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37-29. The Raising of Lazarus

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29. The Raising of Lazarus

It must always remain a mystery why this miracle, so memorable in itself, transcending as it does all other miracles which the Lord wrought, so weighty in its consequences (John 11:33), should have been past over by the three earlier Evangelists, and left for the latest to record. The utmost that can be hoped is to suggest some probable solution. Thus, it has been urged by some, by Grotius and by Olshausen, that the three earlier Evangelists, writing in Palestine, and while either Lazarus or some of his family yet survived, would not willingly draw attention, and, it might be, persecution, upon them (see John 12:10); but that no such causes hindered St. John, who wrote at a much later period, and not in Palestine, but in Asia Minor, from bringing forward this miracle. The omission on their part, and the mention upon his, will then be a parallel to a like omission and mention of the name of the disciple who smote off the ear of the High Priest’s servant, only St. John mentioning that it was Peter who struck the blow (John 18:10). But how far-fetched an explanation is this! At the utmost it would account only for the silence of St. Matthew; not for St. Mark’s, whose Gospel was probably written at Rome; for St. Luke’s as little, who wrote for his friend Theophilus, whom many intimations make us conclude. to have lived in Italy. Moreover, the existence of danger to Lazarus or his family, while the miracle and the impression of the miracle were yet fresh, is of itself not the slightest evidence that such existed long years after. The tide of events had swept onward; new objects of hostility had arisen: not to say that if there was danger, and such danger as the mention of the great work wrought on him would have enhanced, yet Lazarus was now a Christian, and would as little have himself shrunk, as those who loved him would have desired to withdraw him, from the post of honourable peril, tor what else would it have been, but to shrink from confessing Christ, to have desired that a work which revealed so much of the glory of the Lord should remain untold, lest some persecution or danger might from the telling accrue to himself, or to those dear to him? Others, as Neander, feeling the insufficiency of this explanation, have observed how the three earlier Evangelists report few save the miracles that the Lord wrought in Galilee, leaving those wrought in Jerusalem and its neighbourhood nearly untouched, and that so they omitted this.^[1] This is perfectly true; but is no explanation, only a re-stating in other words of the fact which needs to be explained; and the question still remains, Why they should have done so? and to this it is difficult to find now the satisfactory answer. This much we may freely say, while, at the same time, we feel the objections against the historic worth either of St. John, or of the three first Evangelists, drawn from Ms insertion, and their omission, of this miracle, to have little seriousness in them. In the house of Martha at Bethany,^[2] “ for St. Luke (Luk 10:38) speaks of her as if alone the mistress of the house, the Lord had often found a hospitable reception; and not in the house only, He had found too a place in the hearts of the united and happy family which abode under that roof; and He loved with a distinguishing human affection “Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.”^[3] To Bethany, after the day’s task was over in the unfriendly city, He was often wont to retire for the night (Mark 11:11-19); its immediate nearness to the city allowing Him to return thither betimes in the morning. And in the circle of this family, with Mary, who “sat at his feet and heard his word,” with Martha, only hindered from the same assiduous hearing by her desire to pay as much outward observance as she could to her divine guest, with Lazarus his “friend” we may contemplate Him as often wont to find rest and refreshment, after a day spent amid the contradiction of sinners, and among the men who daily mistook and wrested his words. But they whom Christ loves are no more exempt than others from their share of earthly trouble and anguish; rather are they bound over to it the more surely. There is sorrow and a fearful looking for of a still greater sorrow in that household; Lazarus is sick; and the sisters in their need turn to Him whom they may have themselves already proved to be a helper in every time of trouble, whom at any rate they have beheld to be such in the extremest need of others. He is at a distance, beyond Jordan, probably at Bethabara, having withdrawn thither from the malice of his adversaries (John 10:39-40; cf. John 1:28); but the place of his concealment, or retirement rather, is known to the friendly family, and they send a messenger with these tidings, “Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick.” Very beautiful is it to observe their confidence in Him; they do not urge Him to come, but only tell their need; this, they take for granted, will be sufficient; for He does not love, and forsake them whom He loves.^[4] It is but a day’s journey from Bethabara to Bethany; they may securely count that help will not tarry long.

