From Fr. Schmemann:

Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, personifies the whole of mankind and also each man, as Bethany — the home of Lazarus, — stands for the whole world — the home of man. For each man was created as a friend of God and was called to this friendship: the knowledge of God, the communion with Him, the sharing of life with Him: "in Him was Life and the Life was the light of men" (John 1:4). And yet this Friend, whom Jesus loves, whom He has created in love, is destroyed, annihilated by a power which God has not created: death. In His own world, the fruit of His love, wisdom and beauty, God encounters a power that destroys His work and annihilates His design. The world is but lamentation and sorrow, complaint and revolt. How is this possible? How did this happen? These are the questions implied in John’s slow and detailed narrative of Jesus’ progression towards the grave of His friend. And once there, Jesus wept, says the Gospel (John 11:35). Why did He weep if He knew that moments later He would call Lazarus back to life? Byzantine hymnographers fail to grasp the true meaning of these tears. "As man Thou weepest, and as God Thou raisest the one in the grave…" They arrange the actions of Christ according to His two natures: the Divine and the human. But the Orthodox Church teaches that all the actions of Christ are both Divine and human, are actions of the one and same person, the Incarnate Son of God. He who weeps is not only man but also God, and He who calls Lazarus out of the grave is not God alone but also man. And He weeps because He contemplates the miserable state of the world, created by God, and the miserable state of man, the king of creation… "It stinketh," say the Jews trying to prevent Jesus from approaching the corps, and this "it stinketh" can be applied to the whole of creation. God is Life and He called the man into this Divine reality of life and "he stinketh." At the grave of Lazarus Jesus encounters Death — the power of sin and destruction, of hatred and despair. He meets the enemy of God. And we who follow Him are now introduced into the very heart of this hour of Jesus, the hour, which He so often mentioned. The forthcoming darkness of the Cross, its necessity, its universal meaning, all this is given in the shortest verse of the Gospel — "and Jesus wept."

As creatures, we cannot escape creation. As a good friend of mine says, "There is no pie in the sky." We don’t get to escape to some other existence through religion, or death. Creation is one, and we are here. God has placed us here. He has made us here. He gives us life here.

But what is this creation we inhabit? What is it really? That ought to be a simple question to answer, but it is not.

First off, God made this world. He made creation orderly and beautiful and good — full of potential. It was a Garden in which man and God could walk together. One imagines God and Adam having long, intimate conversations as they walked in the Garden. How ought Adam to till and keep the Garden? What should the animals be called? How are things going with Eve? (God would ask Eve, when He walked with her, how things were going with Adam.) God and Adam knew each other well, and they kept getting to know each other better. This is the way things ought to have been. This is the way they were meant to be. The Garden is Nature. Adam conversing and growing with God is natural. To walk with God is in Adam’s essential human nature.

Then something happened. Sin entered the Garden. Death entered. The serpent entered. Adam and Eve fell, and a pall descended on everything. God could not find Adam anywhere to walk with him and talk with him. Adam, where are you? God made Adam and Eve garments of skin to cover their nakedness. He told them they would return to the earth. They would succumb to diseases, and their bodies would corrupt. As with Lazarus, creation began to stink. God wept.

But not everything was lost, because God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden and made them work and suffer. He made them beget children to keep the race alive, so that the memories of Adam and Eve would not be forgotten, and so that in time a New Adam and a New Eve might try again. He allowed all creation to fall with them so that it might become for them food. Adam and Eve would need a comfort, a temporary sustenance to survive, even if only for a brief span of years, even if their earthly lives were only as grass.

The world became a comfort, an enticement, something to take the place of the lost Walk with God in the Garden. Adam still carried his essential human nature with him. He still needed something to fulfill himself. God was no longer there, not in the same way, the same intimate way. Adam had become separated from Him and from the Life He offered. So Adam turned to the world. Soon he began worshipping the creature over the Creator. It seemed to him that his life had to come from the world, but the world was reluctant to give it. The life of the world itself grew paltry. God was no longer in it, either. So the world needed to be appeased to give up its meager life to Adam. Adam began to worship it and to appease it, the Sun, the Mountains, the Rivers, the god of rain, the god of harvest, the gods of death and of generation, of fire and of war. Give me life, cried Adam.

Thus the world became what Eve and Adam had chosen for it to be: "pleasing to the eye, and good for food," but at the same time disobedience, and separation from God, and death. "You shall surely die." This world of our choosing is with us even today, even after Christ.

Finally, though, in the fullness of time, the New Adam did come. God sent His Son to bring back fallen Adam and Eve, to comfort them and walk again with them. The world became His Kingdom, a place where Christ can reign again, will one day reign again. Even now it bears the first fruits of His Coming. The Vineyard has at last been visited by its Owner. The wicked Tenants have been given notice. Branches have been grafted back into the vine. They have been pruned and cultivated and given time to bear fruit. Man has again walked with God, and God with man. The Garden returns.

The great challenge of Christian life is to keep straight all four of these worlds: to know and appreciate the beautiful world that God made in the beginning; to see that there is sin and death, that despite its primordial beauty, all creation now "stinketh" because of the fall — and with God to weep over it; to acknowledge the temptation of a world that is "pleasing to the eye" but not good for real food, a world whose appeal is temporary and whose life is meager; finally, above all, to keep one’s eye on the Kingdom, the world as it will become — has already become — once again, creation as restored by Christ, a Paradise in which there is eternal Life, ever-flowing water, burdens cast off, and union with God once again, even as Adam himself never knew.