"Lord, if you had been here"

They must have been discussing it, going over and over it in their minds and in their conversations, because although the first story presents Mary and Martha as women with different focus points, that day both sisters come to Jesus with the exact same statement: "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."

Jesus, knowing the hearts of all men and all women, hears the questions behind these words. "Why weren't you here? Where were you?"

It was a math problem they had likely gone over again and again: "A man must travel from Jerusalem to Bethany. It is a distance of two miles. Given that he has an entourage of people who travel with him, and the likelihood that word reached him as he was in the middle of speaking to a crowd or performing a work of mercy that should not go interrupted, how long will it take him to arrive in Bethany?"

Surely not two days. Although, as it turned out, it had taken the messenger too long to locate him in the busy capital city. Even had he come the very day he received the message, Lazarus would already have been dead.

"Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." They don't really believe that Jesus needed to hear the news of Lazarus' illness from a messenger. But he wasn't there. Why wasn't he there?

This time, it is so that Lazarus can be brought back from the grave. Yet there were others who died that year in Bethany, other believers, even, who were not miraculously restored to their families. Where was Jesus?

I wonder if the sisters remembered, afterward, perhaps as they stood at the grave of Lazarus for the second time, that one of the names of the promised Messiah was Immanuel.

"God with us."

Which would have answered their question.