It is very easy to move too quickly past the beginning of this story about Jesus and Lazarus. We rush past the beginning because the rest of the story appears, at first glance, to be far more fascinating. Indeed, most of the time it is what Jesus did all the way at the end of the story that galvanizes our attention. There, after all, is the main drama, since it was at the end of the story that Jesus performed his most astonishing miracle: raising Lazarus, deceased four days, from the dead. Jesus had done a number of other miracles in the Gospel of John, of course. He had turned water into wine, healed a paralyzed man and restored sight to a man blind from birth. But to raise someone from the dead? This was breathtaking, unheard of, a remarkable sign of the inbreaking of the eternal, an ant…