“When Jesus heard that, He said, This sickness is not unto death.”^[5] The words are purposely enigmatical, and must greatly have tried the faith of the sisters. For by the time that the messenger brought them back, it is probable that Lazarus was already dead. Sorely therefore must this confident assurance of quite another issue have perplexed them. Could it be that their divine Friend had deceived them, or had been Himself deceived? Why had He not made the issue certain by Himself coming; or, if aught had hindered this, by speaking that word which even at a distance was effectual to heal, which He had spoken for others, for those that were well nigh strangers to Him, and had saved them? But, as with so many other of the divine promises, which seem to us for the moment to come to nothing and utterly to fail, and this because we so little dream of the resources of the Divine love, and are ever limiting them by our knowledge of them, so was it with this word,—a perplexing riddle, till the event had made it plain. Even now, in the eyes of Him who saw the end from the beginning, that sickness was “not unto death;” as they too should acknowledge, when they should find that through the grave and gate of death their brother had past at once to a restored and higher life than any which he yet had lived. For this, I think, we may confidently assume, that it was a higher life to which Lazarus was recalled. That sickness of his was “for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby, -” but in this “glory of God” was included the perfecting for Lazarus of his own spiritual being, as we cannot doubt that it was perfected through these wondrous events of his existence. In them was his hard yet blessed passage into life; while at the same time that which was the decisive crisis in his spiritual development was also a signal moment in the gradual revelation of the glory of Christ unto the world. The Son of God was first glorified in Lazarus, and then on and through him to the world (compare the exact parallel, John 9:2-3).

Some would connect ver. 5, “Now Jesus loved^[6] Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus,” with what goes before, making it to contain an explanation of the message, and of the ready confidence which the sisters entertain in the Lord’s help; some with the verse following; and then St. John will be bringing out into the strongest contrast the Lord’s love to the distressed family at Bethany, and his tarrying notwithstanding for two days where He was, even after the message claiming his help had reached Him. The Evangelist will in this latter case be suggesting to the thoughtful reader all that is involved in this love, which waited so long, ere it would step into save. But Maldonatus, as it. seems to me, has caught a truer view of the sequence of thought, connecting this verse not with the one, but “with the two which follow. He understands St. John to say: Jesus loved Martha and the others; when therefore He heard that Lazarus was sick, He abode indeed two days where He was, but “then after that saith He to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again” To conceive any other reason for his tarrying where He was during those two days, than that He might have scope for that great miracle, as, for example, that He had in hand some signal work for the kingdom of God where He was, such as would not endure interruption, which therefore He could not quit for the most urgent calls of private friendship, is extremely unnatural (see 10:41, 42). Had He only been so determined, He, who could heal with his word at a distance as easily as by his actual presence, would not have failed so to do. This tarrying was rather a part of the severe yet gracious discipline of divine love. The need must attain to the highest, before He interferes. It is often thus. He intervenes with mighty help, but not till every other help, not until, to the weak faith of man, even his own promise has seemed utterly to have failed. But now, when all things are ready for Him, “He saith to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again.” The wondering and trembling disciples remonstrate; “Master, the Jews of late sought to stone Thee, and goest Thou thither again?” The necessity of hiding from their active malice had brought Him to those safer haunts beyond Jordan, and will He now affront that danger anew? In these remonstrances of theirs there spake out truest love to Him; but mingled with this love apprehensions for their own safety, as is revealed in the words of Thomas (ver. 16), who takes it for granted that to return with Him is to die with Him. To keep this in mind, will best help us to understand the answer of the Lord: “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” or, rather, “Are not the hours of the day twelve? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world”—in other words, “Is there not a time which is not cut short or abridged by premature darkness, but consists of twelve full hours, ^[7] during any part of which a man may walk and work without stumbling, being enlightened by the light of this world, by the natural sun in the heavens?” Such an unconcluded day there is now for Me, a day during any part of which I can safely accomplish the work given Me by my Father, whose light I, in like manner, behold. So long as the day, the time appointed by my Father for my earthly walk, endures, so long as there is any work for Me yet to do, I am safe, and you are safe in my company, “We may profitably compare the very similar words spoken under similar circumstances of danger, John 9:4. And then, at ver. 10, leaving all allusion to Himself, and contemplating his disciples alone, He links another thought to this, and warns them that they never walk otherwise than as seeing Him who is the Light of men,—they never walk as in the night,—they undertake no task, they affront no danger, unless looking to Him, unless they can say, “The Lord is my Light;” for so to do were to involve themselves in sure peril and temptation. The final words which explain why such a walker in the night should stumble, “because there is no light in him,” are a forsaking of the figure, which would have required something of this kind, “there is no light above him;” but in the spiritual world it is one and the same thing not to see the light above us, and not to have it in us; for they only have it in them who see it above them (cf. 1Jn 2:8-11).

