John 11 - The New International Commentary
1 The introduction of Lazarus with the words, “Now there was a certain man* who was sick, Lazarus from Bethany,” recalls two similar introductions earlier in the Gospel. In Capernaum “there was a certain royal official whose son was sick” (4:46), and at the pool of Bethsaida “a certain man there who was thirty-eight years into his sickness” (5:5). Here as before, the Gospel writer is less than specific about the nature of the “sickness,” but in contrast to the two preceding instances the “sick man” is named.* More than that, he is identified in relation to someone with whom the readers of the Gospel are expected to be familiar, someone named “Mary,” who had a sister, “Martha.” Given those names, anyone familiar with Luke’s Gospel will remember Luke 10:38–39 as well, where Jesus entered “a certain village, and a certain woman by the name of Martha received him, and her sister was called Mary.” John’s Gospel presupposes here an acquaintance, if not with Luke’s Gospel per se, at least with Luke’s story (or some story) about these two sisters and their “village.” The village is now identified as “Bethany,” and Lazarus too is identified, not immediately as their brother, but first simply as someone from their village.*
P. Going to Bethany (11:1–16)
Now there was a certain man who was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, from the village of Mary, and Martha her sister. And it was Mary, who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick. So the sisters sent to him, saying “Lord, look, one whom you love is sick.” And when he heard it, Jesus said, “This sickness is not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Then, as soon as he heard that he was sick, he remained in the place where he was two days. Next after this he says to the disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.” The disciples say to him, “Rabbi, just now the Jews were seeking to stone you, and you are going back there?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of the day? If someone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if someone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”
These things he said, and after this he says to them, “Lazarus, our friend, has fallen asleep, but I am going that I might wake him up.” So his disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will get better.” Now Jesus had been speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking of natural sleep. So then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus died, and I am glad for your sake, so that you might believe, that I was not there. But now, let us go to him.” So Thomas, the one called Didymos, said to the fellow disciples, “Let us go too, that we might die with him.”
Jesus is still “across the Jordan” (10:40), where “many believed in him” (10:42). There he receives news of the sickness of his friend Lazarus, in Bethany near Jerusalem (11:3). From the start, Jesus promises that the story will not end in death, but will turn out to “the glory of God” (v. 4). The question is whether or not he will put his own life in danger by returning to Judea. The passage invites comparison with 7:1–13, where his brothers urged him to go to Judea and he finally went, but on his own initiative and only after a delay. Here, after a two-day delay, he announces his intention to go back there, and his disciples urge him not to, because of the danger (vv. 7–8). He insists that they are in no immediate danger (vv. 9–10), reasserts his intention to go (v. 11), and again invites them to join him (v. 15). Still unconvinced, they join him nonetheless (v. 16), and with that, disappear from the story.
2 “Mary,” in turn, is identified as the one “who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair,” and almost in the same breath we learn that “it was Mary … whose brother Lazarus was sick” (v. 2, italics added). Mary is mentioned not just because she and Lazarus lived in the same village, but because Lazarus was her own brother (and therefore Martha’s as well). Anyone reading the Gospel for the second or third time will notice that the reference to Mary “anointing the Lord with perfume” anticipates a story to be told in the next chapter (see 12:3), but what is the first-time reader to make of it? It makes no sense at all to such a reader, unless the Gospel writer is assuming some familiarity with a narrative other than his own, just as in the preceding verse he seems to assume familiarity with some kind of story about “Mary and Martha.”
There are two such stories in the canonical Gospel tradition, one in Luke 7:36–50 and one in Mark 14:3–9 (paralleled in Mt 26:6–13). In each of these, the woman who anoints Jesus is anonymous, but the second is located specifically in Bethany, and, perhaps more significantly, is said to be a story destined to be told and retold (see Mk 14:9 and Mt 26:13). Readers acquainted with the telling of that story in some form—not necessarily Mark’s version, or Matthew’s—would be able to appreciate the Gospel writer’s comment that the woman who anointed Jesus at Bethany was in fact none other than Mary, sister to Martha, probably familiar as well from another story now found in Luke, and that the “sick man” here at Bethany was in fact their brother. A small world indeed! Still, there are discrepancies. The anonymous woman in Mark and Matthew anoints Jesus’ head, not his feet, with perfume (see Mk 14:3 and Mt 26:7), and consequently nothing is said about her “wiping his feet with her hair.” Those very details, however, are present in Luke’s story (set not in Bethany of Judea, but in Galilee, in the house of a Pharisee named Simon) about a prostitute who abruptly brought in “an alabaster jar of perfume,” stood behind Jesus weeping and “began to wet his feet with her tears, … wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (see Lk 7:37–38, NIV). The story to which John’s Gospel refers (for the full story, see 12:1–8) preserves the setting of Mark’s account, yet with a number of details preserved not in Mark or Matthew, but in Luke’s story about the prostitute.* This suggests that John’s Gospel is drawing not on any one Gospel’s account, but on one of the many retellings to which Jesus refers in Mark 14:9 and Matthew 26:13. He offers no hint that the woman who anointed Jesus was “a woman who had lived a sinful life” (Lk 7:37, NIV), and he differs from both other accounts in giving her a name and placing her in a family that Jesus knew well (Lk 10:38–42) and “loved” (see vv. 3, 5). The point of the notice is simply to inform the reader who Lazarus was and why his sickness matters.
3 The story of Lazarus, the “certain man who was sick” (v. 1), is linked to Jesus at his retreat across the Jordan by a notice that “the sisters sent to him, saying, “Lord, look, one whom you love is sick” (v. 3). We are not told how they knew where Jesus was, nor are we introduced to the messengers. Nor do the sisters ask Jesus in so many words to come. Instead they content themselves with a simple statement of fact, not unlike his mother’s remark at the Cana wedding that “They have no wine” (2:3). Their comments to Jesus later on (see vv. 21 and 32) reveal that their message was indeed (like his mother’s) an implied request. They did expect him to come, and sooner than he did, but the wording of their message reflects a certain almost familial intimacy, and a confidence that he would know what to do. It stands in striking contrast to the very explicit plea of the royal official at Capernaum, a stranger to Jesus, who said, “Lord, come down before my little child dies!” (4:49). Lazarus is not named, but identified simply as “one whom you love.”* The masculine pronoun is expected to make clear to Jesus that Lazarus is meant. He is the first individual Jesus is explicitly said to have “loved” in this Gospel, although “Martha and her sister” are added almost immediately (v. 5), and one of his disciples is singled out in later chapters as one “whom he loved” (13:23; see also 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20).*
4 On hearing the message, “Jesus said, ‘This sickness is not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified.’ ” To whom was he speaking? Above all, to the reader of the Gospel, but to whom within the actual narrative? Possibly to his disciples, although at this point there is no evidence that his disciples are even present. They have not been mentioned since 9:2, and do not make an appearance here until verse 7. He could have been speaking to the “many” new disciples who had “believed in him” here across the Jordan (10:42), but there is no way to verify this, for nothing more is said about them. More likely, his words represent an answer to the message he has just received, an answer sent back by messenger to the two sisters in Bethany. This too is unverified for the moment, but appears to be verified later on, when Jesus reminds Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” (v. 40). The only place he could have “told” her such a thing was here, with the assurance that her brother’s sickness was not “toward death,* but for the glory of God.” Then, explaining what “the glory of God” means, he continues, “so that through it [that is, the sickness] the Son of God might be glorified.”
There is more here than the sisters can hope to understand, and much to misunderstand. On the face of it, the promise that Lazarus’s sickness was not “toward death” seemed to imply that he would not die, when in fact he would die, and may have been already dead (see vv. 11–14).* Jesus will resolve this issue with Martha later (see vv. 25–26), but for the moment at least his words are misleading. The sisters, as practicing Jews, would presumably have understood “the glory of God,” and Martha at least will shortly demonstrate a knowledge that “the Son of God” is Jesus (see v. 27). But what would they have made of the prospect that he would be “glorified”* (v. 4), much less that it would happen because of their brother’s sickness? Jesus has promised nothing of the kind before. Only the Gospel writer, in one narrative aside, has mentioned his “glorification” (see 7:39, “because Jesus was not yet glorified”), and only a few remarks in passing at the Tent festival (7:18; 8:50, 54) have even hinted at a mutual “glorification” of the Father and the Son. Jesus will make it all clearer later on (see 12:23, 28; 13:31–32; 17:1, 4–5), but for the time being it is a riddle even to the first-time reader of the Gospel, and much more so to Martha and Mary. The missing link is the thought that Jesus’ “glorification,” like his “exaltation” or “lifting up” (3:14; 8:28; 12:32–33), comes to realization paradoxically in his death on the cross (see 12:23–24).* Ironically, the sickness that Jesus says is not “toward death” as far as Lazarus is concerned will in the end result in his own death, and consequently in his “glorification”—for “the glory of God.”
5 Like his reply to his mother at the Cana wedding (2:4), Jesus’ reply here (v. 4) could suggest that he was content to let matters take their course. But this is no more the case now than it was then. He does plan to take action, but in his own time and his own way. He will do so, the Gospel writer assures us, because he “loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (v. 5). The comment reinforces and validates the message of the sisters that “one whom you love is sick” (v. 3),* making it clear that Jesus loved not only Lazarus but the two sisters as well. Initially, Mary was introduced first and then Martha in relation to her, because Mary was presumed to be known to the readers on other grounds (see vv. 1–2). But now that this has been established, Martha is mentioned first and Mary only as “her sister,” without repeating the name. Lazarus is named last because Jesus’ love for him is already a given (v. 3), and the accent is now on Jesus’ response to the communication just received from the sisters. Of the two, possibly Martha was presumed to have been primarily responsible for the message to Jesus because he says to her later, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” (v. 40).
