Sonia reads the resurrection of Lazarus because Raskolnikov asks her to, and he chooses this passage from the Gospel of John without saying why: it is the account of a man dead four days who leaves the tomb when Jesus calls him, read by a woman to a man who has just said that perhaps there is no God at all.
The scene is in Part Four, at night, in Sonia's room. Raskolnikov presses her about the fate of her stepmother's children until she repeats that God will not allow the worst, and he replies: "Well, maybe there is no God at all." Then he kisses her foot: "It was not before you that I bowed down, it was before all human suffering that I bowed down." When he asks whether she prays much, she answers: "And what would I be without God?" Only then does he ask for the New Testament that Lizaveta had brought her, and for the chapter Sonia had read to Lizaveta, the woman he killed.
Sonia reads trembling, and at the height of the reading she imagines that he, unbelieving like the Jews in the account, will believe right there. She stops at the belief of those who saw what Jesus did, closes the book, and says only that it is all about the resurrection of Lazarus. Raskolnikov replies that he has left his mother and sister and proposes: "Together we are cursed, and together we shall go." Behind the door, Svidrigailov hears everything.
The book does not say what he expected to hear, and the scene allows two readings. In one, Lazarus is Raskolnikov, the dead man who comes out because someone calls him, and the one calling is Sonia. In the other, he is one of those who see and believe, and the miracle is what she does as she reads, her voice breaking, to a man who does not believe. In the Epilogue, her Gospel lies under his pillow, and he still has not opened it: "Love resurrected them," the narrator says, and the reading that would fulfill the promise does not come.