“These things said He: and after that He saith unto them, Our friend ^[8] Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.” We are not to suppose that the Lord receives new and later tidings from the house of sickness, announcing that it is now the house of death, nor thus to explain the new communication which He makes to his disciples. By the inner power of his spirit He knows how it has fared with his friend. In language how simple does He speak of the mighty work which He is about to accomplish; language which shall rather extenuate than enhance its greatness: it is but as a sleep and an awaking. The disciples, however, misunderstood his words, and thought that He spake of natural sleep, an indication often of a favourable crisis in a disorder. Eagerly seizing upon any excuse for not returning as into the lion’s jaws, they assume it such here: “Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well.”^[9] What need then that their beloved Lord should expose Himself, and with Himself them, to peril, when his presence was not required, when all was going favourably forward without Him? “Then saith Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.” The image of death as a sleep is so common, belongs so to the natural symbolism of all nations, that it was no difficulty in the image itself which occasioned the misunderstanding upon their part; but, while it was equally possible for them to take his words in a figurative or in a literal sense, they erroneously took them in the latter.^[10] They make an exactly similar mistake, though one involving a greater lack of spiritual insight, Mat 16:5-12. “And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe.” He anticipates what could hardly not have risen up in their minds, namely, why He had not been there to save. Through that absence of his there should be a higher revelation of the glory of God than could have been from his earlier presence; a revelation that should lead them, and in them all the Church, to higher stages of faith, to a deeper recognition of Himself, as the Lord of life and of death. He is glad, for his disciples’ sake, that it thus had befallen; for had He been upon the spot, He could not have suffered the distress of those so dear to Him to reach the highest point, but must have interfered at an earlier moment. When He summons them now to go, “nevertheless, let us go unto him,” it is plain that for one disciple at least the anticipation of death, as the certain consequence of this perilous journey, is not overcome. In the words of Thomas to his fellow-disciples,^[11] “Let us also go, that we may die with Him,” there is a remarkable mixture of faith and unfaithfulness,—faith, since he counted it better to die with his Lord than to live forsaking Him,—unfaithfulness, since he conceived it possible that so long as his Lord had a work to accomplish, He or any under the shield of his presence could be overtaken by any peril which should require them to die together. Thomas was, most probably, of a melancholic desponding character; most true to his Master, yet ever inclined to look at things on their darkest side, finding it most hard to raise himself to the loftier elevations of faith,—to believe other and more than he saw (John 14:5; John 20:25), or to anticipate more favourable issues than those which the earthly probabilities of an event promised.^[12] Men of all temperaments and all characters were within that first and nearest circle of disciples, that they might be the representatives and helpers of all that hereafter, through one difficulty and another, should attain at last to the full assurance of faith. Very beautifully Chrysostom^[13] says of this disciple, that he who now would hardly venture to go with Jesus as far as to the neighbouring Bethany, afterwards without Him travelled to the ends of the world, to the furthest India, daring all the perils of remote and hostile nations.

Martha and Mary would have scarcely ventured to claim help from the Lord, till the sickness of their brother had assumed an alarming character; he probably had died upon the same day that the messenger announcing his illness had reached the Lord; scarcely otherwise would He have found when He came, “that he had lain in the grave four days already.” The day of the messenger’s arrival on this calculation would be one day; two our Lord abode in Peraea after He had dismissed him; and one more,—for it was not more than the journey of a single day,—He would have employed in the journey from thence to Bethany. Dying upon that day, Lazarus, according to the custom of the Jews, that burial should immediately follow on death (Acts 5:6-10), had been buried upon the same, as a comparison of this verse with ver. 39 clearly shows. But before the arrival of Him, the true Comforter, other comforters, some formal, all weak, had arrived. The nearness of Bethany to Jerusalem, which is therefore noticed here, will have made these the more numerous. “Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off,” that is, about two miles; “and many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary,^[14] to comfort them concerning their brother,” gathered at the house of mourning by the providence of God, who would have many witnesses and heralds of this mightiest of the wondrous works of his Son. It was part of the Jewish ceremonial of grief, which was all most accurately defined,^[15] that there should be numerous visits of condolence, a large gathering of friends and acquaintance, not less than ten, as in the case of a marriage company, round those that were mourning for their dead (1Ch 7:22); sometimes, and on the part of some, a reality; yet oftentimes a dry and heartless formality on the one side, as a burden most heavy to bear, an aggravation of grief, on the other. Job’s comforters give witness how little true sympathy sometimes existed with the sufferer. At times, too, it was a bitter mockery, when the very authors of the grief professed to be the comforters in it (Gen 37:35). But now He comes, who could indeed comfort the mourners, and wipe away tears from their eyes. Yet He comes not to the house; that had been already filled by “the Jews,” by those who were for the most part alien, if not hostile, to Him; for almost as often as this term “the Jews” occurs in St. John, hostility to Christ is implied in it. Not amid the disturbing influences of that uncongenial circle shall his first interview with the sorrowing sisters find place. Probably He tarried outside the town, and not very far from the spot where Lazarus was buried, else when Mary went to meet Him, the Jews could scarcely have said, “She goeth unto the grave to weep there” (ver. 31). From thence He may have suffered the tidings to go before Him that He was at hand. When we read that “Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met Him; but Mary sat still in the house,” we are not, in this hastening of the one and tarrying of the other, to trace, as many have done, the different characteristics of the two sisters, or to find a parallel here to Luk 10:39. For on that former occasion, when Mary chose to sit still, she did so because it was at “Jesus’ feet” that she was sitting; this nearness to Him, and not the sitting still, was then the attraction. The same motives which then kept her in stillness there, would now have brought her on swiftest wings of love to the place where the Master was. Moreover, so soon as ever she did hear that her Lord was come and called for her, “she arose quickly, and came unto Him” (ver. 29). “It was not,” to use Chrysostom’s words, “that Martha was now more zealous; but Mary had not heard.” This much characteristic of the two sisters there may very probably be in the narrative, namely, that Martha, engaged in active employments even in the midst of her grief, may have been more in the way of hearing what was happening in the outer world, while Mary, in her deeper and stiller anguish, was sitting retired in the house, and less within the reach of such rumours.^[16]