6 The comment that “Jesus loved” the sisters and Lazarus (v. 5) was necessary in part because what comes next could suggest the opposite. On hearing that Lazarus was sick, Jesus “remained in the place where he was two days” (v. 6). Why the delay, if Jesus “loved” them? Part of the answer, as we have just seen, is surely his determination not to have his hand forced by the wishes of others (besides 2:4, see also 7:6–9). Moreover, anyone who knows the end of the story might well suspect that he waited until Lazarus had died so as finally to raise him from the dead instead of merely healing him, thus adding to “the glory of God.” This appears to be confirmed on his arrival when first Martha (v. 21) and then Mary (v. 32) say to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” and some of “the Jews” who came to comfort them complain that Jesus, having opened a blind man’s eyes, could have “made it so that this man would not die” (v. 37). Yet when Jesus arrives at Bethany, Lazarus is already “four days in the tomb” (v. 17). Even if he had left immediately, and therefore arrived two days sooner, Lazarus would have been at least two days dead.* Still more to the point, the healing of Lazarus seems not to have depended on the actual presence of Jesus, given the precedent of the healing of the royal official’s son (see 4:50). If Jesus could heal a total stranger from a distance, why not a dear friend?
The point of the delay, therefore, must lie elsewhere. The notice is very precise, both as to time and place: “Then … he remained in the place where he was* two days.” “The place where he was” is clearly “across the Jordan, … the place where John was first baptizing,” where Jesus had “remained” already for an indefinite length of time (10:40; that is, Bethany: see 1:28), and where “many came to him” and “there” believed (10:41–42). The interval of “two days” recalls Jesus’ visit to Sychar in Samaria, where the Samaritans who had just “believed in him” (4:39) then “asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.”* The question there was why Jesus left after the “two days.” The question here is why he waited “two days” before leaving. What the two passages have in common is a possible obligation on Jesus’ part to stay on for a measurable length of time (however brief) to nurture the faith of “many” (4:39; 10:41) who “believed in him.” That is, Jesus seems to have “entrusted himself” to the Samaritans at Sychar and to these believers “across the Jordan” here in a way he did not to those whose faith he did not accept as genuine (see 2:24–25). These ties cannot be broken instantly, even though both the itinerant character of Jesus’ ministry,* and here more specifically Jesus’ love for “Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (v. 5), dictate that they must in fact be broken. Consequently, Jesus “remained in the place where he was,” but for only “two days.”
7–8 After the two days, we read, “Next after this he says to the disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea’ ” (v. 7). This is the only place in the Gospel where the question of going to Judea or Jerusalem comes up in connection with something other than one of the Jewish festivals. The command, “Let us go,”* is one that Jesus will repeat more than once as his ministry draws to a close (see v. 15; also 14:31), each time summoning his disciples to a decisive crisis or confrontation (see also Mk 14:42).* Perhaps sensing this, they say to him, “Rabbi, just now the Jews were seeking to stone you, and you are going back there?” (v. 8). This is the first we hear of “the disciples” being present with Jesus “across the Jordan.” Clearly, “the Twelve” who have been his disciples all along are meant (see 6:70), not the “many” who have just now believed (10:42).* This is evident both from Jesus’ language, “Let us go back* to Judea,” implying that they had been there before, and from their awareness that “just now the Jews were seeking to stone you” (see 10:31). The reader learns (belatedly) that “the Twelve” had been with Jesus all along, even though not mentioned.* As for the “many” who believed in Jesus “across the Jordan,” like the Samaritans at Sychar they will not be heard from again.
Here as elsewhere “the Jews” are the Jewish religious authorities, but with a geographical reference as well: Jesus should hesitate to go back to “Judea,” his disciples are saying, because “the Jews”* are seeking to take his life. Even though “the Jews” challenged him in Galilee as well (6:41, 52), only in Judea (more specifically, Jerusalem) have they tried to kill him (see 5:18; 7:1; 8:37, 40, 59; 10:31). To go back there is to put his life in danger. Unlike his brothers in Galilee, who urged him to “Leave here, and go to Judea” so as to “reveal yourself to the world” (7:3–4), his disciples fear for his safety—and possibly their own. Ironically, if Lazarus’s illness is indeed “for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4), the advice of Jesus’ unbelieving brothers would have been more appropriate!
9–10 In his longest speech so far here on the other side of the Jordan, Jesus replies, “Are there not twelve hours of the day?* If someone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if someone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” On the face of it, this is simply a long and elaborate way of saying, “My hour has not yet come” (2:4; see also 7:30 and 8:20). At the same time it echoes what he said to these same disciples earlier in the presence of the man born blind, about the need to “work the works of the One who sent me as long as it is day. Night is coming when no one can work” (9:4). The point is the same here. The “hour” of Jesus’ death is drawing ever nearer. When it is finally announced (12:23, 27; 13:1), it will come as no surprise but as something signaled well in advance. But until then, Jesus is perfectly safe. Just as at the Cana wedding, there is still time to act (see 2:4), and just as in the case of the man born blind, there is still “work” to be done (see 9:4–5). Only when “night” comes (see 13:30) is Jesus in danger.
But is this the full extent of what he is saying? The reader will notice that he drives the point home not with the customary “I” pronouncement (such as “My hour has not yet come”), but with a kind of parable, centering not on himself but on “someone” or “anyone” (v. 10).* What is true of his mission, he implies, is true of everyone. A person who walks in daylight can see where he is going and will not stumble, but a person who walks at night is at risk because “the light is not in him.”* Once the pronouncement is set free from its present context, it is no longer about Jesus (or at least not just about him), but about the disciples themselves, or about anyone who hears his message. As he told them earlier, “Night is coming when no one can work” (9:4b, italics added). Later, in a very different setting, and with “light” and “darkness” rather than “day” and “night” as the operative metaphors, this interpretation will assert itself: “Yet a short time the light is in you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you, and the person who walks in the darkness does not know where he is going” (12:35). The notion of “walking in darkness” or “in the light” (see 8:12; also 1 Jn 1:6–7; 2:11) introduces ethical connotations which are not present here in connection with “walking in the day” or “in the night.” Here, Jesus is speaking of ordinary sunlight, “the light of this world,” not “the Light of the world” as he claimed to be in his own person (see 8:12; 9:5). His disciples could infer from his language that they too were safe for the time being, until their own appointed “hour” of danger and possible death (see 16:2, 4, 21).
11 Jesus’ speech continues, but the Gospel writer is careful to create an interval separating the metaphor he has just used (vv. 9–10) from the one he will now introduce: “These things he said,* and after this he says to them, ‘Lazarus, our friend, has fallen asleep,* but I am going that I might wake him up’ ” (v. 11). The designation of Lazarus as “our friend”* echoes the message from the sisters that “one whom you love is sick” (v. 3), but the pronouncement makes no sense when taken literally. If Lazarus were merely sleeping, he would be awake by the time Jesus arrived at Bethany, and would not need Jesus to wake him! Jesus’ language is no more realistic here than in the house of Jairus in Mark when he said of Jairus’s daughter, “The child is not dead, but sleeps” (Mk 5:39). As in that case, the reader is expected to understand that “sleep” is a metaphor for death. Jesus is announcing his plan to raise Lazarus from the dead. Sleep was a familiar metaphor for death in the ancient world even when no resurrection was expected, and it becomes all the more so in Judaism and early Christianity in light of a firm resurrection faith.* The principle that “he himself knew what he was going to do” (6:6) is presumed to be still in effect.
12–13 Like those who were present at the raising of Jairus’s daughter (see Mk 5:40), Jesus’ disciples take the reference to “sleep” literally: “Lord,* if he has fallen asleep, he will get better” (literally, “he will be saved”).* That is, sleep will be good for him, and he will recover. Jesus will not have to risk his life by going to Judea (see v. 8). The Gospel writer intervenes in his customary way to explain what may have been obvious to most readers: “Now Jesus had been speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking of natural sleep.”* For the moment, readers of the Gospel—even the less perceptive ones who needed the narrative aside—are one step ahead of the disciples within the story.
14–15 The disciples are quickly brought up to speed, as “Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus died’ ”* (v. 14). “Plainly” or “openly,”* translated elsewhere as “publicly” (see 7:4, 26), refers here to literal as opposed to metaphorical speech (see 10:24; also 16:25, 29, where it is explicitly contrasted with speech “in parables” or metaphors).
What he says next is not so clear, either to the disciples or to the reader: “and I am glad for your sake, so that you might believe, that I was not there” (v. 15).* He seems to be assuming what Lazarus’s sisters will tell him when he arrives (vv. 21, 32), that if he had been with Lazarus in Bethany, Lazarus would not have died, and he is “glad” that this was not the case—that is, that Lazarus did in fact die. Jesus is “glad,” he tells the disciples, not for Lazarus’s sake nor for his own, but “for your sake,” and he explains immediately what he means by this: “so that you might believe.” The disciples have “believed” before (2:11; 6:69), but he addresses them as if he wants them to “believe” now for the first time.* In the subsequent narrative, the disciples are never explicitly said to “believe” (in fact, they are not even said to be present), but others do believe: first Martha (v. 27), and then “many of the Jews” who had come to comfort her and her sister (vv. 42, 45; see also v. 48).* Jesus’ rather obscure pronouncement (v. 15) must be read in light of the equally mysterious message he sent back to the sisters earlier: “This sickness is not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4). Jesus is “glad” he was not “there”* because he knows that if he had been present he would not have been willing to allow his friend to die. From a distance he had a choice. He could either have healed Lazarus as he healed the royal official’s son (4:50), or he could have allowed nature to take its course. He chose the latter, knowing that the death of Lazarus had a dual purpose: first, “so that … Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4), and then, as far as the disciples are concerned, “so that you might believe” (v. 15). These purposes can only come to realization if death is not the end of the story—that is, if Lazarus rises from the dead, as Jesus implied when he said, “Lazarus … has fallen asleep, but I am going that I might wake him up” (v. 11). In such a case, Lazarus’s illness is not after all “toward death,” but “for the glory of God,” just as Jesus promised (see v. 4).
Without pausing to find out whether or not the disciples have grasped all this, Jesus concludes with something they will have no difficulty understanding: “But now,* let us go to him”* (v. 15), echoing verse 8, “Let us go back to Judea.” The choice of words is striking. He does not call his disciples to go to Mary and Martha to comfort them, but “to him,” that is, to Lazarus himself, as if he were not dead.* Again, Jesus’ language is consistent with—if it does not actually require—a clear intention to raise Lazarus from the dead.
