Book of John — Session 11: Lazarus

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Session 11 of 21Book of John

Lazarus

Chapter 11; Death, weeping, and a sign that begins the end

Where this chapter sits

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Right now: John the Baptist is beheaded (AD 29)

Setting: Bethany near Jerusalem

By Bea Zalel

John 11

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At this time a man named Lazarus was sick. He lived in Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.
(Mary, whose brother Lazarus was sick, was to anoint the Lord with perfume and wipe His feet with her hair.)
So the sisters sent word to Jesus, "Lord, the one You love is sick."
When Jesus heard this, He said, "This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it."
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.
So on hearing that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was for two days,
and then He said to the disciples, "Let us go back to Judea."
"Rabbi," they replied, "the Jews just tried to stone You, and You are going back there?"
Jesus answered, "Are there not twelve hours of daylight? If anyone walks in the daytime, he will not stumble, because he sees by the light of this world.
But if anyone walks at night, he will stumble, because he has no light."
After He had said this, He told them, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to wake him up."
His disciples replied, "Lord, if he is sleeping, he will get better."
They thought that Jesus was talking about actual sleep, but He was speaking about the death of Lazarus.
So Jesus told them plainly, "Lazarus is dead,
and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him."
Then Thomas called Didymus said to his fellow disciples, "Let us also go, so that we may die with Him."
When Jesus arrived, He found that Lazarus had already spent four days in the tomb.
Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, a little less than two miles away,
and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them in the loss of their brother.
So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet Him, but Mary stayed at home.
Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.
But even now I know that God will give You whatever You ask of Him."
"Your brother will rise again," Jesus told her.
Martha replied, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day."
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies.
And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?"
"Yes, Lord," she answered, "I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."
After Martha had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside to tell her, "The Teacher is here and is asking for you."
And when Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to Him.
Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met Him.
When the Jews who were in the house consoling Mary saw how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.
When Mary came to Jesus and saw Him, she fell at His feet and said, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died."
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.
"Where have you put him?" He asked. "Come and see, Lord," they answered.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews said, "See how He loved him!"
But some of them asked, "Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind also have kept Lazarus from dying?"
Jesus, once again deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.
"Take away the stone," Jesus said. "Lord, by now he stinks," said Martha, the sister of the dead man. "It has already been four days."
Jesus replied, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
So they took away the stone. Then Jesus lifted His eyes upward and said, "Father, I thank You that You have heard Me.
I knew that You always hear Me, but I say this for the benefit of the people standing here, so they may believe that You sent Me."
After Jesus had said this, He called out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"
The man who had been dead came out with his hands and feet bound in strips of linen, and his face wrapped in a cloth. "Unwrap him and let him go," Jesus told them.
Therefore many of the Jews who had come to Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in Him.
But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done.
Then the chief priests and Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, "What are we to do? This man is performing many signs.
If we let Him go on like this, everyone will believe in Him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation."
But one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all!
You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."
Caiaphas did not say this on his own. Instead, as high priest that year, he was prophesying that Jesus would die for the nation,
and not only for the nation, but also for the scattered children of God, to gather them together into one.
So from that day on they plotted to kill Him.
As a result, Jesus no longer went about publicly among the Jews, but He withdrew to a town called Ephraim in an area near the wilderness. And He stayed there with the disciples.
Now the Jewish Passover was near, and many people went up from the country to Jerusalem to purify themselves before the Passover.
They kept looking for Jesus and asking one another as they stood in the temple courts, "What do you think? Will He come to the feast at all?"
But the chief priests and Pharisees had given orders that anyone who knew where He was must report it, so that they could arrest Him.

Inline text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain. Compare with the John 11 chapter in your preferred translation via the link above.

Theme

Bethany was a real village, not a stage set. It sat about two Roman miles east of Jerusalem on the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives, on the road down to Jericho. The modern Arabic name al-Eizariya still preserves "Lazarus" inside it, sixteen centuries after Greek was the area's working language. Mary, Martha and Lazarus appear to have been moderately comfortable people. They owned a house large enough to host Jesus and his disciples (Luke 10:38-42 and Matthew 21:17). They had access to a rock-cut tomb-cave, which was a noticeable expense in a region where most poor families used simple ground burials. At the end of chapter 12 a member of their household will pour out perfume worth a year's wages. They were probably mid-tier landowners, neither destitute peasants nor Jerusalem aristocracy. A Jewish reader hearing Bethany would picture a specific kind of village, close enough to the city to feel its pull, far enough to keep its own rhythms. A Gentile reader, especially one who had walked the road, would picture olive terraces and white limestone tombs cut into the hillsides above the village.