I know, not whether it is an accident of the narrative, fuller at one place than at the other, or whether it belongs to the characteristic touches which escape us at the first glance, but of which Scripture is so full, that nothing should be said of Martha falling at the Lord’s feet, while this is noted of her sister (ver. 32). Martha too is ready to change words with Christ; but the deeper anguish of Mary finds utterance in that one phrase, the one thought which was uppermost in the heart of both: “Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died;” and then she is silent. For it is the bitterest drop in their cup of anguish, that all this might have been otherwise. Had this sickness befallen at another moment, when Christ was nearer, had He been able to hasten to their aid as soon as He was summoned, all might have been averted; they might have been rejoicing in a living, instead of mourning over a dead, brother. Yet even now Martha has not altogether renounced every hope, though she ventures only at a distance to allude to this hope which she is cherishing still. “But I know that even now” now when the grave has closed upon him, “whatsoever Thou wilt ask^[17] of God, God will give it Thee.” High thoughts and poor thoughts of Christ mingle here together;—high thoughts, in that she sees Him as one whose effectual fervent prayers will greatly prevail;—poor thoughts, in that she thinks of Him as obtaining by prayer that which indeed He has by the oneness of his nature with God.^[18] With words purposely ambiguous, being meant for the trying of her faith, Jesus assures her that the deep, though unuttered, longing of her heart shall indeed be granted: “Thy brother shall rise again.” But though her heart could take in the desire for so great a boon, it cannot take in its actual granting (cf. Acts 12:5; Acts 12:15); it shrinks back half in unbelief from the receiving of it. She cannot believe that these words mean more than that he, with all other faithful Israelites, will stand in his lot at the last day; and with a slight movement of impatience at such cold comfort, comfort that so little met the present longings of her heart, which were to have her brother now, she answers, “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day” Her love was as yet earthly, clinging passionately to the earthly objects of its affection, but needing to be infinitely exalted and purified. Unless the Lord had lifted her into a higher region of life, it would have profited her little that He had granted her heart’s desire,^[19] What would it have helped her to receive back her brother, if again she were presently to lose him, if once more they were to be parted asunder by his death or her own? This lower boon would only prove a boon at all, if he and she were both made partakers of a higher life in Christ; then, indeed, death would have no more power over them, then they would truly possess one another, and for ever: and to this the wondrously deep and loving words of Christ would lead her. They are no unseasonable preaching of truths remote from her present needs, but the answer to the very deepest need of her soul; they would lead her from a lost brother to a present Saviour, a Saviour in whom alone that brother could be truly and for ever found. “Jesus said unto her, I am the Resurrection, and the Life; the true Life, the true Resurrection; the everlasting triumphs over death, they are in Me—no remote benefits, as thou speakest of now, to find place at the last day;. no powers separate or separable from Me, as thou spakest of lately, when thou desiredst that I should ask of Another that which I possess evermore in Myself. In Me is victory over the grave, in Me is life eternal: by faith in Me that becomes yours which makes death not to be death, but only the transition to a better life.”

Such, I cannot doubt, is the general meaning and scope of these glorious words. When we ask ourselves what the title “The Resurrection” which Christ ascribes to Himself, involves, we perceive that in one aspect it is something more, in another something less, than that other title of” The Life” which He also challenges for his own. It is more, for it is life in conflict with and overcoming death; it is life being the death of death, meeting it in its highest manifestation, that of physical dissolution and decay, and vanquishing it there. It is less, for so long as that title belongs to Him, it implies something still undone, a mortality not yet wholly swallowed up in life, a last enemy not yet wholly destroyed and put under his feet (1Co 15:25-26). As He is “the Resurrection” of the dead, so is He “the Life” of the living—absolute life, having life in Himself, for so it has been given Him of the Father (John 5:26), the one fountain of life;^[20] so that all who receive not life from Him pass into the state of death, first the death of the spirit, and then, as the completion of their death, the death also of the body. The words following, “He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die,” are not obscure in the sum total of their meaning; yet so to interpret them, as to prevent the two clauses of the sentence from appearing to contain a repetition, and to find progress in them, is not easy. If we compare this passage with John 6:32-59, and observe the repeated stress which is there laid on the raising up at the last day, as the great quickening work of the Son of God (ver. 39, 40, 44, 54), we shall not hesitate to make the declaration, “yet shall he live,” in the first clause here, to be equivalent to the words, “I will raise him up at the last day,” there, and this whole first clause will then be the unfolding of the words, “I am the Resurrection;” as such He will rescue every one that believeth on Him from death and the grave. In like manner, the second clause answers to, and is the expansion of, the more general declaration, “I am the Life;” that is, “Whosoever liveth, every one that draweth the breath of life and believeth upon Me, shall know the power of an everlasting life, shall never truly die. “Here, as so often in our Lord’s words, the temporal death is taken no account of, but quite overlooked, and the believer in Him is contemplated as already lifted above death, and made partaker of everlasting life (John 6:47).^[21]