16 As in 6:68, the disciples respond through a spokesman, not Simon Peter this time but someone not named before, “Thomas, the one called Didymos” (v. 16).* “Didymos” meant “twin,” but nothing is made of the name.* Only later is Thomas further identified as “one of the Twelve” (20:24). Here he speaks not to Jesus but “to the fellow disciples.”* “Let us go too, that we might die with him.” Thomas proposes, echoing Jesus’ words, “Let us go to him” (v. 15). The command, “Let us go too,” sounds strangely redundant, as if Thomas were somehow speaking to a different group, that is, “we too”* in addition to Jesus and those he has just addressed.* But no other group is present. Thomas and his “fellow disciples” can hardly be distinguished from “the disciples” mentioned in verses 7, 8, and 12.* Therefore Thomas is addressing the same group, seconding what Jesus has just said—yet with a shocking difference. Instead of simply “going to” Lazarus for an undisclosed purpose (as in v. 15), Thomas urges them to go “that we might die with him.”*
Die with whom? With Lazarus, or with Jesus? Commentators almost unanimously agree that Thomas is urging his fellow disciples to die with Jesus.* A few admit that a reference to Lazarus is “grammatically possible” even though “highly improbable.”* In fact, however, the reference to Lazarus is more than “grammatically possible.” It is, if not grammatically certain, at least the more natural way of reading of the text. The reasons are, first, Thomas’s stated intent “that we might die with him” (v. 16) echoes Jesus’ announcement, “Lazarus died”* (v. 14). Despite the presumed danger (v. 8), nothing has been said explicitly about Jesus “dying.” Second, the pronouns in Jesus’ pronouncement and that of Thomas are the same, and the reader has a right to expect the same antecedent. Jesus urged that the disciples go “to him” (v. 15), that is, to Lazarus, and Thomas wanted them all to die “with him” (v. 16). Moreover, in the next verse we will learn that when Jesus arrived in Bethany he found “him* already four days in the tomb” (v. 17). If the first and third of these pronouns refer clearly to Lazarus, it is unnatural to assume that the middle one abruptly refers to Jesus! Consequently the conventional wisdom of commentators should be reversed. It is “grammatically possible” that Thomas speaks of dying with Jesus, but more likely that “with him”* means with Lazarus.
If Thomas is referring to Lazarus, what does it tell us about Thomas and his faith? Obviously it puts him at odds with Jesus’ opening statement that “This sickness is not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4). As far as Thomas is concerned, the sickness of Lazarus is “toward death,” both for Lazarus himself and for Jesus and the disciples—consequently not “for the glory of God.” His is a counsel not of faith but of unbelief and despair, for he has failed to grasp either the prospect that “the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4), or the meaning of Jesus’ promise that “I am going that I might wake him up” (v. 11).* So despite his words, “Let us go too,” which imply that they did accompany Jesus to Bethany, he and his fellow disciples disappear at this point and are not seen again until Jesus withdraws to a town called Ephraim near the desert, where he remained “with the disciples” (v. 54). Jesus had expressed to them the hope “that you might believe” (v. 15), but nothing is said of their faith (or even their presence) at the raising of Lazarus. Jesus’ hope is fulfilled instead by Martha (vv. 27, 40), and by “many of the Jews” who had come to comfort her and her sister Mary on their brother’s death (see v. 45). They, not the disciples, “believed.”
17 Nothing is said of the actual journey to Bethany. Only a participle* signals that “Jesus had come” there, and no mention is made of Thomas and the other disciples. On his arrival, Jesus “found him [that is, Lazarus] already four days in the tomb.”* This can only be read as a kind of heading for the whole section to follow, at least up to verse 39.* Jesus cannot have come immediately to the tomb, for as late as verse 34 he is still asking, “Where have you laid him?”* The point is simply to set the stage for the eventual raising of Lazarus. In case we forget we will be reminded of it just before the miracle, when Martha says to Jesus at the tomb, “Lord, already it stinks, for it has been four days!” (v. 39).
Why the mention of “four days,” not once but twice? Commentators often cite a Jewish tradition that “For three days [after death] the soul hovers over the body, intending to reenter it, but as soon as it sees its appearance change, it departs.”* The tradition is late, and not widely attested, but in the earlier oral law, if a body was to be identified, it had to be done within three days of death, on the theory that otherwise the changes produced by decay would preclude certainty.* It is doubtful that such traditions shed much light on the present passage, or would even have been familiar to readers of John’s Gospel. If the intent of the reference was to certify that Lazarus was truly dead, the detail of “four days” seems both confusing and unnecessary. Confusing because a Christian reader might be prompted to ask, “Was Jesus not truly dead because he was raised within three days?” And unnecessary because the reality of Lazarus’s death is nowhere an issue within the story. Not only has Jesus pronounced him dead, and that “plainly” (v. 14), but he is, after all, “already in the tomb,” a detail well beyond what is told either in Mark’s story of Jairus’s daughter (Mk 5:21–43) or Luke’s account of the raising of the widow’s son at Nain (Lk 7:11–17). One may assume that he would have been just as dead after two days, or one, as after four. The best explanation for the accent on “four days,” therefore, is that this is simply the way the story was remembered and handed down. But from a literary standpoint, the notice also serves to prepare the reader for Jesus’ stark confrontation with death as decay and uncleanness when he finally stands before the tomb (see v. 39).
Q. The Raising of Lazarus, and Its Consequences (11:17–54)
So, when Jesus had come, he found him already four days in the tomb. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some fifteen stadia away. And many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary, that they might comfort them about the brother. So Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, met him, while Mary was sitting in the house. Then Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now, I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”
And having said this, she went and summoned Mary her sister, and told her privately, “The Teacher is here, and is summoning you.” And she, as soon as she heard, got up quickly and was coming to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha met him. So the Jews who were with her in the house and were comforting her, when they saw that she had risen quickly and gone out, followed her, thinking that she was going to the tomb to cry there. Then Mary, as soon as she came to where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” So Jesus, as soon as he saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, got angry in the spirit and shook himself. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. Then the Jews were saying, “See how he loved him.” But some of them said, “Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind man have made it so that this man would not die?” So Jesus, again angry within himself, comes to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus says, “Lift the stone.” The sister of the deceased, Martha, says to him, “Lord, already it stinks, for it has been four days!” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” So they lifted the stone, but Jesus lifted his eyes upward and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. And I knew that you always hear me, but I said [it] for the sake of the crowd standing around, so that they might believe that you sent me.” And when he had said these things, he shouted in a great voice, “Lazarus! Out!” The one who had died came out, bound with bandages on his feet and hands, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Loosen him, and let him go.”
So then, many of the Jews, those who had come to Mary and seen the things he had done, believed in him. But some of them went off to the Pharisees and told them the things Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered council and were saying, “What do we do because this man is doing many signs? If we let him go on like this, they will all believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” But a certain one among them, Caiaphas, being Chief Priest of that year, said to them, “You don’t know anything! Don’t you realize that it is to your advantage that one man die for the people, and the whole nation not be lost?” And this he did not say on his own, but being the Chief Priest of that year he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation alone, but in order that the children of God who are scattered might also be gathered into one. So from that day they resolved that they would kill him. Then Jesus would no longer walk openly among the Jews, but he went from there to the region near the desert, to a town called Ephraim, and there he remained with the disciples.
On his arrival in Bethany, Jesus is greeted three times with the comment that he could have kept Lazarus from dying—by Lazarus’s sisters, Martha (v. 21), and Mary (v. 32), and by a group of Jews who had come to comfort the sisters (v. 37). Martha comes out to meet Jesus and confesses her faith in him (vv. 20–27). Mary comes later (v. 29), and “the Jews” follow her. Jesus is angry and troubled by the situation (vv. 33, 35, 38), but in the end he prays a prayer of thanksgiving (vv. 41–42) and calls Lazarus from the tomb (vv. 43–44). At this, “the Jews” are divided: some “believe,” while others report what has happened to the Pharisees (vv. 45–46). A council is called, and at the urging of Caiaphas, the High Priest, a decision is reached. If Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem up to this point is viewed as a trial (see, for example, 5:31–47; 8:12–20, 21–59), this scene can be understood as the handing down of the verdict: Jesus must die. There is no formal trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin in this Gospel, and no other declaration of a verdict. In the wake of this decision, Jesus flees for an undetermined length of time to a town “near the desert” called Ephraim (v. 54), but his sojourn there is temporary. The stage is set for the last Passover (v. 55), and for Jesus’ passion. No further trial is needed, and none will be forthcoming.
18–19 At this point the Gospel writer inserts a narrative aside: “Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, some fifteen stadia away” (v. 18).* The reader might have expected to be told the distance from where Jesus had been, across the Jordan, to Bethany, but instead learns the much shorter distance between Bethany and Jerusalem.* The likely reason is that the Gospel writer knows this distance but not the other, because he is unsure of the precise location of the other Bethany “across the Jordan” (see 1:28; 10:42). The reason for the notice is probably to explain the presence in Bethany of “many of the Jews” who “had come to Martha and Mary that they might comfort them about the brother” (v. 19).* The fact that their presence in Bethany needs to be explained (most of the residents of Bethany were presumably “Jews” in any case) suggests that they were no ordinary “Jews,” but more specifically Jews from Jerusalem,* possibly religious leaders linked in some way to the temple. Because Bethany was as close as it was to Jerusalem, it was feasible for people from Jerusalem to come and join in the mourning over Lazarus.* The notice is surprising because the last we heard of “the Jews” or “Judeans” was that they were seeking to stone Jesus (v. 8). This group of “Jews” will be heard from again (see vv. 31, 33, 35, 45–46), and the Gospel writer wants to explain from the start why they were so conveniently present.
