Jesus · c. AD 30
Chapter 44
Lazarus, Come Out
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies.Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
For parents
Lazarus dies of an illness and has been in the tomb four days when Jesus comes; Mary and the Jews who came to comfort her weep, and Martha says that by now there is a bad smell (John 11:14–17, 31–39). After Jesus raises him, the chief priests and the Pharisees make plans to put Jesus to death and give orders to seize him (11:47–53, 57). It is all told plainly and gently.
In , the village where and her sister lived, a man named was sick.
John says this was the Mary who anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and wiped his feet with her hair. The sick man, Lazarus, was her brother.
So his sisters sent a message to : “Lord, look, the one you care for so much is sick.”
When Jesus heard it, he said, “Death isn’t where this sickness ends. It’s for the glory of God, so that God’s Son may be glorified by it.”
Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. So after the news came that Lazarus was sick, he stayed on for two days in the place where he was.
After this, Jesus said to the , “Let’s go into again.”
“,” the disciples said, “the Jews were just trying to stone you. Are you going there again?”
Jesus answered, “Aren’t there twelve hours of daylight? If someone walks in the daytime, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if someone walks at night, he stumbles, because the light isn’t in him.”
After that, he said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going so that I can wake him out of his sleep.”
“Lord,” the disciples said, “if he has fallen asleep, he’ll recover.”
John explains that Jesus was talking about Lazarus’ death, but the disciples thought he meant that Lazarus was asleep and resting.
So Jesus said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead. I’m glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe. Even so, let’s go to him.”
Then said to the other disciples, “Let’s go as well, so that we can die with him.” Thomas was also called Didymus, a name that means “Twin.”
When Jesus got there, he found that Lazarus had been in the tomb four days already.
Bethany was near , about fifteen stadia away, or about 1.7 miles. Many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary, to comfort them over their brother.
When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary stayed in the house.
Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”
Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”
“I know that he will rise again in the at the last day,” Martha said.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the , God’s Son, the one who comes into the world.”
When she had said this, Martha went away and called her sister Mary. She told her secretly, “The Teacher is here, and he’s calling you.”
When Mary heard this, she quickly got up and went to Jesus. He hadn’t come into the village yet. He was still in the place where Martha met him.
The Jews who were with Mary in the house had been comforting her. When they saw her get up in a hurry and go out, they followed her. “She’s going to the tomb to weep there,” they said.
When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell down at his feet. “Lord, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died,” she said.
When Jesus saw her weeping, and saw that the Jews who came with her were weeping too, he groaned in his spirit and was troubled. “Where did you lay him?” he asked.
“Lord, come and see,” they told him.
Jesus wept.
“See how much he cared for him!” the Jews said.
Some of them said, “This man opened the eyes of the man who was blind. Couldn’t he have kept this man from dying too?”
Jesus came to the tomb, groaning again within himself. The tomb was a cave, and a stone lay against it.
“Take away the stone,” Jesus said.
Martha, the sister of the man who had died, said to him, “Lord, by this time there is a bad smell, because he has been dead four days.”
Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see God’s glory?”
So they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. Then Jesus looked up. “Father,” he said, “I thank you for listening to me. I know you always listen to me, but I said this because of the crowd standing around, so that they may believe that you sent me.”
When he had said this, he called out loudly, “Lazarus, come out!”
Out came the man who had been dead. His hands and feet were bound with wrappings, and a cloth was wrapped around his face. Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”
The Jews who had come to Mary saw what Jesus did, and as a result, many of them believed in him.
But some of them went away to the and told them the things Jesus had done.
Then the and the Pharisees gathered a . “What are we doing?” they said. “This man does many . If we leave him alone like this, everyone will believe in him, and the will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
But one of them, , the that year, said to them, “You don’t know anything at all. You don’t stop to think that it is better for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.”
John says that this didn’t come from Caiaphas himself. As that year’s high priest, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only. Jesus would die so that he might also gather the children of God who are scattered far and wide together into one.
So from that day forward, the chief priests and the Pharisees planned together how to put Jesus to death.
So Jesus stopped walking openly among the Jews. He went away from there to the country near the wilderness, to a city called , and he stayed there with his disciples.
Now the Jews’ was near. Many people went up from the country to Jerusalem before the Passover, to .
They were looking for Jesus. As they stood in the temple, they said to one another, “What do you think? Is he not coming to the feast at all?”
The chief priests and the Pharisees had ordered anyone who knew where Jesus was to report it, so they could arrest him.