John 11 · An Iconic Story
The Raising of Lazarus
Jesus hears that His friend is dying and stays where He is for two more days on purpose — so that when He finally reaches the tomb and calls him out by name, nobody on earth can say the man was not dead.
Rembrandt was in his mid-twenties and already doing the thing he would do for the rest of his life: putting the light where the meaning is and leaving everything else in the dark. Jesus stands with one arm straight up, and the whole picture hangs off that gesture. Lazarus is rising out of the floor of the tomb, still bound, still grey, and Rembrandt spends most of his attention not on him but on the faces of the people watching, which is exactly where John spends his. The onlookers are the ones John says went and told the authorities.
Four Days
John 11, told plainly
Lazarus of Bethany was ill, and his sisters sent word. They did not ask for anything. They just told Him: the one you love is sick. Jesus heard it, and stayed where He was for two more days.
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So on hearing that Lazarus was sick, He stayed where He was for two days,John joins the two sentences with a word that makes the delay harder, not easier: He loved them, SO He stayed.
By the time He got there, Lazarus had been in the tomb four days. Martha came out down the road to meet Him and said the sentence both sisters had been saying to each other all week: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus told her that her brother would rise again, and then said the thing the chapter exists for. Not I will raise the dead one day. I am the resurrection.
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”And then a question straight at her, which the chapter puts to the reader too: do you believe this?
She said yes, and gave one of the great confessions in the Gospels. Then Mary came out and fell at His feet and said the same thing her sister had said. And when He saw her crying, and everyone with her crying, something moved in Him that the Greek describes as anger as much as grief. He asked where they had put him.
Jesus wept.Two words in English, one in Greek, and that Greek verb is used nowhere else in the New Testament.
They rolled the stone away. He prayed out loud, and said He was doing it out loud for the sake of the people standing there. Then He shouted: Lazarus, come out. And the dead man came out, still tied hand and foot in the graveclothes, his face still wrapped. Unbind him, Jesus said, and let him go.
After Jesus had said this, He called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The man who had been dead came out with his hands and feet bound in strips of linen, and his face wrapped in a cloth. “Unwrap him and let him go,” Jesus told them.The last words in the scene are not to Lazarus. They are to everyone else: take the wrappings off him.
(Tr. xlix. 1) The resurrection of Lazarus is more spoken of than any of our Lord's miracles. But if we bear in mind who He was who wrought this miracle, we shall feel not so much of wonder, as of delight. He who made the man, raised the man; and it is a greater thing to create a man, than to revive him. Lazarus was sick at Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. The place was near Jerusalem.
Augustine of Hippo· Catena Aurea by Aquinas (1264), on John 11:1
Six Things the Chapter Says Out Loud
and that the retellings tend to leave out
THE DELAY IS EXPLAINED, TWICE
This is not a story about a friend who arrived late. John says He stayed two days after hearing, and then has Jesus tell the disciples outright that He is glad He was not there, for their sakes, so that they would believe. The waiting is part of the sign, and the text says so before the reader can ask.
“JESUS WEPT” IS A DIFFERENT WORD
Mary weeps and the crowd weeps, and John uses klaiō for them: loud, public, professional mourning. For Jesus he switches to dakryō, and that verb appears exactly once in the entire New Testament. It means He shed tears. Quieter, shorter, and His alone.
HE WAS ANGRY, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
Twice John says Jesus was embrimaomai: a hard word that elsewhere means snorting with indignation. English translations reach for “deeply moved,” which is smoother than the Greek. Barnes handles it honestly below: violent agitation of mind, and not at anyone standing in the scene.
THE PRAYER WAS FOR THE CROWD
He prays aloud at the tomb and then says why: because of the people standing here, so they will believe You sent Me. The prayer is not how the miracle is worked. It is spoken for the ears of the witnesses, and John records the explanation rather than leaving it to be guessed.
HE COMES OUT STILL TIED UP
A man walks out of a tomb wrapped hand and foot with a cloth over his face, and the last thing Jesus says in the whole scene is an instruction to the bystanders: unbind him, and let him go. The people who came to mourn are handed a job.
THIS IS THE MIRACLE THAT GETS HIM KILLED
John 11:53: from that day on they planned to put Him to death. And John 12:10 adds the detail nobody expects: they planned to kill Lazarus too, because as long as he was walking around he was evidence. Raising a man from the dead turned out to be a capital offence for two people.