20 Jesus’ entry into Bethany to raise Lazarus from the dead anticipates, first, his triumphal entry into Jerusalem a chapter later (see 12:12–19), and, second, his future coming to earth to raise the dead (see 1 Thess 4:15–17; 1 Cor 15:23, 51–52). He “comes”* like a conquering hero, yet to a “village” (v. 1) rather than a great city, and not publicly to the whole village but privately to a family he knows and loves (v. 5). Martha’s response evokes the picture of early Christians anxiously awaiting the “coming” of Jesus, for “as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming,” she “met him”* outside the village (see v. 30), as if to escort him the rest of the way in.* Mary, by contrast, remained “sitting in the house,” presumably the house shared by the sisters and possibly Lazarus as well. Too much should not be made of the contrast between the sisters, which is surely derived in part from Luke 10:38–42. Mary seems to have remained at home not because she was less eager to welcome Jesus, but because she had not yet learned of his arrival (see v. 29, where she too, “as soon as she heard, got up quickly and was coming to him”).*
21–22 Martha greets Jesus with the words, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v. 21; compare v. 32). Her remark could be read either as a mild rebuke or as a tribute to Jesus’ love and power to heal. Her added comment, “Even now,* I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you” (v. 22), suggests that it is the latter. As we have seen, even if Jesus had left immediately on receiving her message, Lazarus would still have died, and he could have kept Lazarus from dying without actually coming to Bethany (see, for example, 4:50). It is unclear precisely what Martha expects to happen “even now,” but like Jesus’ mother at the Cana wedding she trusts him to act (see 2:5), and she “knows,” like the man born blind (see 9:31), that whatever Jesus accomplishes he will accomplish through prayer. His method of raising Lazarus from the dead (11:41–42) will bear her out. Her certainty that “whatever you ask God, God will give you” lays a basis for Jesus’ own promises to his disciples later in the Gospel that “whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you” (16:23; see also 14:13–14; 15:7, 16; 16:26–27).*
23–24 Jesus’ reply gives concreteness to Martha’s “whatever you ask God” (v. 22). “Your brother will rise,”* he promises (v. 23). The reader will recall Jesus’ stated intention to go to Lazarus “that I might wake him up” (v. 11), but Martha had not heard those words. At most, she may have heard back from Jesus that “This sickness is not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4). This would have been enough to explain her confidence (v. 22), that somehow everything would turn out for the best. But all she can muster by way of particulars is “I know that he will rise in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24). Once more, Martha is distinguished by what she “knows,” and what she knows is again (as in v. 22) presumed to be true. Lazarus will “rise in the resurrection at the last day” (see 5:28–29), and Jesus’ words, “Your brother will rise” (v. 23), could mean just that, and nothing more. But if that is the case, the reader still remembers that Jesus promised earlier (not once but four times) concerning those who believed that he himself would “raise him [or it] at the last day” (see 6:39, 40, 44, 54). But Martha’s comment that Lazarus will “rise in the resurrection at the last day” exhibits no awareness of Jesus’ unique role in that great future event. As a Jew (evidently influenced by a Pharisaic belief in the resurrection), the two things she “knows”* amount finally to the same thing. That is, all she can imagine for her brother is that Jesus’ prayers for him will assure him a place among the righteous “at the last day,” when the dead are raised.
25–26 Jesus next enlarges Martha’s horizons with yet another of his characteristic “I am” pronouncements. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” he tells her. “The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die” (vv. 25–26). In contrast to his previous “I am” sayings, which were uttered twice (“the Bread of life,” 6:35, 47; “the Light of the world,” 8:12; 9:5; “the Door,” 10:7, 9; “the good Shepherd,” 10:11, 14), this one occurs only once, but with two predicates, “the Resurrection”* and “the Life.”* The first echoes Martha’s own reference to “the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24); the second predicate (“the Life”) defines what “resurrection” actually means for the believer, whether now or in the future.* The other “I am” sayings with their predicates were generally followed by an invitation or promise introduced by a relative or conditional clause, or a participle (see, for example, 6:35; 8:12; 10:9). This time, with two predicates, there are also two promises: first, “The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live” (v. 25); second, “everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die” (v. 26).* It is natural to view the first as the corollary of “I am the Resurrection,” and the second as the corollary of “I am the Life.” Thus,
(a) I am the Resurrection—that is, the one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live.
(b) I am the Life—that is, everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die.
No such schematization is explicit, however. Both of the promises, each with its implied invitation to “believe,” arise out of the two-pronged predicate: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” More to the point, the second promise follows logically from the first. If it is true that the person who believes in Jesus and died (in this case Lazarus) will live again—whether immediately or “in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24), then it follows that no living believer will ever die—ultimately. They may die physically, like Lazarus, but death’s dominion is only temporary, for Jesus himself (“the Resurrection and the Life”) will “raise them at the last day” (see 6:39, 40, 44, 54). With this, Jesus explains (in retrospect) his claim to “the Jews” at the Tent festival, “Amen, amen, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never ever see death” (8:51). It is worth noting that Jesus is not promising Martha in so many words that he will raise Lazarus from the dead that very day. Nothing that he says necessarily goes beyond what she already believed—that Lazarus would rise in the final resurrection—except the claim that in order to rise from the dead a person must “believe in me.”* The issue was not the nature of resurrection, or whether it would take place now or later, but simply the role of Jesus in the gift of resurrection and eternal life. When Jesus concludes by asking, “Do you believe this?” (v. 26), he is asking simply, “Do you believe in me?”*
27 Martha understands this, and answers accordingly: “Yes, Lord, I believe* that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world” (v. 27, italics added). Both the emphatic pronouns and the perfect tense of the verb “believe” recall the confession of Peter on behalf of the Twelve (6:69), implying a settled conviction. Moreover, the content of the two confessions (“the Holy One of God” in the first instance, and “the Christ, the Son of God” here) can probably be assumed to be more or less equivalent. The parallel hints that, at least within the present narrative, Martha (and perhaps her sister Mary as well) have displaced the absent Thomas and his fellow disciples as “believers” or “disciples,” and as witnesses to the miracle that Jesus will perform. The two titles Martha has chosen, “the Christ” and “the Son of God,” have been fairly conspicuous in Jesus’ debates with “the Jews” all along,* but are now drawn together here for the first time. Even though Jesus has insisted that titles do not matter as far as his claims are concerned (see 10:34–36), it appears that they do matter as far as believers and readers of the Gospel are concerned. Martha’s confession matches almost word for word the very confession the Gospel writer wants to elicit from all his readers (see 20:31, “that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in his name”). All Martha adds is the further characterization of Jesus as the one “coming into the world.”* In the immediate context, her comment picks up the preceding notice that “as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming” (v. 20), she went out to meet him. Within the narrative, his “coming” to Bethany to raise the dead stands for his “coming into the world” for the same purpose, whether now or in the future.* The intent is not to fix the time of his “coming,” present or future, but to define him as “the Coming One,”* who does not belong to the world but invades it from the outside (specifically “from above”),* to transform or overcome it. Jesus does not respond to her confession of faith, but simply allows it to stand, as he did the confession of the Samaritan villagers (4:42), and the faith of the man born blind (9:38).*
28 Perhaps surprisingly, Martha does not escort Jesus into the village (see above, n.
29 Mary, “as soon as she heard,”* acted just as Martha had done (v. 20). She “got up quickly* and was coming to him” (v. 29). Again, the choice of words hints at resurrection (“got up”),* while at the same time confirming the impression that Mary, like her sister and Lazarus, was a believer (“coming to him”).* She acts “quickly” to make up for lost time, matching her sister’s prompt response to the “coming” of the “Coming One.” The imperfect, “was coming to him,” sustains the note of haste, raising the reader’s level of expectation. What will Mary say to Jesus? What happens next?
30–31 The writer keeps us in suspense with two narrative asides, one about Jesus and one about “the Jews” who were earlier said to have “come to Martha and Mary” to comfort them (see v. 19). Jesus, we are reminded, “had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha met him” (v. 30). Thus Mary, in “coming to him” (v. 29), was returning to the place from which Martha had come to fetch her. Whether or not Martha accompanied her we are not told. Presumably she did, because she is present later at the tomb of Lazarus (vv. 39–40), but for the moment the narrative focuses not on her but on Mary, and on “the Jews who were with her in the house and were comforting her” (v. 31a). This group of “Jews,” we are told next, “when they saw that [Mary] had risen quickly* and gone out, followed her, thinking* she was going to* the tomb to cry there” (v. 31b). They had evidently remained with Mary in the house when Martha went out to meet Jesus (v. 20), and they obviously have not overheard the “private” (v. 28) exchange between the two sisters. Consequently, they are mistaken about Mary’s immediate destination, but in “following her,” they will stumble into what would otherwise have been a private exchange between Jesus and Mary (or between Jesus and both sisters).
32 Finally, after the two narrative asides (vv. 30–31), we learn that Mary, “as soon as she came to where Jesus was and saw him, fell at his feet saying to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’ ” (v. 32), repeating almost word for word what Martha had said earlier (v. 21). She stops there, however, without the words Martha had added, “Even now, I know that whatever you ask God, God will give you” (v. 22). Consequently, there is no exchange of words between Jesus and Mary, and no explicit confession of faith (as in v. 27). Instead, at the very outset we are told that when she first saw Jesus and spoke to him, she “fell at his feet.” This is an act thoroughly characteristic of Mary of Bethany, for wherever she meets Jesus in the Gospel tradition she is at his feet (see v. 2; 12:3; Lk 10:39). Here it is her wordless confession of faith,* one that she will later repeat (see 12:3–8).
33 Jesus’ reaction is surprising, for “as soon as he saw* her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying,” he “got angry* in the spirit and shook himself”* (v. 33). The language of the verse raises all kinds of questions. We have just learned that Mary fell at Jesus’ feet, but we have not been told up to now that she was “crying” (Martha had not cried as far as we know), nor is it at all clear why her crying and that of “the Jews” would have made Jesus “angry”—to the point that he “shook” with anger.* Two verses later we will learn that Jesus himself “wept,” and that this was viewed as a sign of his great love for Lazarus (vv. 35–36). Why then should the “crying” over Lazarus have made him angry?
