"18 Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, 19 and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. 20 So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. 21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”"
John 11:18-26
Jesus' tremendous words in 25, 26, have been encased in a kind of reverential awe by our very familiarity with them, and we tend to miss the absolutely tremendous and even shattering thing they are saying to us. Resurrection is not a conception, it is Jesus. And what is being said is this: the last day had suddenly become transplanted into the present. There is a sense in which the whole gospel belongs to this unique kind of phenomenon, and it is this that explains the amazing things that Jesus did. That is why we are not to look for raisings from the dead in the here and now. This was but a token. The fact that Jesus was there was sufficient in itself to ensure Lazarus's being brought back from the dead, and this was the earnest and harbinger of what was one day to be and what one day will be. The 'token-ness' of what happened to Lazarus is seen in the fact that the raising of Lazarus was not a resurrection from the dead as Jesus' resurrection was, but only a resuscitation - not indeed in the sense of reviving someone from unconsciousness, for Lazarus was really dead - that is to say, he was brought back to the status quo, back to the same life as he had known before. But when Jesus died and rose again, He came back a new Jesus, with a spiritual body. And His rising was not a return to the status quo before the cross but rather an advance to an entirely new position. He was now alive to die no more. But this could not be said of Lazarus; and there is no warrant for our supposing that he did not die later on a second time, doubtless in a ripe old age. For him, the real resurrection was yet to be. What he experienced was a token of the coming glory.