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.Both hard words are in this one verse: He snorted in spirit, and He troubled Himself.
He groaned in the spirit - The word rendered groaned, here, commonly denotes to be angry or indignant, or to reprove severely, denoting violent agitation of mind. Here it also evidently denotes violent agitation - not from anger, but from grief. He saw the sorrow of others, and he was also moved with sympathy and love. The word groan usually, with us, denotes an expression of internal sorrow by a special sound. The word here, however, does not mean that utterance was given to the internal emotion, but that it was deep and agitating, though internal.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on John 11:33
After He had said this, He told them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to wake him up.”He says “asleep,” the disciples hear “resting,” and He has to say the word plainly. The metaphor was never a euphemism.
Lazarus sleepeth - Is dead. The word sleep is applied to death, 1. Because of the resemblance between them, as sleep is the kinsman of death. In this sense it is often used by pagan writers. 2. However, in the Scriptures it is used to intimate that death will not be final: that there will be an awaking out of this sleep, or a resurrection.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on John 11:11
The Chapter's Clock
every hour on this line was chosen
The gaps are drawn to scale. Almost half this line is a man deliberately not going, and John tells you before you can ask that the not-going was the point.
- The message sent“Lord, the one You love is sick”, no request attachedTwo days waitingHe hears, and stays exactly where He isThe journeyThen, and only then: let us go to himFour days in the tombBy arrival the count is past every doubtThe shout“Lazarus, come out”The council meetsFrom that day on, they plotted to kill Him
He abode two days - Probably Lazarus died soon after the messengers left him. Jesus knew that (Joh 11:11), and did not hasten to Judea, but remained two days longer where he was, that there might not be the possibility of doubt that he was dead, so that when he came there he had been dead four days, Joh 11:39. This shows, moreover, that he intended to raise him up. If he had not, it could hardly be reconciled with friendship thus to remain, without any reason, away from an afflicted family.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on John 11:6
The geography made the delay expensive in a second way. Bethany sits fifteen stadia from Jerusalem (under two miles), close enough that mourners from the city had walked out to the house, and close enough that whatever happened there would be reported back the same afternoon. Burial was same-day in first-century Judea, in a rock-cut family cave closed with a stone, and the mourning that followed was loud, long and communal. That is why the house is full of people when He arrives, and it is why this miracle had more witnesses than any other.
When Jesus arrived, He found that Lazarus had already spent four days in the tomb. Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, a little less than two miles away,John gives the count and the distance in the same breath: the two facts the rest of the chapter runs on.
And four days is not a detail John leaves the reader to work out. He puts Martha at the tomb saying the blunt thing about her own brother, and lets her sentence settle the state of the body before the stone moves.
“Take away the stone,” Jesus said. “Lord, by now he stinks,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man. “It has already been four days.”Martha's objection is the chapter's own evidence, spoken by the person with the most reason to want it untrue.
Four days - This proves that there could be no deception, for it could not have been a case of suspended animation. All these circumstances are mentioned to show that there was no imposture. Impostors do not mention minute circumstances like these. They deal in generals only. Every part of this narrative bears the marks of truth.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869), on John 11:39
The Question John Never Answers
the most complete silence in the chapter, left as it is
A man was dead for four days and then walked out of his own tomb, and the Gospel that reports it does not ask him a single question. Whole libraries have been written into that gap. This page does not add to them.
What did Lazarus experience?
Nothing. John records no account, no description, no report of any kind. It is the first thing a modern reader wants and the one thing the chapter refuses, and the refusal is so complete it has to be deliberate. Lazarus does not speak in John 11 at all: not before he dies, not after he is raised. Every book that tells you what he saw is telling you something the Bible does not.
Why did Jesus weep, when He knew what He was about to do?
He had told the disciples days earlier that Lazarus would be raised. He stands outside the tomb minutes from calling him out. And He weeps. John reports the tears and offers no explanation whatever. The crowd offers one: see how He loved him— but that is the crowd's guess, written down as the crowd's guess, and the chapter does not endorse it. The old commentators reach for answers, and the best of them are honest that they are reaching:
Jesus wept - The least verse in the Bible, yet inferior to none. Some of the ruthless ancients, improperly styled fathers of the Church, thought that weeping was a degradation of the character of Christ; and therefore, according to the testimony of Epiphanius, Anchorat. c. 13, razed out of the Gospel of St. Luke the place (Luk 19:41) where Christ is said to have wept over Jerusalem.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on John 11:35
But was there nothing in those tears beyond sorrow for human suffering and death? Could these effects move Him without suggesting the cause? Who can doubt that in His ear every feature of the scene proclaimed that stern law of the Kingdom, "The wages of sin is death" (Ro 6:23), and that this element in His visible emotion underlay all the rest?