Most English translations simply dodge the problem by concealing the reference to anger.* Jesus was not angry, they imply, just “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (RSV, NIV, TNIV), or “deeply disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (NRSV).* But most commentators acknowledge that Jesus is indeed said to have been “angry,” both here and in verse 38.* The meaning of the verb is scarcely open to question.* The mistake of many translators is to ask prematurely the question, “Why would Jesus be angry?” instead of, “What does the verb actually mean?” Still, once the meaning is established, the question, “Why was Jesus angry?” will not go away, and the answers are varied. To some, he was angry at the hypocrisy of “the Jews,” or their unbelief—and possibly Mary’s unbelief as well.* Why were they “crying”? Did they not understand what he was about to do? To still others, he was angry in the face of death, viewed as evidence of the presence of Satan and Satan’s dominion, perhaps in anticipation of his own impending encounter with death in the garden of Gethsemane.*
None of these answers is entirely satisfactory. Nothing in the text suggests that the crying of “the Jews” (much less of Mary) was in any way hypocritical. Nor are “the Jews” as a group guilty of unbelief, for after the miracle we learn that “many” of them “believed” in Jesus (even though some did not, vv. 45–46). As for the personification of death or the presence of Satan, it is not yet an issue in the Gospel—if it ever is. No sooner do we hear of “the ruler of this world” than we learn that he has been “thrown out” (12:31; see also 14:30; 16:11). Satan will carry out his futile work through Judas Iscariot (13:2), but he has not yet entered Judas (see 13:27), and in any case we have no evidence that Judas is even present until his cameo appearance in the next chapter (12:4). Yet without question Jesus’ anger is provoked by the sight of Mary “crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying” (v. 33a).* Mary, as we have seen, “fell at his feet” (v. 32), and the picture of her “crying” there vaguely recalls a scene in Luke in which a woman “stood behind him at his feet crying, and began to wipe his feet with the tears” (Lk 7:38). Within John’s Gospel, it anticipates—for a second time (see 11:2)—the scene a chapter later in which Mary “anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair” (12:3). It is a tender and emotional moment, even though Mary merely repeats what Martha had said earlier. Her comment, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v. 32b), should have introduced an exchange between her and Jesus, as it had done earlier between Jesus and Martha, but it does not. The presence of these “Jews” (see vv. 19, 31) comes as an intrusion, an invasion of privacy ending the encounter, and this could be the reason for Jesus’ anger.* The Gospel writer may have provided a clue earlier, in the notice that when Martha first summoned Mary, she spoke to her “privately”* (v. 28), out of earshot of these “Jews.” Jesus’ opportunity to do the same is now spoiled by their presence. We can only guess what he might have said to her. Would it have been simply a replay of verses 23–27, or something quite different? Instead, the miracle story runs its course, and Mary disappears (for the time being) from the narrative.
The notion that privacy was the issue has not been explored in the commentaries, but there are hints outside of John’s Gospel that this might be the case. For example, the only two occurrences in the synoptic Gospels of the verb “to be angry”* occur in connection with the so-called “secrecy phenomena”: after Jesus cleansed the leper in Mark, he “sternly warned him” and sent him away, saying, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone’ ” (Mk 1:43–44), and when he opened the eyes of two blind men in Matthew, he “sternly warned them, ‘See that you let know no one know’ ” (Mt 9:30, italics added).* Both of these orders were disobeyed (Mk 1:45; Mt 9:31), but along with other data (particularly in Mark) they testify to Jesus’ characteristic desire for privacy in his so-called “public” ministry. This desire is not confined to texts involving the so-called “messianic secret.”* Jesus seems to have valued his privacy in a variety of situations and probably for a variety of reasons.* In the one Markan narrative in which Jesus raises someone from the dead (the raising of Jairus’s daughter, Mk 5:35–43), Jesus first separated himself from the “large crowd” hemming him in (see 5:24, 31), and “allowed no one to follow along with him except Peter and James and John” (5:37). Then, outside Jairus’s house, “he saw a commotion, and much crying and wailing” (v. 38). “Why the commotion and crying?” he asked, “The child is not dead, but sleeps” (v. 39). Finally, when “they laughed at him” for this, Jesus “put them all outside,” taking with him only “the child’s father and mother, and those who were with him [that is, Peter, James and John], and went in where the child was” (v. 40). Then the miracle followed, in relative privacy (vv. 41–43). Jesus seems to have wished for just such intimacy here—with a family he knew far better—and because it was not to be, he “got angry in the spirit and shook himself.”*
34 Nevertheless, whether in private or not, Jesus must do what he came to do. Suppressing his anger,* he asks, “Where have you laid him?” (v. 34). The question confirms that he did not know the tomb’s location, and therefore had not visited it on his arrival in Bethany (v. 17). He can only be speaking to the two sisters (although Martha is not mentioned as being present until v. 39), for “the Jews” had come only to console the sisters and to mourn (vv. 19, 31). They would have had no responsibility for the burial. Consequently, it is the sisters who reply, “Lord, come and see” (v. 34b). Their request curiously recalls Jesus’ first words to his would-be disciples (1:39), and especially Philip’s invitation to Nathanael (1:46), but in the present narrative it simply serves to heighten the reader’s expectation: What will Jesus find at the tomb, and what will he do? At one level, the reader already knows what he will find (see v. 17), and what he will do there (vv. 11 and 23), but the excitement builds as matters move toward their inevitable conclusion. And suspense builds as well, as the reader is given one more brief vignette (vv. 35–37) before Jesus finally proceeds to the tomb (v. 38).
35–37 That the presence of the Jewish mourners is the reason for Jesus’ anger is evident from what happens next. Instead of going immediately to the tomb, “Jesus wept” (v. 35). The word “wept,”* found only here in the New Testament, is distinct from the “crying” of Mary and “the Jews” (v. 33), and is aorist rather than present. Jesus did not join in their continual “crying” but simply “shed tears” of his own.* The response to Jesus’ tears comes not from Mary or Martha, but from “the Jews,” underscoring the intrusive nature of their presence and again spoiling the intimacy of the moment. Worse, they are divided among themselves, anticipating a more serious split after the miracle is over (see vv. 45–46). Their first reaction was “See how he loved him” (v. 36), confirming what the sisters had said (v. 3) and what the narrator has already told the readers (v. 5). But then “some of them” added a sour note: “Could not this man who opened the eyes of the blind man have made it so that this man would not die?” (v. 37).* The comment recalls that of Martha (v. 21), and Mary (v. 32), but with a note of skepticism not present before, as if calling into question the thought that Jesus loved Lazarus. If he had the power to prevent his friend’s death, what he must have lacked was the willingness to do so. At the same time, the comment links these “Jews” from Jerusalem to those in the preceding chapter who knew about the healing of the man born blind, and were finally driven to acknowledge that Jesus had performed that miracle (see 10:21). Despite the acknowledgment, and despite their sympathy for Mary and Martha, they are now reverting to character.
38 Consequently, the second mention of Jesus’ anger comes as no surprise: “So Jesus, again angry within himself,* comes to* the tomb” (v. 38a). “Within himself” corresponds to “in the spirit” in the previous instance (v. 33). “Again” is more like “still,”* for Jesus’ anger (v. 33) is not likely to have subsided even in his grief. The cause of his anger is much the same as before—probably the intrusive responses of third parties (vv. 36–37), preempting any reaction from his loved ones. On Jesus’ arrival at the tomb, the Gospel writer pauses to describe the tomb, so that the reader can imagine the procedure Jesus will follow: “It was a cave,* and a stone was lying against it” (v. 38b).* The stage is set for Jesus to act.
39 “Lift the stone,”* Jesus commands the bystanders, but Martha (who has not been heard from since v. 28) interrupts. Martha is abruptly reintroduced here as “the sister of the deceased,”* as if we had not met her before, possibly preserving the language of an earlier source in which she was in fact being introduced for the first time.* In the present narrative, by contrast, Jesus’ reply to her (v. 40) will underscore the major role she has already played. Yet for the moment she has nothing profound to say, only the earthy observation, “Lord, already it stinks,* for it has been four days!” With this the introductory notice, “when Jesus had come, he found [Lazarus] already four days in the tomb” (v. 17), is finally confirmed. Even the “already” recalls the earlier reference. “It stinks” implies that there had been no embalming of the body, and although there are hints of embalming (v. 44), there is no mention of spices, or anything remotely comparable to the enormous quantity of myrrh and aloes used to embalm the body of Jesus (see 19:39–40).* The purpose of Martha’s blunt objection is to not to single her out for lack of faith, but to allow her to give voice to what everyone on the scene except Jesus must have been thinking, and to elicit from Jesus for the reader’s benefit his starkly contrasting response (v. 40).
40 “Did I not tell you,” Jesus replies, “that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” His words are spoken to Martha and to her alone,* raising acutely the question, When had he told her this? His comment here draws together two previous pronouncements: the first when he sent word back to the two sisters that the sickness of their brother was “not toward death, but for the glory of God, so that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4), and the second when he said to Martha alone, and in person, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this?” (vv. 25–26). Martha then confessed that she did believe (v. 27), and now he tells her that because of her faith, what matters for her is not what she can smell—the foul odor of death—but what she is about to “see”—“the glory of God,” understood as the realization of the promise that “the one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live” (v. 25). In the larger setting of the Gospel, the promise to Martha that “you will see the glory of God” reiterates and reinforces Jesus’ promise to his first disciples that “You will see the sky opened, and the angels of God going up and coming down over the Son of man” (1:51). If that promise anticipated all of Jesus’ signs, particularly the first one, in which he began to display his “glory” (2:11), the promise to Martha anticipates the last of his signs, the raising of her brother, and beyond that Jesus’ final “glorification” (11:4). In effect, Jesus has now announced what he will do, and in the same breath interpreted its meaning. All that remains is for the bystanders (that is, “the Jews”) to “Lift the stone” and, with Martha, “see the glory of God.”
41 The story continues after the brief interruption, with an evident play on words (v. 41, with italics added): “So they lifted the stone, but Jesus lifted his eyes upward”*—in prayer, as he will do again (see 17:1). Even though the man born blind (9:31), and just recently Martha herself (v. 22), seem to have known that Jesus performed his miracles and healings by the power of prayer, what follows is his first prayer actually recorded in the Gospel. He has consistently referred to God as his “Father,” but now for the first time he addresses God as “Father” in prayer.* “Father,” he says, “I thank you* that you heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said [it] for the sake of the crowd standing by, so that they might believe that you sent me” (vv. 41–42). He has “given thanks” once before (see 6:11, 23), even though the actual content of his prayer over the loaves was not given. Here his words are given, yet oddly enough this prayer has no content either. Jesus merely gives thanks that the Father has heard his prayer (v. 41). What prayer, and when? Some have argued that Jesus is referring to a prayer at an earlier time, either when he first received news of Lazarus’s illness (v. 3), or when he was speaking with Martha (see v. 22).* This is possible, but no previous prayer is recorded, and it is safer not to assume one.* More likely, Jesus’ thanksgiving at just this moment is in effect his petition to the Father, just as his thanksgiving over the loaves served as a petition consecrating them and multiplying them for the multitude (6:11, 23). That prayer of thanksgiving was public, but this time it is not immediately clear whether he is praying publicly or privately. His opening words, “I thank you that you heard me” (v. 41) appear to be public, for he adds in the next verse, “I said [it] for the sake of the crowd standing around” (v. 42), implying that they heard.* What follows, however, sounds more like a private exchange between Jesus and the Father, for he speaks to the Father about the crowd as if they are out of earshot and cannot hear what he is saying.