Same-day burial was the rule in the warm Judean climate. The body was washed by family members and wrapped in linen strips with aromatic spices layered between them. It was then carried in procession to a rock-cut tomb and sealed inside with a rolling stone. Professional mourners, almost always women, were hired even by poor families. Jeremiah 9:17-18 names them and calls the wailing women to come. Public grief was loud, communal and structurally required. The first seven days, the shiva, were the period of deepest mourning. The bereaved sat on the ground with faces uncovered while neighbors brought food. Then came thirty days of less intense mourning. Then a quieter year for parents. Infant mortality in this world ran somewhere between thirty and fifty percent. Every adult who heard this gospel read aloud had buried multiple siblings, often children, often a parent in adulthood. When verse 19 reports that many of the Jews had come from Jerusalem to console Martha and Mary, it is describing a scene the original audience had personally lived dozens of times.

Then a small chronological detail in verse 17, easy to miss in English. Lazarus has already been in the tomb four days. The rabbinic tradition recorded later in Genesis Rabbah 100:7 held that the soul lingered near the body for three days. It hoped to reenter and only departed on the fourth. Whether or not this belief was fully formalized in Jesus's lifetime, the popular sense of "three days, then it is really over" was already in circulation. Lincoln calls Lazarus's four-day delay a "deliberate over-shooting." Jesus waits not because he does not care. He waits because he wants the sign to be unambiguous. By the fourth day, no observer could later claim the man had merely been in a coma. A Jewish reader catches the chronology instantly and hears Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones, behind it. A Gentile reader catches the obvious fact of death. The layered theology only opens once the rabbinic context comes in.

Verses 33, 35 and 38 use three different Greek verbs and they matter. "Embrimaomai," first used to describe a horse snorting, here means to be deeply moved or to be inwardly enraged. "Tarasso" means troubled, agitated, shaken. John uses the same verb again in chapter 12:27 and chapter 13:21 for Jesus's deepest emotional disturbances, the kind that come before the cross. "Dakruo" is the simple verb for shedding tears. So when verse 35 records "Jesus wept," the shortest verse in the English Bible, it is the visible surface of an emotional storm three verbs deep. Jesus is not gently moist-eyed beside the tomb of a friend. He is shaking with anger and grief at death itself, the enemy he has come to undo. Brown calls this the closest the four gospels come to revealing the felt cost of incarnation. God in flesh weeps at the grave of a man he loved.

The chapter ends not with celebration but with a Sanhedrin meeting. The Lazarus sign, the most dramatic Jesus has performed, triggers the political calculation that will finally kill him. Caiaphas, high priest that year, speaks the line John wants the reader to remember: "It is better that one man should die for the people, than that the whole nation should perish." John then steps out from behind the curtain in verses 51 and 52 to tell us Caiaphas did not say this on his own. As the sitting high priest he prophesied, without knowing it, that Jesus would die for the nation and gather God's scattered children into one. Caiaphas's pragmatism is unintentional theology. Carson notes that John tracks the conspiracy plotline back to exactly this meeting. The leaders are so threatened by demonstrated life-giving power that they decide to kill the life-giver. From this chapter on, the gospel runs in a single direction.

Supporting cross-references

Genesis Rabbah 100:7 →Jeremiah 9:17-18 →Ezekiel 37 →Luke 10:38-42 →Matthew 21:17 →John 12:27 →John 13:21 →

Discussion questions

Bethany was a particular village with olive terraces and limestone tombs, not a generic backdrop. What changes for you when you read the Lazarus story not as a parable but as a story set in a place you could walk to in less than an hour?
Public, communal, loud grief was the cultural norm of 1st-century Judea and almost every adult listener had carried out the rituals more than once. What does it tell you about your own grief practices that this story expects mourners to come in numbers and stay for days?
Lazarus's four days in the tomb are deliberately past the rabbinic line where hope was considered finished. Where in your life have you set a deadline past which you stopped hoping? What would it cost you to keep listening for Jesus's voice after that deadline has passed?
Three Greek verbs, none of them gentle, sit behind the two-word English sentence "Jesus wept." How does it change your picture of God to imagine him shaking at the grave of a friend before he raises him?
Caiaphas spoke a true sentence by accident, while doing politics. Have you ever watched someone speak more truth than they intended? What does that suggest about the way God can work even through hostile institutions?

Lazarus

John 11

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Discussion questions

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