Having claimed all this for Himself, He demands of Martha whether she can receive it: “Believest thou this, —that I am this Lord of life and of death? Doth thy faith in the divine verities of the resurrection and eternal life after death centre in Me?” Her answer, “Yea, Lord, I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world,” is perhaps more direct than at first sight it appears. For one of the offices of Christ the Messiah was, according to the Jewish expectations, to raise the dead; and thus, confessing Him to be the Christ, she implicitly confessed Him also to be the quickener of the dead. Or she may mean,—”I believe all glorious things concerning Thee; there is nought which I do not believe concerning Thee, since I believe Thee to be Him in whom every glorious gift for the world is centred, “—speaking like one whose faith, as that of most persons at all times must be, was implicit rather than explicit: she did not know all which that name, “the Christ, the Son of God,” involved, but all which it did involve she was ready to believe.

She says no more; for now she will make her sister partaker of the joyful tidings that He, the long waited for, long desired, is arrived at last. Some good thing too, it may be, she expects from his high and mysterious words, though she knows not precisely what: a ray of comfort has found its way into her heart, and she would fain make her sister a sharer in this. Yet she told not her tidings openly, suspecting, and having good cause to suspect (ver. 46), that some of their visitors from Jerusalem might be of unfriendly disposition towards the Lord. “She called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee.” This, that He had asked for Mary, we had not learned from the previous account. “As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly, and came unto Him.” The Jews take it for granted that she is hastening in a paroxysm of her grief to the grave, that she may weep there; as it was the custom of Jewish women often to visit the graves of their kindred,^[22] and this especially during the first days of their mourning;—and they follow; for thus was it provided of God that this miracle should have many witnesses. “Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw Him, she fell down at his feet,^[23] saying, Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died” The words with which her sister had greeted the Lord thus repeating themselves a second time from her lips, give us a glimpse of all that had passed in that mournful house, since the beloved was laid in earth: often during that four days’ interval the sisters had said one to the other, how different the issues might have been, if the divine friend had been with them. Such had been the one thought in the hearts, the one word upon the lips, of both, and therefore was so naturally the first spoken by each, and that altogether independently of the other. This is indeed one of the finer traits of the narrative. At the spectacle of all this grief, the sisters weeping, and even the more indifferent visitors from Jerusalem weeping likewise, the Lord also “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled”^[24] The word which we translate “groaned’^[25]does indeed far rather express the feelings of indignation and displeasure than of grief, which, save as a certain amount of it is contained in all displeasure, it means not at all. But at what and with whom was Jesus thus indignant? The notion of some Greek expositors,^[26] that He was indignant with Himself for these stirrings of pity, these human tears,—that the word expresses the inward struggle to repress, as something weak and unworthy, these rising utterances of grief,—is not to be accepted for an instant. Christianity knows of no such dead Stoicism; it demands a regulating, but no such repressing, of the natural affections; on the contrary, it bids us to “weep with them that weep” (Rom 12:15); and, in the beautiful words of Leighton, that we “seek not altogether to dry the stream of sorrow, but to bound it, and keep it within its banks.” Some, as Theodore of Mopsuestia and Lampe, suppose Him indignant in spirit at the hostile dispositions which He already traced and detected among the Jews that were present, the unbelief on their part with which He foresaw that great work of his would be received. Others, that his indignation was excited by the unbelief of Martha and Mary and the others, which they manifested in their weeping, whereby they showed clearly that they did not believe that He would raise their dead. But He Himself wept presently, and there was nothing in these their natural tears to have roused a feeling of the kind.

