Commentary - John 11:1-16

Bird's-eye view

The story of the raising of Lazarus is the seventh and final sign in John's Gospel, and it is the capstone miracle that precipitates the Lord's passion. This is not a story about Jesus responding to a tragedy, but rather about Jesus orchestrating a triumph. Every element, from the initial sickness to the calculated delay to the final, glorious outcome, is meticulously arranged by Christ for a singular purpose: the glory of God. This is a divine setup. Jesus is not simply demonstrating power over death; He is demonstrating that He is the Resurrection and the Life. He is teaching His disciples, and us, a foundational lesson about divine sovereignty. God's love for His people is not a sentimental affection that shields us from all harm, but a rugged, purposeful love that will lead us through the valley of the shadow of death in order to display His glory and deepen our faith. This entire episode is a preview of the gospel, a dress rehearsal for Christ's own death and resurrection, designed to fortify His followers for the crisis that was about to break upon them.

We see here the profound interplay between Christ's genuine humanity, His deep love for His friends, and His unwavering commitment to His Father's divine timetable. The disciples are afraid, Martha and Mary are grieving, and Thomas is fatalistic, but Jesus moves with a calm and sovereign purpose. He is the author of this story, and He knows how it ends. The central lesson is that God's delays are not His denials, and His methods, though often painful and perplexing to us, are always aimed at the greater glory of His Son.

Outline

Context In John

This chapter marks a crucial turning point in John's Gospel. The raising of Lazarus is the last and most spectacular of the public signs Jesus performs to reveal His identity. It serves as the immediate catalyst for the plot to kill Him. Up to this point, opposition has been steadily mounting, with multiple attempts to stone Him (John 8:59; 10:31). But this miracle, performed so close to Jerusalem and so undeniably public, forces the hand of the Sanhedrin. They conclude that if they let Him continue, everyone will believe in Him, threatening their power (John 11:47-53). Thus, the sign that most profoundly demonstrates Jesus' identity as the giver of life is the very act that seals His own death warrant. Thematically, it stands as the ultimate demonstration of the claim He made in John 5, that the Son gives life to whom He is pleased to give it. It is the living embodiment of His declaration, "I am the resurrection and the life," which He will make to Martha shortly.

Key Issues

The Calculated Crisis

We live in a therapeutic age that assumes God's primary job is to ensure our comfort and immediate well being. We think of love as that which removes all obstacles and smooths the path. This story demolishes that idol. The central character in this drama is not Lazarus in his tomb, or Mary and Martha in their grief, but the Lord Jesus Christ, sovereignly and deliberately allowing a crisis to unfold. He receives the news, and because He loves this family, He waits. He waits until the situation has gone from bad to worse, from sickness to death, from a tragedy to a biological impossibility. He does this because His love is not sentimental. His love is fixed on a far greater goal than the temporary comfort of His friends. His love is aimed at the glory of God and the establishment of a rock solid faith in the hearts of His disciples. This is a calculated crisis, designed from start to finish to show that Jesus Christ has absolute authority over the final enemy, death, and that He is worthy of our absolute trust, even when His methods are baffling.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1-2 Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. And it was the Mary who anointed the Lord with perfume, and wiped His feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.

John begins by grounding this monumental event in a real family. These are not abstract figures in a parable; they are specific people from a specific town. Lazarus, Mary, and Martha are friends of Jesus. John identifies Mary by an act of extravagant devotion that had not yet occurred in his narrative (it happens in chapter 12), indicating that his original audience was well acquainted with this family and their story. This detail immediately establishes the intimate relationship between Jesus and this household. The crisis that is about to unfold is not happening to strangers, but to those whom Jesus knows and loves.

3 So the sisters sent to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.”

The message they send is a model of faithful prayer. It is simple, direct, and rests entirely on their relationship with Jesus. They do not presume to tell Him what to do. They don't say, "Come at once!" or "Heal him now!" They simply lay the facts of the case before Him: the one You love is sick. Their appeal is not based on Lazarus's merit, but on Christ's affection. This is the essence of grace. They trust that His love is sufficient, and that informing Him of the need is all that is required. They place the problem in His hands and trust Him to act according to His character.

4 But when Jesus heard this, He said, “This sickness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by it.”

Jesus immediately reframes the situation from a divine perspective. From a human point of view, this sickness certainly will end in death. But from God's point of view, death is not the final word. Death is merely a stagehand in a much larger drama. The ultimate telos, the final purpose, of this illness is not the grave, but glory. Specifically, it is for the glory of God, which is revealed as the Son of God is glorified through it. Jesus is stating the scriptural principle that God is sovereign over all affliction, and He ordains it for His own purposes. This sickness was not a random tragedy that God would later redeem; it was sent with a glorious purpose from the very beginning.

