John 11 - ESV Gospel Transformation Study Bible

11:1–16 Jesus enjoyed a special relationship with Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. This family gave him welcome and oasis in a world of conflict and escalating hostility (cf. Luke 10:38–42). Perhaps it was precisely because of Jesus’ great love for this family that he entrusted to them a very difficult story, a hard providence: the sickness and death of Lazarus.

The gospel is a story of our God doing all things well, not all things easily. His name is Abba Father, but this does not mean that he leads his children in a life of complacent ease and comfort. Indeed, upon hearing about Lazarus’s sickness, Jesus waited two days longer before responding—apparently so that his compassion could be revealed by a more glorious expression of divine power, expressed according to divine wisdom and timing. God’s ways are not our ways (Isa. 55:8). They are much better.

11:17–27 Jesus delayed coming to his beloved friends until he was certain Lazarus was dead. Martha and Mary were incredulous about Jesus’ decision to wait. “Lord, if you had been here . . .” (v. 21). The discipline of delay is one of the hardest lessons we must learn, as followers of Jesus, especially when it is God who does the delaying. Only grace can enable us to accept God’s rich vocabulary of answers to our earnest prayers—“yes,” “no,” “not yet,” or even “yes, but it’s going to feel like no”—because we trust that he “is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20).

The more deeply we know and walk with Jesus, the more readily we accept God’s glory as our greatest good, even when it feels like such a momentary bad. As “the resurrection and the life,” Jesus is always writing better stories than we could ever pen. Martha and Mary would soon find this to be true.

11:28–37 Jesus identifies with us in our pain and loss. He comes to us in our weakness and brokenness. Though he knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, Jesus wept when he saw the tears of Mary and her companions. This is Jesus being truly human. As God incarnate, Jesus shows us what he, as God, created man to be—a whole-hearted lover of God and a compassionate lover of fellow image-bearers—summarized in the two great commandments (Matt. 22:34–40).

But as the incarnate God, Jesus’ tears in front of Lazarus’s tomb are of a different order. This is Jesus feeling the weight of the fall—the violation and disintegration of the way things were meant to be. His holy tears are those of the Creator grieving over the forfeiture of beauty through the intrusion of sin and death. Once again, in the incarnate Lord, we see the heart of the Lamb who would offer his life to overcome our sin and death.

11:38–44 The death and resurrection of Lazarus were a precursor of Jesus’ impending death and resurrection. Jesus had already spoken of the day when “all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out” (5:28–29). Here we are given a “preview of coming attractions.” The apostle Paul spells out the vital connection between Jesus’ bodily resurrection and ours (1 Cor. 15:12–23). If the dead are not raised, Jesus wasn’t raised, but if Jesus was raised, we too shall be raised. The real loser in view is death itself, and more expressly Satan, who holds the power of death (Heb. 2:14). The resurrection we presently enjoy through our union with Christ (Eph. 2:4–7; Col. 3:1) will one day segue into the resurrection of our bodies.

11:45–57 Here is another example of the use of irony in John’s Gospel (cf. note on 9:13–34). Caiaphas, the high priest, unwittingly prophesied that Jesus’ death would be a vicarious, substitutionary atonement. The God of all grace is sovereignly at work, at all times and in all places. He sits in heaven and laughs derisively at those who plot and scheme against his saving purposes in his Son (Ps. 2:2–4).