Much better is it to take this as the indignation which the Lord of life felt at all which sin had wrought: He beheld death in all its fearfulness, as the wages of sin; the woes of a whole world, of which this was but a little sample, rose up before his eye; all its mourners and all its graves were present to Him. For that He was about to wipe away the tears of those present did not truly alter the case. Lazarus rose again, but only to taste a second time the bitterness of death; these mourners He might comfort, but only for a little while; these tears He might stanch, only again hereafter to flow; and how many had flowed and must flow with no such Comforter to wipe them, even for a season, away. Contemplating all this, a mighty indignation at the author of all this woe possessed his heart. And now He will delay no longer, but will do battle with him, and show in a present, though as yet an incomplete, triumph over him, some preludes of his future victory.^[27] With this feeling He demands, “Where have ye laid him? They said unto Him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept;”^[28] or perhaps it would have been more accurately rendered, ”shed tears,”^[29] Himself borne along with, and not seeking to resist, this great tide of sorrow.

Some of the Jews present, moved to good will by this lively sympathy of the Lord with the sorrows of those around Him, exclaimed, “Behold how He loved him! And some” or rather, “But some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?” It is an invidious question. He weeps over this calamity now, but could He not have hindered it? He who could open the eyes of the blind (they refer to the case which, through the judicial investigation that followed, had made so great a stir at Jerusalem, John ix.), could He not (by his prayer to God) have hindered that this man should have died? There was indeed in this accusation, as so often in similar cases, something contradictory; for their very assumption that He possessed such power and favour with God as would have enabled Him to stay the stroke of death, rested on the assumption of so eminent a goodness upon his part, as would have secured that his power should not have been grudgingly restrained in any case, where it would have been suitably exerted. It is characteristic of the exact truth of this narrative (although it has been brought as an argument against it), that they, dwellers in Jerusalem, should refer to this miracle which had lately occurred there (John ix.), rather than to the previous raisings from the dead, which might at first sight appear more to the point. But those, occurring at an earlier period, and in the remoter Galilee, they may very likely have only heard of by obscure report. At all events, they would not have been present to them with at all the same liveliness as was this miracle, brought into prominence by the contradiction which it had roused, and the futile attempts which had been made to prove it an imposture. Yet a maker-up of the narrative from later and insecure traditions would inevitably have fallen upon those miracles of a like kind, as arguments of the power of Jesus to have accomplished this.

Meanwhile they reach the tomb, though not without another access of that indignant horror, another of those mighty shudderings, that shook the frame of the Lord of life,—so dreadful did death seem to Him who, looking through all its natural causes, at which we often stop short, saw it purely as the seal and token of sin; so unnatural did its usurpation appear over a race made for immortality (Wisd. 1:13, 14). “Jesus therefore, again groaning in Himself, cometh to the grave.” This, as the whole course of the narrative shows, was without the town (ver. 30), according to the universal custom of the East (Luk 7:12), which did not suffer a placing of the dead among the living.^[30] “It was a cave,” as were commonly the family vaults of the Jews; sometimes natural (Gen 23:9; Jdt 16:23), sometimes artificial and hollowed out by man’s labour from the rock (Isa 22:16; Mat 27:60), in a garden (John 19:41), or in some field the possession of the family (Gen 23:9; Gen 23:17-20; Gen 35:18; 2Ki 21:13); with recesses in the sides, wherein the bodies were laid, occasionally with chambers one beyond another. “And a stone lay upon it.” Sometimes the entrance to these tombs was on a level; sometimes there was a descent to them by steps, as on the present occasion seems probably to have been the case. This stone, blocking up the entrance, kept aloof the beasts of prey, above all the numerous jackals, which else might have found their way into these receptacles of the dead, and torn the bodies. It was naturally of sufficient size and weight not easily to be moved away (Mark xvi. 3). The tomb of our blessed Lord Himself, with its “door,” appears rather to have had a horizontal entrance.^[31]

Among other slighter indications which we have that Mary and Martha were not at all among the poorest of their people, this is one, that they should possess such a family vault as this. The poor had not, and it lay not within their power to purchase in fee, portions of land to set apart for these purposes of family interment. The possession of such was a privilege of the wealthier orders; only such were thus laid in the sepulchres of their fathers.^[32] We have another indication of the same in the large concourse of mourners, and those of the higher ranks, which assembled from Jerusalem to console the sisters in their bereavement; for even in grief that word is too often true, that “wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his neighbour” (Pro 19:4). The pound of ointment of spikenard, “very costly,” with which Mary anointed the feet of the Saviour (John 12:3), points the same way; and the language of the original at ver. 19, however it may mean Martha and Mary, and not those around them,^[33] yet means them as the centre of an assemblage. Chrysostom assumes the sisters to have been highborn,^[34] Εὐγενέστεραι. as generally did the early interpreters; probably with right; although they lay a mistaken emphasis upon “the town of Mary and her sister Martha” (ver. 1), who conclude from these words that Bethany belonged to them. The Levitical law rendered, and was intended to render, any such concentration of landed property in the hands of one or two persons impossible; not to say that, by as good a right, Bethsaida might be concluded to have belonged to Andrew and Peter, for the language is exactly similar (John 1:45).

