John 11:32-44 (NRSV)
32 When Mary came where Jesus was and
saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my
brother would not have died.” 33 When Jesus saw her weeping, and the
Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and
deeply moved. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to
him, “Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus began to weep. 36 So
the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” 37 But some of them said,
“Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from
dying?”
38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and
a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.”
Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a
stench because he has been dead four days.” 40 Jesus said to her,
“Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” 41
So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I
thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me,
but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may
believe that you sent me.” 43 When he had said this, he cried with a
loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands
and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus
said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
John 11:32-44, part of a story that
begins in verse 1, is the story of Jesus giving life in the story of Lazarus.
The story of the raising of Lazarus is the final and most spectacular of the
seven most fully described public miracles or “signs” performed by Jesus in the
Fourth Gospel.[1]
The other signs are the miracle of the water turned to wine (John 2:1-11), the healing
of the official’s son (4:46-54), the healing of the paralytic by the pool
(5:2-9), the feeding of the 5,000 (6:1-14), the walking on the water (6:16-21)
and the healing of the man born blind (9:1-12). The numbering of signs has led
scholars to posit that there was a source predating the gospel of John, later
incorporated by the evangelist, which described these major public “signs.”[2]
In John, Jesus always performs the miracles in public. John tells us that the
miracles have the purpose that non-believers would believe in him. We see this
in 2:11, where the miracle revealed his glory in a way that the disciples
believed in him. Further, the signs done in Jerusalem lead to belief (2:23).
John has no enigmatic parables. Jesus declares himself publicly. John follows
the miracle of the feeding of the 5000 with the discourse on Jesus as the bread
of life (Chapter 6). John follows the healing of the blind man with the
discourse on Jesus as the light of the world (Chapter 9). Here, we have a
miracle that confirms Jesus as resurrection and life. The story provides a
bridge to the next section of John, the book of glory. It points forward toward
the remainder of the gospel and Jesus’ final glorification. The death and
rising of Lazarus obviously prefigures that of Jesus — though with significant
differences. It also highlights an overarching theme of the “book of glory,”
namely God’s power to glorify Jesus in his death, which leads to faith and life
for his followers.
In my studies of
the Gospel of John, I like to see the links with the Synoptic Gospels. Only
Luke mentions Lazarus (16:19-31), where the question concerns the dead coming
back to life. I find that interesting.
Further, we find the raising of the young man of Nain (Luke 7:11-16) and the
daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:22-24, 35-43). [3]
In both cases, we seem to get a hint of the inner life of Jesus, as we do in
this story as well.
The
figure of Lazarus stands at the summit of several converging trajectories in
the gospel of John. He is fourth in a line of crucial characters — Nicodemus,
the Samaritan woman, the man born blind and Lazarus — through whom Jesus
reveals himself in the first half of the gospel. Jesus’ engagement with each of
these characters consumes the better part of a chapter and brings a distinct
element of his personality into public light. With the story of Lazarus, Jesus
brings his message and his miracles to the boundary of human existence, the
very border between death and life. The reader has known from the beginning
that “life” came into being through him (1:4), but now John makes the point
clear in both word (“I am the resurrection and the life”) and deed (“The dead
man came out”).
32 When Mary came where Jesus was
and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died.” Mary interrupts Jesus on his slow
progression to the tomb because of her overwhelming grief. Her grief unveils
the genuine humanity of Jesus. 33 When
Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, in a
rare moment when a gospel writer lets us see the inner life of Jesus, he was greatly disturbed in
spirit and deeply moved. Jesus joins Mary in weeping in weeping over the
tragedy of death. 34 He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him,
“Lord, come and see.” 35 Jesus
began to weep. Jesus weeps over the power of death itself, the way it cuts
short human life, the way death devastates those left behind to mourn and
lament.[4] 36
Therefore, the Jews said, “See
how he loved him!” They see his tears as a sign of his love. They will see
further evidence of that love. 37 Yet, some of them said, “Could not he who
opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Jesus is
not fighting sad and sorrowing people. He stands with them, sympathetically
bearing the burden of the whole age. However, weeping with them means that
Jesus is fighting for them. Of course, the sheer evidence and extent of that
love is still to come. While his words alone had convinced Martha, it would
take supernatural action to effect faithfulness from Mary and many others who
observed. Even Martha, with her newly strengthened faith, is unprepared for
what follows, and earns a gentle reprimand from Jesus (v.40). At the sight of
the tears of Jesus, the crowd says, "How he loved him." Jesus weeps over the power of death itself,
the way it cuts short human life, the way death devastates those left behind to
mourn and lament.[5]
The simple
miracle story continues in verses 38-39a.
38 Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave,
and a stone was lying against it. 39 Jesus said, “Take away the
stone.”
Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to
him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” 40
Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would
see the glory of God?” The glory of God (verse 4) is the reason for this
miracle. Although Martha has just made a statement of faith in Jesus as
resurrection and life, she remains unpaired for what is to come. The question of Jesus to
those standing outside the tomb encapsulates the challenge of the gospel. 41 Therefore, they took away the stone. Then, Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I
thank you for having heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me,
but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may
believe that you sent me.”