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on John 11:35
What happened to him afterwards?
John 12 shows him at a meal in Bethany with crowds coming out to look at him, and that is the entire New Testament record of the rest of his life. How long he lived, where he went, how he died a second time; later traditions exist and they are traditions, not text. What Scripture does say about him after the tomb is chilling enough on its own.
So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well, for on account of him many of the Jews were deserting them and believing in Jesus.A living man became a problem to be solved. He was walking evidence, and the plan was to remove the evidence.
“I Am the Resurrection and the Life”
the claim is the text's own, and it is made in the first person
Martha believes in the resurrection. She says so before He does — at the last day, like every faithful Jew of her generation. He does not correct her doctrine. He moves it. The resurrection is not only an event at the end of the world; it is a person standing in the road in front of her, and He asks whether she believes that. The whole study of that sentence lives at I Am the Resurrection and the Life.
“Yes, Lord,” she answered, “I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”Her answer: the Johannine equal of Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi, and John puts it in a woman's mouth at a graveside.
Then the sign does what John says signs do, and it costs Him everything. The council meets. And in that meeting the high priest says one of the strangest sentences in the New Testament: a piece of cold political arithmetic that John stops the narrative to tell us was prophecy, spoken by a man who had no idea he was prophesying.
You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”Caiaphas means: better one man dies than we lose the nation. John hears the gospel in it.
It is expedient that one man should die for the people - So God overruled his tongue, for he spake not of himself, by his own spirit only, but by the spirit of prophecy. And thus he gave unawares as clear a testimony to the priestly, as Pilate did to the kingly office of Christ.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), on John 11:50
One last honest distinction, and the New Testament makes it itself. Lazarus was brought back into this life and would die again; he came out of the tomb still wearing it. When Jesus rose, the wrappings stayed behind and He did not need unbinding, and Paul calls Him the firstfruits, the first of a harvest rather than a solitary wonder. Bethany is a sign pointing at Easter. It is not Easter.
But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.The difference between a man called back and the Man who went first, and the reason the second one is called firstfruits.
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching: go further than this page
Homilies on the Gospel of John
Augustine of Hippo · c. 407-420
Tractate xlix is Augustine on this chapter, and it opens with the line quoted above: it is a greater thing to create a man than to revive one. Sixteen centuries on, still the best place to start.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the New Testament
Albert Barnes · 1832-1869
Barnes carries more of this page than any other single voice: the reckoning of the two days, the meaning of “sleep,” the hard word at the tomb, and the plainest statement anywhere of why four days settles the question.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · 1871
Their paragraph on the two shortest words in the Bible asks the question everyone asks and refuses to answer it cheaply: what was in those tears besides sorrow?
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament
John Wesley · 1755
Short, sharp, and unmatched on Caiaphas: God overruled his tongue, and the man who arranged the execution testified to the priesthood of the one he executed.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Unbind Him, and Let Him Go
The chapter ends the way it began: with other people. The sisters sent the message; the mourners filled the house; the crowd watched and some of them went straight to the authorities. And the last instruction Jesus gives at the tomb is given to the bystanders, not the dead man. He does the raising. They take the wrappings off.
Two days of waiting bought four days of certainty, and the certainty cost Him His life; the council met that week, and from that day the decision was made. He knew the price of calling Lazarus out, and He called him out by name anyway.
GO ON FROM HERE
Built from MannaFest's research brief on the iconic stories of Jesus and the gate-verified John 11 quote pool — public-domain commentary quoted verbatim (Augustine of Hippo in the Catena Aurea, Albert Barnes, Adam Clarke, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, John Wesley). Greek word data floor-verified against the site's word-level text of John 11. Scripture BSB, fetched from the floor. Distances are John's own (fifteen stadia, John 11:18). Artwork: Rembrandt, The Raising of Lazarus (c. 1630-1632), public domain, license-verified at Wikimedia Commons.