to him.

One honest step: the next time you catch yourself pushing hope into "someday," ask whether Jesus might be offering you something for today instead.

Here's the part of the story that surprises people. Jesus is about to perform the miracle. He knows Lazarus is coming out of that tomb. And yet, when he sees Mary weeping, "he was deeply moved in spirit and greatly troubled," and then, in the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept" (John 11:33, 35).

That's strange if Jesus is simply managing the moment, waiting to unveil a miracle. But love doesn't work that way. When you truly love someone, your heart gets bound up with theirs. A neighbor's grief three doors down in your apartment building can stay at arm's length. A spouse's grief, a child's grief, a close friend's grief becomes your own. Psalm 56 pictures God this way, counting our tears, keeping them in a bottle. Hebrews calls Jesus a sympathetic high priest, one who feels what we feel. Mary's grief became his grief. That's still true for you. He isn't managing your pain from a safe distance. He's carrying it with you.

Verse 33 says Jesus was "deeply moved in spirit and greatly troubled," and a more literal rendering of that phrase leans closer to provoked, or outraged. Jesus doesn't arrive at the tomb with resigned acceptance. He arrives angry.
That matters, because our culture, ancient and modern, has usually tried to make peace with death by calling it natural. Even the oldest surviving epic we have, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is essentially one long refusal of that idea: the hero's best friend dies, and Gilgamesh spends the rest of the story fighting the fact that he's next. We say death is natural and then spend enormous scientific effort trying to delay it. Jesus doesn't treat death as natural either. He treats it as an intrusion, an enemy, evidence of sin and decay pressing into a world he made good. His anger is not a loss of control. It may be the most honest, rational response to death there is.

One honest step: name what you're actually angry about the next time you grieve, instead of rushing yourself toward calm acceptance.

There's a third layer to Jesus's emotion in verse 33 beyond grief and anger, something closer to dread. Standing at Lazarus's tomb, Jesus is close to Jerusalem, and close to his own. He knows that raising Lazarus will provoke the religious leaders who already tried to stone him at the end of John chapter 10, and that this miracle will be the last straw pushing them toward his arrest and execution. He is not performing a trick from a safe distance. He's tasting what it will cost him to give his friend life. He is not just showing his love to Lazarus by raising him from the grave. He shows it by walking toward his own cross to make that resurrection permanent.

When Lazarus comes out of the tomb, he's still wrapped in grave clothes, hands and feet bound, face covered. Jesus doesn't unwrap him himself. He tells the crowd standing there, "Unbind him, and let him go" (John 11:44). The miracle raises Lazarus. The community sets him free from what death left on him.
That's a picture worth sitting with if you're carrying guilt you've already been forgiven for, bitterness that keeps an old wound alive, or despair that nothing can ever be new again. In Christ, the resurrection is already set in place, but plenty of us still walk around wearing grave clothes. You may need someone else, a friend, a community group, another believer, to remind you out loud: you're free.

One honest step: name one grave clothes habit, guilt, bitterness, or despair, that you're still wearing, and tell one person about it this week.

Apostles Uptown gathers Sunday mornings on the Upper East Side, at Regis High School, 60 East 85th Street, and community groups meet throughout the week across East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, and the Upper West Side. This sermon's questions aren't abstract for people living here. In a city that moves fast and rarely stops to grieve well, where losing someone can mean going right back to work Monday morning with no space to feel it, the claim that Jesus counts your tears and calls death an intrusion, not a fact of life to simply manage, is close to the bone. You don't have to have your theology of death figured out to show up. No performance. Come as you are, grief, doubt, anger, and all.

Julian Barnes wrote that he doesn't believe in God, but misses him. Standing at Lazarus's tomb, Jesus answers that ache directly: not with a doctrine to file away for someday, but with his own presence, his own tears, and his own power, here now. "I am the resurrection and the life," he says. Not I will be. I am.

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