42 Jesus’ apparently private conversation with the Father begins with the claim, “I knew that you always hear me” (v. 42a), bringing to mind the former blind man’s pronouncement that “if anyone is god-fearing and does his will, this one he hears” (9:31), and at the same time Jesus’ own claim that “the One who sent me is with me, … for I always do the things that please him” (8:29).* It is a unique prayer, the prayer of One who has said, “I and the Father are one” (10:30), and “the Father is in me and I in the Father” (10:38).* Jesus in this Gospel rarely prays in the conventional sense of the word because his whole life on earth is a prayer, by virtue of his union with the Father.* This is what Nathanael was told he would see (“the angels of God going up and coming down over the Son of man,” 1:51), and what Jesus has just promised to Martha (“you will see the glory of God,” v. 40). But now in “lifting his eyes upward” and giving thanks audibly (v. 41), he has reached out beyond Martha and Mary, praying aloud not because he has to (for God has already heard him), but, as he tells the Father, “for the sake of the crowd standing around, so that they might believe that you sent me” (v. 42b).
This “crowd” of bystanders can only be “the Jews” who had come to mourn with the sisters, interrupting their privacy (vv. 31, 33) and arousing Jesus’ anger (vv. 33, 38).* It was evidently to them that he said, “Lift the stone” (v. 39), for the writer would have assumed that the women were unable to do so (see Mk 16:3). It is to this “crowd standing around” that Jesus, overcoming his anger, now turns his attention. In some way his prayer is for their benefit. A distinction should be drawn between the content of the prayer, which is never stated but which we can assume to be for the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and its purpose, which is explicitly said to be “so that they might believe that you sent me.” That Jesus has “the crowd” (or ‘the Jews’) in view is apparent from the moment he “lifted his eyes upward” (v. 41), for such body language signals not only prayer (as in 17:1) but mission, an awareness of people in need of what he has come to bring. “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, that they are white for harvest,” he once told his disciples as the Samaritan villagers approached (4:35), and in Galilee when he “lifted up his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him,” he asked, “Where shall we buy loaves so that these may eat?” even as “he himself knew what he was going to do” (6:5–6). Later, when he “lifts up his eyes to heaven” for the last time (17:1), the ultimate goal of his prayer will be “that the world might believe that you have sent me” (17:21; see also vv. 8, 23, 25). Here too, even at the tomb of his dear friend, his mind is on his mission to the world, most immediately to “the crowd standing around.”
The purpose of his spoken prayer (v. 41) is to make to clear to the bystanders that what he is about to do is not something done “on his own,” but something the Father is accomplishing through him. His goal is that they might “believe” as Martha has done (vv. 27, 40), not simply in him as a miracle worker, but as the Father’s agent and representative. What he wants them to believe, he tells the Father, is “that you sent me” (italics added). As he has said again and again in different ways, “I have not come on my own, but that One sent me” (8:42). Because Jesus first introduced the notion of the Son’s dependence on the Father in connection with the giving of life and the raising of the dead (5:19–21), it is all the more important for him to keep that thought in the forefront at this visible sign of resurrection, for the benefit of the bystanders—and perhaps even more the readers of the Gospel, that we too “might believe” these things (see 20:31).
43 Only when he has made it very clear that he is not acting “on his own” does Jesus turn his attention to the tomb, and the dead man within: “And when he had said these things,* he shouted in a great voice, “Lazarus! Out!”* Here for the first time the principle that a true shepherd “summons his own sheep by name and leads them out” (10:3) comes to graphic expression, side by side with Jesus’ promise that “an hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (5:25; also v. 28). It is as if the great day of resurrection is about to begin!
44 In keeping with that future scenario, Lazarus “came out.”* Yet the facetious comment often made that if Jesus had not called out the name “Lazarus” all the dead would have risen is not quite pertinent, because there are substantial differences between this miracle and the general resurrection expected at the end of the age. No one will have to “lift the stone” on that day (v. 39), and (most conspicuously) Lazarus comes out still “bound with bandages on his feet and hands, and his face wrapped in a cloth,” so that Jesus has to give “the crowd standing around” yet another command, “Loosen him, and let him go” (v. 44). Despite the rich symbolism, this is a resuscitation, not a resurrection. Later, when Jesus himself is raised, the contrast will be self-evident, for the stone will be already “taken away from the tomb” (20:1), Jesus’ body nowhere to be seen, and only “the linen cloths lying, and the cloth which had been over his face not with the linen cloths, but rolled up by itself in one place” (20:7). The so-called “resurrection” of Lazarus is but a sign of future resurrection (see 12:18), not the event itself. The promise to Martha that her brother “will rise” still awaits “the resurrection at the last day” (vv. 23–24). For the moment, Lazarus is not being ushered into the age to come, but simply received back into everyday life. This is evident in other Gospel resuscitations: the daughter of Jairus “got up and began walking,” and Jesus asked that she be “given something to eat” (Mk 5:42–43), and when the widow’s son at Nain “sat up and began speaking,” Jesus “gave him back to his mother” (Lk 7:15; see also 1 Kgs 17:23; 2 Kgs 4:36). Here, because Lazarus was already in a tomb, wrapped in ill-smelling bandages and a facecloth, Jesus instead says, “Loosen him, and let him go.”
This practical command* brings to mind Jesus’ promise to “the Jews who had believed him” at the Tent festival that “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (8:32), free from the prospect of dying in their sins (see 8:21, 24).* “So if the Son sets you free,” he had added, “you will really be free” (8:36). Freedom and eternal life were synonymous in that setting. Now Lazarus is literally “loosened” or set free, restored to physical life for a few more years, but assured of eternal life forever. In him the promise has come true that “The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never ever die” (vv. 25–26). Except for a cameo appearance in the next chapter (12:2), nothing more is known of his future, yet his story will have far-reaching consequences. As Jesus knew from the start, God’s intent was “that through it the Son of God might be glorified” (v. 4). Events will now move quickly toward that end.
45–46 The raising of Lazarus, like the healing of the man born blind (9:16; 10:19–21), brings about a “split” among “the Jews,” although the characteristic word is not used here. “Many” of them, we are told, “believed” in Jesus on the basis of “the things he had done” (v. 45). They are identified as those Jews “who had come to Mary” (vv. 19, 31), followed her to the feet of Jesus, and joined her in crying over Lazarus, arousing Jesus’ anger (vv. 33, 38). Their faith now fulfills Jesus’ stated intention “that they might believe” (v. 42). It is immediately qualified, however, by the notice that “some of them went off to the Pharisees and told them the things Jesus had done” (v. 46).* Either way, the issue was what Jesus had “done”* (vv. 45, 46), but the implication is that some of those said to “believe” did not actually believe,* and consequently that their motives in informing the Pharisees in Jerusalem were not pure as far as Jesus was concerned.* As for those who genuinely believed, they do not simply fade from the scene like the “many” at the first Passover (2:23), or at Sychar in Samaria (4:39), or the Tent festival (7:31; 8:30), or on the other side of the Jordan (10:42).* Rather, their continuing presence will put both Jesus and Lazarus in danger (see 12:10–11), as they go on to bear testimony that Jesus “had done this sign” (12:17–18).
47–48 When the Pharisees heard what Jesus had done, “the chief priests and the Pharisees,” acting jointly (as in 7:32, 45),* “gathered council and were saying, ‘What do we do* because this man* is doing many signs? If we let him go on like this, they will all believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation’ ” (vv. 47–48). “Gathered council”* implies a meeting of the Sanhedrin, the highest ruling authority in Jerusalem other than the Romans,* but the absence of the definite article suggests that it may not have been a formal meeting of the whole body.* It is in no sense a “trial” of Jesus before the Sanhedrin (even in absentia), but simply a private deliberation authorizing his arrest (see vv. 53, 57). How then does it go beyond that early confrontation after the healing at the pool of Bethsaida, when “the Jews began pursuing Jesus, because he did such things on the Sabbath” (5:16) and “kept seeking all the more to kill him, because he was … making himself equal to God” (5:18)? Jesus has been a wanted man ever since (see, for example, 7:1, 30, 32; 8:20, 59; 10:31, 39; 11:8), and it is legitimate to ask what this scene adds to the situation.
Nothing is said here of the specific charges of Sabbath breaking and claiming to be the Son of God. The accent is rather on strategy. Getting rid of Jesus has become more urgent because of fear of what “the Romans” might do. The reference to “many signs” recalls at least two previous miracles of Jesus that were remembered and commented on after the fact, the healing of the sick man at the pool (5:1–9; see 7:21–23), and the granting of sight to the man born blind (9:1–7; see 10:21; 11:37), plus other signs that may or may not have been known to the authorities in Jerusalem (see 4:46–54; 6:5–15). The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems to have been the last straw. “Many” had believed because of these “many” signs (see v. 45; also 2:23; 7:30; 8:30; 10:42), and the council’s exaggerated fear was that more and more—“all,” in fact—would do the same,* precipitating rebellion against Rome and bringing down the wrath of the Romans on Israel. Ungrounded as they are, such fears still have a certain plausibility within the narrative if we remember those who, after one of Jesus’ signs in Galilee, hailed him as “truly the Prophet who is coming into the world,” and tried to “seize him to make him king” (see 6:14–15).
