If You Had Been Here
John 11:1-45

Jijo Kandamkulathy CMF
Claretian Missionaries

She runs out to meet Him on the road. This is so characteristic of Martha—the woman of action, the one who gets things done while her sister sits quietly at the Lord’s feet. But today her running is different. There is an edge to it, a wound. The words burst forth before she can compose them, raw and unfiltered: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

If you had been here. Those five words carry the weight of every disappointed prayer, every moment when heaven seemed silent while earth crumbled. They are the words of every Catholic who has ever whispered, “Where were you, Lord? If you truly loved me, why did you let this happen?” Martha is us. And she is not alone in this cry. The disciples are crossing the sea when a violent squall descends upon them. The waves are crashing, the boat is taking on water, and Jesus is asleep. And they wake Him with a cry that echoes across the Gospels: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” Do you not care, Lord? Look at what is happening to us! If you were here, if you were paying attention, this would not be happening!

What we witness in both Martha and the disciples is the heart’s desperate attempt to hold onto God when everything falls apart. We carry two things inside us: the belief that God loves us, and the experience that life hurts us. When these two collide, something has to give. And often, like Martha, we conclude that God must have been absent. It is easier to believe He was not there than to face the possibility that He was present and this still happened. We search for a reason, a cause, someone to blame—and God becomes the safest target because He is big enough to absorb our anger.

Let us be honest with one another: Martha represents every believer caught in the terrible tension between faith and the reality of death. The disciples represent the same struggle, only now the death is their own, imminent and terrifying. They believe—oh, they have left everything to follow this man! But in the storm, all that faith seems to dissolve in the face of raw fear. “We are perishing!” they cry, and beneath those words lies the same accusation Martha will later voice: You could have prevented this. Why did you let it happen?

Then comes the moment that exposes the depth of Martha’s struggle. Jesus stands before the tomb and commands, “Take away the stone.” And Martha—faithful, believing Martha—objects: “Lord, by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been dead four days.” Here is the heart protecting itself from hope. Hope is dangerous. Hope leaves us vulnerable. If she allows herself to believe that something might happen, and then nothing happens, the disappointment will be unbearable. So she falls back on what she can see, what she can smell, what she knows to be true: four days, decay, death. It is safer to expect nothing than to risk hoping for everything.
Four days. The soul hovered near the body for three days, but by the fourth day, all hope was gone. Death had won. Decay had begun. The stench was undeniable proof that this was final. Martha represents every Catholic who has stood at the edge of a grave and thought, “This is too far gone. Even God cannot fix this.” We believe in resurrection at the end of time. We believe in miracles we read about in Scripture. But when faced with the actual stench of our own losses—the lingering odor of dreams that have died, relationships that have decomposed, the empty chair at the table—we hesitate. Lord, it’s been too long. The situation is too far gone. Even you cannot—And Jesus stops her. “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

This is the heart of the matter. Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. The text emphasizes this three times. And because He loved them, He stayed where He was for two extra days. The delay was not a failure of love but an expression of it. He had something greater in mind than preventing death—He intended to conquer it. In the boat, the disciples see only the storm. They do not see that the sleeping Jesus is about to reveal Himself as Lord over wind and wave. They want a savior who prevents suffering, but He wants to give them something greater: a savior who is present in the suffering and who has power over it. “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” He asks them after He calms the sea.

We struggle with this because we want a God who prevents suffering, not one who transforms it. We want a God who shows up on our schedule, not One whose glory operates on a different timeline. At the cross, the question “If you had been here, this would not have happened” reaches its most agonizing pitch. There, God Himself cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and in that cry, He gathers up all our questions, all our doubts, all our accusations, and transforms them from within.
So what is the practical solution to this dilemma of balancing faith and death? Notice that Jesus does not rebuke Martha for her doubt. He does not say, “How dare you question me!” Just as He did not rebuke the terrified disciples—He calmed the storm first, and then gently questioned their faith. He leads Martha gently from the faith she has to the faith He wants to give her. He takes her correct words—”I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day”—and draws them into the present moment: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he dies, will live.” The solution is not to suppress our questions but to bring them to Jesus. It is not to pretend we don’t smell the stench of death but to hear His voice commanding us to remove the stone anyway. It is to stay in conversation with Him even when our first words are words of disappointment and fear.

Martha shows us the way. She speaks her pain honestly. She remains in dialogue. She listens when Jesus challenges her limited vision. And then she makes the most extraordinary confession of faith in the entire Gospel: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.” This is not the faith that has never doubted. It is the faith that has doubted and chosen to believe anyway. It is the faith that has smelled death and still trusted the God of life. It is the faith that has said “If you had been here” and then added “but even now I know.” It is the faith of disciples who have cried out “We are perishing!” and then watched the wind and waves obey the voice of their sleeping Master.

Do what Martha did. Do what the disciples did. Run to Jesus with your honest questions, wake Him with your honest fears. Let Him lead you from the faith that merely recites words to the faith that confesses Him as Lord in the face of death and storm. And when He commands you to remove the stone—to face the stench, to confront the reality of your loss—obey Him, trusting that His glory awaits on the other side of your obedience. For the One who called Lazarus forth from the tomb still stands at the entrance of every grave we dig, and His voice has not lost its power. The One who stilled the storm with a word still sits in the boat with us, and He has not fallen asleep to our fears. Lazarus, come out! And to you, dear doubting soul: Unbind him, and let him go. Peace, be still.

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