In verses 43-44, we have the conclusion of the
simple miracle story. 43 When
he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” Jesus
echoes Isaiah 49:8-9, where the Lord says to prisoners, “Come out.” He also
echoes his earlier statement that all who are in their graves will hear the
voice of the Lord and come out (5:28-29). The prayer of Jesus shows that the power comes from the
Father to the Son. We now see the divine
purpose. He did not just heal the
body. He brought a new awareness of
eternal life, especially for the family. 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with
strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind
him, and let him go.” By waiting those two days, Jesus did far more for Lazarus than heal his
body of some sickness. Jesus' words to Martha, his compassion toward Mary and
his resurrection of Lazarus brought an entire family into a life of faith that
would take them on to eternal life. Pointing to the burial clothes will remind
us later of the careful placing of the burial clothes of Jesus in the tomb
(20:7). This is the battle of Jesus for the cause of humanity as the
creature of God, ordained by God for life and not for death. When Lazarus hears
it, and does as Jesus commands, it declares the victory of Jesus in this
battle. In this dramatic way, John reveals what all the gospel writers saw
beneath all the events they recorded.[6]
The
story is for "the glory of God."
It is not so much a family crisis as a struggle in the world between
death and sin. It is not so much about
resuscitating a corpse as about giving life to the world. The deeper truth is that apart from God, the
world is a cemetery, but into that world, Christ offers resurrection. There are many touching points with Jesus'
own passion. He is deeply troubled. He weeps.
The tomb is near Jerusalem. The
tomb has a stone over it and someone has rolled it away. Someone removed the burial clothes from one
who was dead. Lazarus left the tomb, but
the price was that Jesus entered it.
John's telling of this story
is crucially important to the theology of the Johannine community. The rich,
tightly woven narrative is heavy with theological overlay, the most central
concern being how believing, reborn Christians are to understand the reality of
physical death within their ranks. The dramatic incident in Bethany allows
Jesus to confront the specter of human death, especially the death of one he
greatly loves, and to demonstrate how Christians may expect to overcome it both
spiritually and physically through the power of Christ.
The bitter confrontation with Jewish unbelief
(10:22-39) precedes this act of self-revelation from Jesus, in a sign that
forms the climax of all the signs by Jesus, the raising of Lazarus. A word of
revelation in the center of the chapter gives it its literal interpretation.
Its Christological and soteriological significance receive brief mention in the
introduction and at the climax of the narrative. Together with the healing of
the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus expresses the central Christological
idea of the fourth gospel, that Jesus is the light and life of the world, as
said in 1:4. Wherever he found the story, the writer has placed this greatest
of signs of Jesus as bringer of life quite deliberately at this point in his
gospel. As the drama of the battle between belief and unbelief reaches its
height, it is a final powerful stimulus for faith, which makes many more people
come to believe in Jesus, so that the Jewish leaders view the swelling flood
with extreme anxiety. This drives them to prepare a counter-attack, and take an
official decision in the council to kill Jesus. In the writer’s deeper vision,
it is no accident that at the moment that the Son of God gives the supreme demonstration
of his power over life, the unbelievers resolve to destroy him and take all the
steps necessary to that end. The path to the cross is marked out in advance,
but it is marked in the plan of God. The raising up on the cross will become
the glorification of God in the Son. The sign of the raising of the dead is
already pointing towards this final glorification, and the high priests
involuntary prophecy shows how human purposes inevitably serve the plan of God.
[1]
Schnackenburg distinguishes between a sayings sources in v. 1, 3, 17-18, 33-34,
38-39, 43-44, and the evangelist's expansion in v. 2, 4-5, 6-16, 19-27, 28-32,
35-38, 39b-42. The original text was a
simple account of the raising of a dead man.
[2] There is a very different approach to
miracles in the gospel of John than there is in the gospel of Mark. In Mark,
Jesus often orders others to be silent after he has performed a healing or an
exorcism, or swears them to secrecy after they have witnessed one of his
miracles (Mark 1:25, 34, 44; 3:12; 5:43; 7:36). In John, the miracles are
always done in public and are said to have been done so that non believers
would believe in him. After he changes the water into wine in chapter 2, we are
told that by doing so he “revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in
him” (2:11). Similarly, the signs done in Jerusalem are said to lead others to
belief (2:23). However, in Mark, Jesus criticizes those who need signs done for
them in order to believe (Mark 8:11-13). Another
difference between Mark and John is the fact that Mark’s Jesus speaks in
parables and is constantly misunderstood by those around him. In fact, the idea
that others do not understand Jesus is one of the major facts pointed out by
Mark by way of explaining why more people did not accept him as the Messiah. In
John there are no parables at all. Jesus declares himself publicly at every
turn, and often follows his miracles with descriptions of his identity that
mirror the miracles just performed. When he heals the paralytic on the Sabbath
he follows this up with a declaration that “My Father is still working, and I
also am working.” In other words, it is lawful for him to heal on the Sabbath
because his work is part of the work of God who is never idle. After the
feeding of the 5,000, Jesus soon declares, “I am the bread of life” (John
6:35), and tells those who ask him for a sign so that they might believe that
he himself is the sign of God’s action in the world (John 6:30-33). Jesus
declares outright that the healing of the man born blind served the purpose of
revealing the work of God (John 9:3), and just before healing the blind man he
declares, “I am the light of the world” (John 9:5).
[3]
Barnabas Lindars, The Gospel of John, 1987: They may not have known
about this miracle. Further, for the purposes of their stories of Jesus, it
became dispensable. Such are the explanations some have offered as to why the
synoptic gospels did not include this story. Clearly, the local early
Christians would have found the miracle occurring in Bethany near Jerusalem to
have great meaning. Yet, the dominant tradition on which the Synoptic Gospels
have their basis focused upon miracles in Galilee. We can observe a similar
process in the case of the Easter tradition. The only regrettable aspect of
John’s work is that it has deprived us of any hope of recovering the truth of what
actually happened.
[4]
Sadly, some interpreters have suggested that Jesus weeps due to the lack of
faith he is witnessing.
[5] Barth
(Church Dogmatics, IV.2, [64.3], 227)
[6] Barth
(Church Dogmatics, IV.2 [64.3], 228)
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