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Evidence · Case 06 · Problem of Evil

The Gospel of John, the raising of Lazarus

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At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, with the man’s sisters weeping around him, Jesus weeps too, even though he is moments away from raising Lazarus back to life. He knows the ending is good and he grieves anyway. The verse reads simply, “Jesus wept.” It is the shortest verse in most English Bibles, though in the original Greek it runs to three words, so keep the “shortest verse” line tied to English translations.

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Objections & responses

Doesn’t “God suffers with us” only address the emotional pain of evil, without answering the philosophical problem of evil?

Fair objection: presence is a pastoral answer, not a philosophical one. The philosopher J. L. Mackie argued that an all-powerful, all-good God is logically inconsistent with the existence of evil at all, and William Rowe argued the weaker evidential point that the sheer amount of seemingly pointless suffering counts as evidence against such a God. Neither is answered just by saying God is present in it.

The intellectual replies live elsewhere. Against the logical problem, Alvin Plantinga’s free will defense is widely regarded, even by non-theist philosophers, as showing God and evil are not strictly inconsistent, since a world of free creatures able to choose good is worth the risk that they choose evil -- that case is made in a separate section of this page. Against the evidential problem, a limited observer is not well placed to judge that a given evil is genuinely pointless. This page offers presence rather than a full theodicy on purpose, not because the formal objection has no answer.

Jesus deliberately delayed two days so that Lazarus would die (John 11:6, 15), then wept. Isn’t weeping over a death you allowed for a demonstration a picture of a God who stages grief rather than shares it?

This is the hard reading of the chapter, and it should be faced. John says Jesus delayed so that the disciples would believe, and that he was deeply moved at the tomb, a word that implies anger as well as grief. The text presents both: a purpose behind the delay and genuine sorrow at what death does. The Christian reading is that this is the whole problem in miniature. God permits what he grieves, for the sake of a good that requires it, and does not pretend the grief is unreal. That is not comforting on its own; it is only comforting if the good is real and the death is undone, which is what the chapter goes on to show.

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