5-6 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when He heard that he was sick, He then stayed two days in the place where He was.

Here is the theological heart of the passage, and it is an offense to all sentimentalism. John explicitly states that Jesus loved this family. Then, with a deliberate logical connector, "So" or "Therefore," he links that love directly to Jesus's delay. It was because He loved them that He waited. A lesser love would have rushed to prevent their pain. A divine love, a covenantal love, was willing to allow them to walk through the deepest grief in order to bring about a greater good. The two day delay was not incidental; it was essential. It ensured that Lazarus would not just be dead, but four days dead, long past any hope of resuscitation. Jesus loved them too much to give them a small miracle when He had a world changing resurrection planned.

7-8 Then after this He said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to Him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone You, and are You going there again?”

After the strategic delay, Jesus announces it is time to go. The disciples' reaction is entirely understandable from a human standpoint. They are operating on the basis of threat assessment. Judea means danger. They just escaped a stoning, and the Lord wants to walk right back into the hornet's nest. Their fear is logical, but it is not spiritual. They see the circumstances, but they do not see the sovereign hand of the Father guiding those circumstances.

9-10 Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.”

Jesus answers their fear with a profound principle. He is walking in the "day," meaning He is operating perfectly within the will and timetable of His Father. The Father has appointed a "day" for His work, a set time, and as long as Jesus walks in that light, no one can touch Him. He cannot stumble. The real danger is not the stones of the Jews, but stepping outside the Father's will into the "night." This is a declaration of His absolute security within the sovereign plan of God. His "hour" had not yet come, and until it did, He was invulnerable.

11-13 He said these things, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I go, so that I may awaken him.” The disciples then said to Him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be saved from his sickness.” Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that He was speaking of actual sleep.

Jesus uses the beautiful and common biblical metaphor for the death of a saint: he has fallen asleep. For the believer, death has lost its sting; it is but a temporary rest before the resurrection. But the disciples, still thinking in purely natural terms, take Him literally. Their response is almost comically obtuse. "Oh, good! If he's sleeping, he must be on the mend." This demonstrates their profound spiritual dullness. They are still not thinking on the same plane as Jesus. They are thinking about convalescence; He is thinking about resurrection.

14-15 So Jesus then said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe; but let us go to him.”

Because of their dullness, Jesus drops the metaphor and speaks with blunt clarity: "Lazarus is dead." There is no room for misunderstanding now. Then He says something even more jarring: "I am glad... that I was not there." He is glad for the grief of Mary and Martha? He is glad for the death of His friend? Yes. But notice the reason: "for your sakes... so that you may believe." Jesus is the master teacher, and He knows that this trial is the necessary curriculum for the lesson He is about to teach. He is engineering this entire event to forge an unshakeable faith in His disciples, a faith that will have to endure His own tomb in a matter of days.

16 Therefore Thomas, who is called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, so that we may die with Him.”

Thomas gets a bad rap, but there is a gritty loyalty here that we should admire. He does not share Jesus's confidence. He hears "let us go to him" and thinks "let us go to our deaths." He cannot see the glory on the other side of this journey. All he sees is the threat the other disciples saw, and he assumes the worst. But his conclusion is not to abandon Jesus. It is to die with Him. His faith is pessimistic, gloomy, and shot through with doubt, but it is a faith that clings to Jesus nonetheless. It is a courageous fatalism. If the rabbi is going down, we are going down with Him. This is a weak faith, but it is a real faith, and Jesus can work with that.

Application

This passage forces us to confront our assumptions about the love of God. We are tempted to believe that if God truly loves us, He will keep us from pain, grief, and loss. This story teaches the opposite. God's love is so profound that He will lead us into and through such trials for the sake of a greater good: His glory and our sanctification. When we face a sickness, a loss, or a bewildering delay in God's provision, our first question should not be "Why is this happening to me?" but rather "How does God intend to get glory for His Son through this?"

We must learn to trust God's timing. Mary and Martha wanted Jesus to come immediately. Jesus waited two days. His delay felt like a denial, but it was actually the setup for a greater deliverance. In our own lives, we must submit to the "twelve hours" in God's day. He is never late. He is never early. He operates on a perfect schedule designed to produce the maximum glory for Himself and the maximum faith in us.

Finally, we must see that Jesus Christ is Lord over death. The death of a believer is described as sleep, because we have a Lord who has the power to awaken us. For the Christian, the grave is not a final destination, but a waiting room. The same voice that called "Lazarus, come forth!" will one day call all who are in the tombs, and we will rise. This is the bedrock of our hope. Because Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life, we do not have to fear sickness, and we do not have to fear the grave. Both are simply tools in His hand, used to display His glory.