“Jesus said, Take ye away the stone” Why, it may be asked, does St. John designate Martha in the next words as “the sister of him that was dead,” when this was abundantly plain before? Probably to account for the remonstrance of hers, which follows. She, as the sister of the dead, would naturally be more shocked than another at the thought of the exposure of that countenance, upon which corruption had already set its seal; she would most shudderingly contemplate that beloved form made a spectacle to strangers, now when it was become an abhorring even to them that had loved it best. Yet the words of her remonstrance, “Lord, by this time he stinketh; for he hath been dead four days” are scarcely, as by so many they are interpreted, an experience which she now makes, but rather a conclusion which she draws from the length of time during which the body had already lain in the grave. With the rapid decomposition that goes forward in a hot country, necessitating as it does an almost immediate burial, the “four days” might well have brought this about, which she fears. At the same time, it gives to this miracle almost a monstrous character, if we suppose it was actually the re-animating of a body which had already undergone the process of corruption. Rather He who sees the end from the beginning, and who had intended that Lazarus should live again, had watched over that body in his providence, that it should not hasten to corruption. If the poet could imagine a divine power guarding from all defeature and wrong the body which was thus preserved only for an honourable burial;^[35] by how much more may we assume a like preservation for that body which, not in the world of fiction, but of reality, was to become again so soon the tabernacle for the soul of one of Christ’s servants. No conclusion of an opposite kind can be drawn from these words of Martha, being spoken, as plainly they are, before the stone has been removed.^[36] This much, however, her words do reveal—that her faith in the Lord as able even then to quicken her dead brother had already failed. There is nothing strange in this. A weak faith, such as hers, would inevitably have these alternating ebbs and flows. All which this command to remove the stone implies for her now is a desire on the Lord’s part to look once more on the countenance of him whom He loved; from this intention she would fain recal Him, by urging how death and corruption must have been busy in the tomb where Lazarus had already slept his four days’ sleep. The Lord checks and rebukes her unbelief: “Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?” When had He said this, and to what former conversation does He refer? No doubt to that which He held with her when first they met. It is true that these precise words do no. t occur there; but that conversation was on the power of faith, as the means to make our own the fulness of the powers that dwelt in Christ. There is no need, therefore, to suppose that He alludes to something in that prior discourse, unrecorded by the Evangelist. And now Martha acquiesces: she does believe, and no longer opposes the hindrance of her unbelief to the work which the Lord would accomplish.

“Then,” when those nearest of kin were thus consenting, “they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me.” But any thanksgiving upon his part to God, and thanksgiving on account of being heard, might easily have been misinterpreted by the disciples then, and by the Church afterwards; as though it would have been possible for the Father not to have heard Him,—as though He had first obtained this power to call Lazarus from his grave, after supplication,—had, like Elisha (2Ki 4:33-35), by dint of prayer (cf. Acts 9:40) painfully won back the life which had departed; whereas the power was most truly his own, not indeed in disconnexion from the Father, for what He saw the Father do, that also He did; but in this, his oneness with the Father, there lay the uninterrupted power of doing these mighty acts.^[37] Therefore He explains, evidently not any more in that loud voice which should be heard by the whole surrounding multitude, but yet so that his disciples might hear Him, what this his “Father, I thank Thee” meant, and why it was spoken: “And I knew that Thou hearest Me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me.” For them it was wholesome: they should thus understand that He claimed his power from above, and not from beneath; that there was no magic, no necromancy here. The thanks to God were an acknowledgment that the power was from God. Chrysostom supposes that when this thanksgiving prayer was uttered, Lazarus was already re-animated; but this assuredly is a mistake. Christ is so sure that the effect will follow his word, that He renders as by anticipation thanks to his Father; but this cry “with a loud voice,”^[38] calling the things that are not as though they were, this “Lazarus, come forth,”^[39] is itself the quickening word, at which first the life returns to the dead.^[40] For it is ever to the voice of the Son of God that the power of quickening the dead and calling them from their graves is attributed; thus John 5:28-29 : “The hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth;” so 1Th 4:16, it is the Lord’s descending “with a shout,” which is followed by the resurrection of the dead in Him, Nor, probably, is “the last trump” of 1Co 15:52, anything else but this voice of God which shall sound through all the kingdom of death. Many, in their zeal for multiplying miracles, make it a new miracle, a wonder in a wonder,^[41] as St. Basil calls it, that Lazarus was able to obey the summons, while yet he was “bound hand and foot with grave-clothes.”^[42] But if so, to what end the further word, “Loose him, and let him go”?^[43] Probably he was loosely involved in these grave-clothes, which hindering all free action, yet did not hinder motion altogether; or, it may be that, in accordance with the Egyptian fashion, every limb was wrapped round with these stripes by itself, just as in the mummies each separate finger has sometimes its own wrapping.

