Lazarus, Come Forth: A Study of John 11

John 11 is the longest single story in the Gospels. It takes forty-four verses to tell, it stops the plot of John’s Gospel dead and then restarts it in a different direction, and it contains the shortest verse in the English Bible. It is also one of the easiest passages in scripture to flatten into a slogan.

So this is a slow read. Everything below stays inside the King James text, and where the passage is silent we will say so rather than fill the gap. This study belongs with the BibleInVideo retelling of the story, and the songs that grew out of the chapter are on Alive Again.

The story, without decoration

Lazarus of Bethany is sick. His sisters — Martha and Mary, the same household that appears in Luke 10 — send word to Jesus with a message that is almost an argument: Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick (v. 3). They do not ask for anything. They name the relationship and let it speak.

Jesus answers in a way that must have been hard to hear. This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby (v. 4). Then he does the thing that gives the whole chapter its shape: he stays where he is for two more days (v. 6).

By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been in the grave four days (v. 17). Martha goes out to meet him and says the line most of us would say: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died (v. 21). It is not a polite sentence. It is grief with an accusation inside it, and Jesus does not rebuke her for it.

“I am the resurrection, and the life”

The centre of the chapter is a conversation, not a miracle. Martha moves from what she knows about the last day — I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day (v. 24) — to a claim about the present:

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?

— John 11:25-26, KJV

Note what Jesus does with her theology. He does not correct it; he puts himself in the middle of it. Martha had the doctrine of the resurrection filed away as something that happens later and elsewhere. Jesus answers that the resurrection is standing in front of her, asking her a question.

That question — Believest thou this? — is the one the passage puts to the reader, and it is asked before anyone has seen anything.

“Jesus wept” — and what it is not

Verse 35 is two words in English and one word in Greek: Jesus wept. It is quoted so often that it has almost stopped meaning anything, usually as a sentimental aside about how nice it is that Jesus has feelings.

Read it in its place and it is sharper than that. The Greek word here is different from the one used three verses earlier for the mourners, who are described with the ordinary verb for loud, public wailing. Jesus does not wail. He weeps quietly, at the tomb, in front of people, having already told everyone present that he intends to raise Lazarus.

That is the difficult part. He knows how the afternoon ends, and he still grieves. The passage never treats his foreknowledge as a substitute for sorrow. If anything it makes the sorrow more deliberate.

For anyone who has been told that grief is a failure of faith, this is the evangelist’s answer: the one who is about to call a dead man out of the tomb is standing at the same grave crying.

What the passage does not say

Honest reading also means noticing the questions John leaves open.

It does not explain why Lazarus and not someone else. Bethany’s graveyard was not emptied. The chapter gives one family a reunion and offers no formula for why. It does not say the sisters prayed hard enough, or that other mourners did not.
It does not treat disappointment as unbelief. Martha and Mary both say, in effect, you were late. Both of them are met with the presence of Jesus rather than a lecture about their tone.
It is not a promise that every grave opens now. Lazarus is raised, and Lazarus dies again; John is not selling a this-life exemption. The sign points past itself, to the death and resurrection the Gospel is walking toward.
It does not make the miracle a private transaction. Loose him, and let him go (v. 44) is said to the bystanders. The man is alive, and he still needs people to unwrap him.

Where it sits in John

The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and last of the signs in the first half of John’s Gospel, and it is the one that ends the argument. In verse 53, from this day forward, the council determined to put Jesus to death. The sign that gives a family back its brother is the same event that seals the Son of God’s own death.

John makes sure you feel the cost of that. Bethany is not a happy ending tucked in before the passion. It is the hinge.

The album Alive Again walks the same path in order, from Lazarus’ Hymn through Garden Tomb to Table at Emmaus — useful if you want to feel how much of the chapter happens before the stone moves.

Questions for study, alone or in a group

Martha says if thou hadst been here. Where is that sentence true of your own life right now?
Jesus asks Martha to believe before she sees. What does believing before look like where you are?
Jesus wept while knowing the outcome. What does that say about how he regards grief?
Who are the people in your life who could be asked to loose him, and let him go — to help someone walk out of what has bound them?
Verse 4 says the sickness is for the glory of God. How do you hold that alongside the fact that the sisters still lost four days with their brother?

Praying it

Read verses 1 to 6 slowly, and stop at the delay. Name the place in your life where you have sent word and heaven has gone quiet. Then read verse 35, and leave it there without moving on to the miracle.

The chapter can wait. It waited two days itself.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version, which is in the public domain.