Those of us who are of a certain age can remember giggling when the story of the raising of Lazarus was read out in church and we heard Martha warn Jesus that her brother had been dead for four days: “By now he stinketh” (John 11:39). “Stink” was one of those words you weren’t supposed to use in polite company. (I remember a grammar school teacher rebuking a classmate for describing the “stink” that he had smelled in the boy’s lavatory–but I probably shouldn’t go into details….) Perhaps the verb is still considered improper: here are some euphemisms used in some contemporary translations: “there is a bad odor”; “there is a stench”: “there will be an offensive odor”: “the smell will be awful”; “there will be a bad smell”; “the smell will be terrible”; “he’s already decaying.” “the air is foul now”. But I digress….
Augustine noted that there are three places in the Gospels where Jesus raises the dead and he took them as symbolic of Christ’s rescuing us from our sins. He went into the centurion’s house and revived his son (Mk 5:35-39), and this represents people who have consented to sin in their hearts even if they haven’t yet committed it. He raised the son of the widow of Nain as the boy was being carried out of the house (Lk 7:11-15), and this represents people whose private consent becomes public when they commit it. Lazarus was the most difficult case, because he was already dead for four days and had begun to stink, and he represents the power sin can accrue when it has become habitual, a force so strong that Jesus has to bellow to overcome it.
People who do what is evil entangle themselves in an evil habit to the point that it does not allow them to see that it is evil, and they become defenders of their evil deeds and angry when criticized…. Weighed down by such wicked habits, it’s as if they were buried. What should I say, brothers and sisters? They’re so buried that one could say of them what was said of Lazarus, “He stinks by now.” That stone laid against Lazarus’ tomb is the hard power of habit by which a soul is crushed and can’t rise or breathe again.
But Martha said: “He’s been dead for four days.” And in fact a soul comes to that habit of which I am speaking in four stages. The first is a pleasurable tickling in the heart; the second is consent to it; the third is the act itself; and the fourth is the habit. There are some people who when they encounter unlawful things so dismiss them from their thoughts that they take no delight in them. There are some who experience the pleasure but do not consent to it; their death is not yet complete but in a way has begun. When consent is added to the pleasure, that is already damnation. Then from consent one goes to the act, the act becomes a habit, and one has reason to despair, as it is said: “He’s been dead for four days. He stinks by now.” Then came the Lord, and although all things were easy for him, he showed you some difficulty. He bellowed…, and his loud shout showed the kind of rebuke needed for people hardened by habit. But at the voice of the shouting Lord, the chains of compulsion were broken. (Augustine, Sermon 98, 5; PL 38, 594)
"In verbo veritatis" (2 Cor 6:7) 