Yet if John’s Gospel is dated later than
49–50 Finally, after the voicing of these concerns, a concrete proposal emerges.* The “Chief Priest” speaks, and the matter is settled. Caiaphas is introduced rather oddly, as if readers are unfamiliar with the office of High Priest, as “a certain one among them, Caiaphas, being Chief Priest* of that year” (v. 49). The phrase “of that year,” repeated twice more in identifying Caiaphas (see v. 51; 18:13), could imply that the Chief Priest served for only one year, but this was not the case.* If the expression were simply an error,* it is odd that it would have been repeated three times. More likely, it is used deliberately and rhetorically to accent the historic nature of the council’s decision, and the events that followed. It all happened in “that [fateful] year” when, as we will shortly learn, Jesus would “die for the nation” (v. 51).* To the reader living decades later, “that year” marks a milestone in the past, just as surely as “from that day” when Jesus’ fate was sealed (v. 53), or “from that hour” when he died (19:27), and in much the same way that phrases such as “in that day” (14:20; 16:23, 26) or “hour” (see 2:4; 4:21, 23; 5:25, 28; 16:4) point to milestones in the future, whether from Jesus’ perspective or the reader’s.
Caiaphas speaks sharply to his colleagues. “You don’t know anything!”* he charges (v. 49b, italics added), implying by the emphatic pronoun that he understands what they do not. “Don’t you realize,” he continues, “that it is to your advantage* that one man die for the people, and the whole nation not be lost?” (v. 50). In keeping with his tendency to depict “the Jews” as divided among themselves about Jesus (most recently in vv. 45–46),* the Gospel writer accents the tension between the Chief Priest and the rest of the council, despite their eventual agreement (v. 53).* Appealing to their reason and self-interest, Caiaphas proposes that Jesus be made a scapegoat. Better “one man* die for the people, and the whole nation not be lost.”*
In a curious way, the form of this “prophecy” (see v. 51) recalls a pair of sayings of Jesus himself in a very different tradition about a very different subject: “And if your right eye [or your right hand] offend you, pluck it out [or cut it off] and throw it from you, for it is to your advantage* that one of your members be lost, and your whole body not* thrown into Gehenna” (Mt 5:29, 30; italics added). Yet no one familiar with that passage could view Caiaphas’s proposal as anything but a crude parody of it, whether deliberate or not. Caiaphas has taken the principle of sacrificing one bodily member for the sake of the whole and applied it ruthlessly to the body politic.* The two sayings are of course not found in John’s Gospel, yet Jesus has repeatedly stated his intention that those who believe in him “might not be lost”* (3:16), and, more than that, his certainty that his sheep “will never ever be lost” (10:28; see also 6:39).* Caiaphas’s concern, by contrast, is not with those who believe in Jesus—they are in fact part of the danger (v. 48)—but rather with “the whole nation” and its welfare. His proposal could be interpreted in one of two ways: either to do away with Jesus before he brings down on Israel the wrath of Rome, or to see to it that Rome itself does the job. The latter is what actually happens (see 18:31–32), and it is quite plausible that this was the Chief Priest’s intention from the start. Better that Rome put one troublemaker to death than that it destroy the whole nation. The notion of “one man” dying “for the people”* may strike the reader (even before the Gospel writer spells it out, vv. 51–52) as an odd echo of Jesus’ own stated intention to lay down his life “for the sheep” (10:11, 15).* But Caiaphas’s intention is very different. To him the “one man” is by no means “shepherd” to the people (as in “one Shepherd,” 10:16),* and his proposal is sheer political expediency, the creation of a scapegoat.
51 The Gospel writer intervenes to claim the truth of what Caiaphas has just said, regardless of his motivation: “And this he did not say on his own,* but being the Chief Priest of that year he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation” (v. 51). Elsewhere in the Gospel, only Jesus (7:17–18; 12:49; 14:10) and the so-called “Paraclete,” or “Spirit of truth” (16:13), are said to speak “not on his own,” but here the claim is made for Caiaphas, not with respect to his speech or behavior generally,* but of his one specific proposal that Jesus “die for the nation.” This means not that he is actually a “prophet,”* but that on one memorable occasion he “prophesied,” that is, he spoke for God. Although the comment links Caiaphas’s ability to prophesy to his being “Chief Priest of that year,” there is no hard evidence that Jewish priests or high priests necessarily had the gift of prophecy.* The Gospel writer is merely seizing the opportunity to attach an ironic double meaning to the Chief Priest’s words. He does this by simply repeating the core of Caiaphas’s pronouncement, “that one man die for the nation,” substituting “nation” for “people,” while omitting the introductory words, “it is to your advantage,” and the concluding words, “and the whole nation not be lost.” Ironically, the structural elements in the pronouncement that parallel the structure of Jesus’ own words (in Mt 5:29–30) are precisely the ones omitted.
The narrative aside transforms the Chief Priest’s strategic plan into a plain statement of fact: Jesus was indeed “going to die for the nation.” But in what sense “for the nation”?* Surely for the nation’s benefit, but not in the sense of protecting her from the Roman legions. As we have seen, the Gospel writer must have known that such a hope was futile. Rather, what the reader may have already suspected (from v. 50) now becomes explicit. Jesus would “die for the nation” redemptively, just as he would “lay down his life” for his sheep (10:11, 15). Only here in John’s Gospel is anything said about Jesus dying redemptively “for,” or “on behalf of,” the nation of Israel. The Christian reader is tempted to hurry past this assertion so as to concentrate on the writer’s more universal interest in “the children of God who [were] scattered” (v. 52), but this temptation should be resisted.* Far from merely repeating what Caiaphas has just said, the Gospel writer shifts the subject matter from political expediency to salvation, and the initiative from the Chief Priest and council (v. 50) back to where it belongs, as far as the reader is concerned, with Jesus the Shepherd. There is a hint here (though hardly more than that) of a hope for Israel’s restoration comparable to what is found in certain passages in Matthew, Luke, and Acts, and in Paul.* That said, the hint is not followed up. Instead, the Gospel writer quickly moves on to something Caiaphas did not actually say, a kind of afterthought that nevertheless finally dwarfs the “prophecy” itself.
52 The Gospel writer now volunteers the information that Jesus would die “not for the nation alone, but in order that the children of God who are scattered might also be gathered into one” (v. 52). The phrase “for the nation” is picked up a second time, in order to set the stage for something new. The form of the pronouncement (“not for this alone,* but for that”) occurs once more in John’s Gospel, when Jesus prays “not for these alone, but also for those who believe in me through their word” (17:20). There, too, the intent is “that they all might be one” (17:21). The distinction is between Jesus’ immediate disciples and those who would come to believe in him later, while here it is between the nation of Israel and “the children of God who are scattered.”* Who are these “the children of God”? The definite articles* suggest that they are a group known to the reader, a group elaborately introduced (without definite articles) near the very beginning of the Gospel: “But to as many as did receive him he gave authority to become children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood lines, nor of fleshly desire, nor a husband’s desire, but of God” (1:12–13). They are in fact the whole Christian community, consisting of all those who are or will be “born of God” or “born from above” (3:3).*
In moving beyond the actual words of the Chief Priest, the writer changes the grammatical construction as well. Instead of “not for the nation alone, but for the children of God,” he explains what the phrase “for the children of God” would have meant. That is, how exactly is Jesus’ death “for” them, or “on their behalf”? In what way does it benefit them? He answers by shifting to a purpose clause: Jesus would die “in order that the children of God who are scattered might also be gathered into one.”* The “also” (
53 The meeting of the Sanhedrin is framed by the vocabulary of “gathering.” The chief priests and Pharisees “gathered” the council to begin with* (v. 47) in order to decide Jesus’ fate, but in the end “the children of God” would be the ones “gathered into one” (v. 52). Ironically, the council now starts things in motion toward that end by quickly agreeing to the Chief Priest’s proposal: “So from that day they resolved that they would kill him” (v. 53). Over against the divine purpose “that the children of God … be gathered into one” (v. 52) now stands the council’s firm purpose toward Jesus “that they would kill him” (v. 53). What neither the council nor Caiaphas understands is that the latter would, in the plan of God, inevitably bring about the former.
“From that day” seems to mark a decisive event or turning point,* and yet the reader still has to wonder in what way that decision goes beyond the notices six chapters earlier, after Jesus healed the sick man at the pool, that “the Jews began pursuing Jesus” (5:16) and “kept seeking all the more to kill him” (5:18). From that point on we were told repeatedly that they were intent on killing him (see 7:1, 19, 20, 25; 8:37, 40, 58; 10:31). What then is new or different about the notice here that the council finally “resolved* that they would kill him”? Only that it is now a quasi-official act of the Sanhedrin at the behest of the Chief Priest. No such resolution is mentioned in Mark or Luke, only a brief notice that “the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how they might seize him by stealth and kill him” (Mk 14:1; also Lk 22:2). But Matthew’s Gospel offers a closer parallel: “Then the chief priests and the elders of the people were gathered in the courtyard of the Chief Priest, who was called Caiaphas, and they plotted together* that they would seize and kill Jesus by stealth” (Mt 26:3–4).* This would not have to imply more than what was stated in Mark and Luke,* but the vocabulary at least is similar to John’s. Matthew and John agree that at some point prior to Jesus’ arrest the Jewish authorities met together to take action against him. They do not agree on the timing. The notice in Matthew is two days before the Passover (Mt 26:2; Mk 14:1), while in John’s Gospel the council meets much earlier. We are not even told that “the Passover of the Jews was near” (v. 55) until after Jesus’ sojourn in “the region near the desert” for an unspecified length of time (v. 54). And when he finally returns to Bethany, it is still “six days before the Passover” (12:1), not two.
The council’s resolution is bluntly stated: “they resolved that they would kill him.” The reader knows by now that this has been their intention all along (beginning at 5:18). Jesus accused them three times of seeking his life (7:19; 8:37, 40), and they would neither deny it nor admit it.* Now they are admitting it, if not to Jesus at least to themselves. The Gospel writer could have chosen the more judicial term, “put to death,” but seems to prefer the verb “kill” in order to confirm very explicitly Jesus’ accusations against them (see also 12:10; 16:2; 18:31).
54 We are not told how Jesus learned of the council’s decision, only that he “would no longer walk openly among the Jews, but he went from there to the region* near the desert, to a town called Ephraim, and there he remained with the disciples” (v. 54). “Ephraim” is believed to have been located to the northeast of Jerusalem, on the northern border of Judea.* This sojourn is but for a moment in narrative time, marking a break between the council’s decision and the events at Passover leading to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. But in real time (as the reader imagines it), Jesus could have spent weeks, even months, in this “town called Ephraim,” for the length of his sojourn there is not given. In that respect it is comparable to his sojourn “across the Jordan” just before the raising of Lazarus (10:40–42). The last firm notice of time was the Rededication festival in the winter (10:22), and the next will be the Passover in the spring (which is “near” in v. 55, and just “six days” away in 12:1). Unless a whole year has passed of which we are told nothing, all the events from 10:22 on must fit into three months or so.
The notice that Jesus “would no longer walk openly among the Jews” (that is, in the vicinity of Jerusalem) recalls the notice earlier that he “chose not to walk in Judea because the Jews there were seeking to kill him” (7:1), and for a time resisted his brothers’ advice to “be in the public eye” (7:4). But here, instead of staying where he was, he makes his escape,* just as he did before when “the Jews” tried to stone him (8:59) or arrest him (10:39).* Nothing is said of what Jesus did or what happened in this “town called Ephraim,” except that he “remained with the disciples.”* The absence of information about his sojourn is puzzling,* but suggests that the accent is simply on Jesus “being there,” and being “with the disciples.” This is borne out by certain other instances in which Jesus “remains” or “spends time” somewhere for an indefinite period (see 2:12; 3:22; 10:40).* As for being “there” (
As for being “with the disciples,” we have heard nothing of them since Thomas “said to the fellow disciples, ‘Let us go too that we might die with him’ ” (v. 16). All through the account of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus’ disciples (aside from Mary and Martha) have been conspicuous by their absence. Now they resurface, and from here on, well into the Passion narrative, they will continue to be in the picture (see 12:4–6, 16, 21–26; 13:1–17:26; 18:1, etc.). The implication of the brief notice is that Jesus spent time privately with his disciples, perhaps preparing them for what was to come, yet what evidence we have about Ephraim suggests that it was by no means a remote or uninhabited place, but a populated “town,”* perhaps of some size, not a mere “village”* like Bethany.* At the same time, the detail that it was in “the region near the desert” evokes at least the possibility of refuge and solitude. While a sojourn in “the desert” (comparable to the synoptic temptation stories) would have made a good story, the Gospel writer is probably dealing with a firm historical tradition that Jesus and his disciples, for whatever reason, spent some time before his Passion in a real “town” with plenty of real inhabitants.*
55 The reader is fast-forwarded through Jesus’ sojourn, and in due course “the Passover of the Jews was near” (v. 55a). An argument could be made that this (and not the end of chapter 12) is the major dividing point of the Gospel, for all that happens from here on happens in connection with this final Passover. The notice echoes almost word for word the notice of Jesus’ first Passover: “And the Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem” (2:13). The difference is that here nothing is said immediately—or ever, for that matter—of Jesus “going up to Jerusalem” for the festival (see 5:1; 7:10). Instead, we learn that “many went up from the region to Jerusalem, before the Passover, that they might purify themselves” (v. 55b). But what is meant by “the region”? Is it a general term for the Judean countryside outside Jerusalem,* or does the notice refer to the specific “region near the desert” (v. 54) where Jesus has been staying? Most commentators do not even raise the issue, but its importance should not be overlooked.* The correspondence between “to the region”* (v. 54) and “from the region”* argues strongly for a reference to the same “region near the desert” where Jesus and his disciples had taken refuge. Thus, “many went up from the [aforementioned] region to Jerusalem,” before the Passover, that they might purify themselves” This is consistent with the notion of that region (and the town of Ephraim in particular) as a populated area relatively close to Jerusalem.* Self-purification in order to celebrate the Passover was mandated in Scripture (see Num 9:6–12; 2 Chr 30:17–18), and it was probably thought advantageous to do so as close as possible to the actual festival so as not to risk additional defilement.* But the Gospel writer is not primarily interested in the details of self-purification.* He merely uses it to explain why “many,” possibly from the very region where Jesus had been staying, were at the festival ahead of time. More important to him is what they were saying about Jesus once they were there.
R. To Jerusalem Again (11:55–12:19)
Now the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went up from the region to Jerusalem before the Passover, that they might purify themselves. So they were seeking Jesus, and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, “What do you think? That he surely won’t come to the festival? Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given commands that if anyone found out where he was, they should make it known, so that they might arrest him.
Then Jesus, six days before the Passover, came into Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus raised from the dead. Then they made a dinner for him there, and Martha was serving, while Lazarus was one of those reclining with him. Then Mary took a pound of expensive perfume of genuine nard, anointed the feet of Jesus, and dried his feet with her hair. The house was filled from the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas the Iscariot, one of his disciples, the one who was going to hand him over, says, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” Now he said this not because it mattered to him about the poor, but because he was a thief, and, having the money box, was stealing from what was being put in. So Jesus said, “Let her be, so as to keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but me you do not always have.”
Then a great crowd from the Jews found out that he was there and came, not because of Jesus alone, but that they might also see Lazarus, whom he raised from the dead. And the chief priests resolved that they would also kill Lazarus, because on account of him many of the Jews were going off and believing in Jesus. The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival, when they heard that Jesus was coming into Jerusalem, took the branches of the palms and went out to meet him, and they were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the One coming in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” And Jesus, having found a young donkey, sat on it, just as it is written, “Fear not, daughter Zion. Look, your king is coming, sitting on a donkey’s colt!” These things his disciples did not understand at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things were written about him and these things they did for him. So the crowd that was with him kept testifying that he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead. That was also why the crowd met him, because they heard that he had done this sign. Then the Pharisees said to each other, “You can see that you’re accomplishing nothing. Look, the world has gone after him!”
This bittersweet narrative brings together several brief independent scenes, skillfully blending the shadow of Jesus’ impending death with the prospect of final glory.* Its account of Jesus’ last journey to Jerusalem is introduced by the notice that “the Passover of the Jews was near” (v. 55), raising expectations that he will return to Jerusalem as he customarily did for the Jewish festivals (see 2:13, 5:1, and 7:10, 6:4 being the sole exception). The note of expectancy is maintained by those already at the festival (vv. 55–57), yet Jesus is never explicitly said to “go up to Jerusalem” for this Passover. Instead, he simply makes an appearance back in Bethany “six days before the Passover” at a dinner where Mary anoints his feet with perfume (12:1–11). But then it is on to Jerusalem and a tumultuous welcome by the crowds there, frustrating the authorities who were seeking his life (vv. 12–19). Despite the welcome and despite the Pharisees’ lament, “Look, the world has gone after him!” (v. 19), his anointing by Mary (see vv. 7–8) has already signaled to the reader that his death is inevitable. It is now clear that life for Lazarus will mean death for Jesus—and possibly for Lazarus as well (see 12:10). Yet so far, instead of dying he has been welcomed triumphantly into Jerusalem as “the king of Israel” (v. 13). He has gained the world (v. 19)—but at what price?
56–57 The conversation of these pilgrims centers on whether or not Jesus would make an appearance at the festival, given the decision of the Chief Priest and the council: “So they were seeking Jesus,” we are told, “and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, ‘What do you think? That he surely won’t come to the festival?’ ” (v. 56). The writer pauses to explain why: “Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given commands that if anyone found out where Jesus was, they should make it known, so that they might arrest him” (v. 57). The scene is markedly similar to an earlier one at the Tent festival where “the Jews were seeking him at the festival, and said, ‘Where is that man?’ ” There, after considerable murmuring in the crowd, we were told that “No one would speak about him publicly … for fear of the Jews” (see 7:11–13).
Yet there are important differences as well. For one thing, “the Jews” in the earlier situation “were seeking” Jesus (7:11) with hostile intent, “seeking” to kill him as they had intended all along (see 7:1). Here, by contrast, those “seeking” him (v. 56) are not “the Jews” but the “many” who had come early to the Passover festival “from the region” (v. 55). They are “seeking” him in all likelihood not with hostile intent, but out of simple curiosity. Their speculation as to whether or not he would come to the festival is more natural and understandable if they know who he is and are acquainted with his previous whereabouts than if they do not. It is not likely that his name would have been such a household word that people from all over Israel would be asking such questions. The curiosity of these pilgrims is consistent with the thought that they are from not just any “region” or “country,” but specifically from “the region near the desert” (v. 54) where Jesus had been staying. That they were wondering about these things “as they stood in the temple” (v. 56) heightens the impression that we are dealing here not with a “great murmuring among the crowds” (as in 7:12), but with a particular delegation from a particular place.
Another difference is that the issue of whether Jesus will or will not come to Jerusalem is raised in Jerusalem itself at the festival, not in the place where Jesus is staying (as in 7:1–10, in Galilee). Just as he did not accompany his brothers when they went up to Jerusalem from Galilee (7:8–10), so he did not accompany the “many” other pilgrims from “the region” to this his last Passover. His current whereabouts are unknown to them, and just as unknown to the reader. Their question, “What do you think? That he surely won’t come to the festival?” expects a negative answer, yet in a subtle way hints at a positive one, implying that if Jesus does come it will be a bold move indeed.* The effect is to invite the reader to ask the same question, raising the level of suspense. Will Jesus show up at the festival or not?
57 As if a reason for the suspense were needed, the writer supplies one: “Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given commands* that if anyone found out where he was, they should make it known, so that they might arrest him” (v. 57). This is scarcely a surprise, given the preceding notice that “from that day they [that is, “the chief priests and Pharisees,” v. 47] resolved that they would kill him” (v. 53). It is merely a reminder that the council’s resolution was now being implemented. What is unclear is the intention of these delegates “from the region.” Is it to turn him over to the authorities, or merely to take note of his presence should he make an appearance at the festival? It is a moot question because in any event we are not told whether or not they “found out where he was.” Only after Jesus is back in the vicinity of Jerusalem are we told that “the great crowd from the Jews found out that he was there” (12:9, echoing the language of v. 57), and even then they are not said to have made him known to the authorities. So here, as we have seen, the worshipers raising the question of whether or not Jesus will come to the festival do not appear hostile to him (like “the Jews” in 7:11), but neutral (more like “the crowds” in 7:12). Yet regardless of their intent, the decree of “the chief priests and the Pharisees” makes it clear that Jesus is in danger, so that for the reader the suspense mounts.
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