St. John here breaks off the narrative of the miracle itself, leaving us to imagine their joy, who thus beyond all expectation received back their dead from the grave; a joy which was well nigh theirs alone, among all the mourners of all times—

“Who to the verge have followed that they love, And on the insuperable threshold stand, With cherished names its speechless calm reprove, And stretch in the abyss their ungrasped hand.”

He leaves this, and passes on to show us the historic significance of this miracle in the development of the Lord’s earthly history, the permitted link which it formed in the chain of those events, which should be crowned, according to the determinate decree and counsel of God, by the atoning death of the Son of God upon the cross.

What the purpose was of these Jews that “went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what, things Jesus had done,” has been diversely conceived. By some, as by Origen, it has been supposed that they went with a good intention, thinking to tell them that which even they could no longer resist, which would make them also acknowledge that this was the Christ. Yet the place which this intimation occupies in the narrative seems decisively to contradict this more favourable construction of their purpose. “Many,” St. John declares, “of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on Him; but some of them,” not of those that believed, but of the Jews, “went their way to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done.” These were persons who did not believe; who on one plea or another refused to be convinced by this miracle (Luk 16:31), and reported to the professed enemies of the Lord what He had done, to irritate them yet more against the doer,^[44] to warn them of the instant need of more earnestly counter-working Him who had done, or seemed to do, so great a sign; and it is observable that St. John joins immediately with this report to the Pharisees an increased activity in their hostile machinations against the Lord. And they are indeed now seriously alarmed. They anticipate the effects which this, the mightiest work that Christ wrought, would have upon the people, which historically we know that it actually had (John 12:10-11; John 12:17-19); and they gather in council together against the Lord and against his Anointed. They stop not to inquire whether “this man,” as they contemptuously call Him,—who, even according to their own confession, “doeth many miracles” (cf. Acts 4:16), may not be doing them in the power of God, may not be indeed the promised King of Israel. The question of the truth or falsehood of his claims seems never to enter into their minds, but only how the acknowledgment of these claims will bear on the worldly fortunes of their order, and this they contemplate under somewhat a novel aspect: “If we let Him thus alone, all men will believe on Him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.” But what necessary connexion did they trace between the recognition of Jesus as the Christ, and a conflict with the Roman power? Probably this. The people will acknowledge Him for the Messiah; He will set Himself at their head, or they by compulsion will make Him their king (John 6:15); hereupon will follow an attempt to throw off the foreign yoke, an attempt to be crushed presently by the superior power of the Roman legions; and then these will not distinguish the innocent from the guilty, but will make a general sweep, taking away from us wholly whatsoever survives of our power and independence, “our place^[45] and nation.” Or, without anticipating an actual insurrection, they may have supposed that the mere fact of acknowledging a Messiah would arouse the jealousy of the Romans, would by them be accounted as an act of rebellion, to be visited with these extremest penalties.^[46] How sensitive that jealousy was, how easily alarmed, we have a thousand proofs. The Roman governor comes at once to this point; “Art Thou the King of the Jews?” (John 18:33); and compare Acts 16:21; Acts 17:7-8. Augustine stands alone in a somewhat different interpretation of the words—namely, that the Jews were already meditating, as no doubt they were, the great revolt of a later time, and saw plainly that the very nerves of it would be cut by the spread of the doctrines of this Prince of peace. Where should they find instruments for their purpose? all resistance to the Roman domination would become impossible; and these whensoever they chose, would come and rob them of whatever remained of their national existence.^[47] We shall do best, however, in adhering to the more usual interpretation. The question will still remain, Did they who said this,, feel truly the dread which they professed; or only pretend to fear these consequences from the ministry of Christ, if suffered to remain uninterrupted; and that, on account of a party in the Sanhedrim (see John 9:16), who could only by such pleas as these be won over to the extreme measures now meditated against Him? Chrysostom, and most of the Greek expositors, suppose they did but feign this fear; I must needs think that they were sincere in the alarm which they professed.

Probably many half-measures had been proposed by one member and another of the Sanhedrim for arresting the growing inclination of the people to recognize Jesus as the Christ, and had been debated backward and forward, such as hindering them from hearing Him; proclaiming anew, as had been done before, that any should be excommunicated who should confess Him to be Christ (John 9:22). But these measures had been already tried, and had proved insufficient; and in that “Ye know nothing at all” of Caiaphas, we hear the voice of the bold bad man, silencing, with ill-suppressed contempt, his weak and vacillating colleagues, who could see the danger, while they yet shrunk, though not for the truth’s sake,. from the step which promised to remove it. “Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” Guilty or not guilty, this man, who threatens to imperil the whole nation, and, whether He Himself means it or no to compromise it with the Roman power, must be taken put of the way.

Caiaphas, who dares thus to come to the point, and to speak the unuttered thought of many in that assembly, was a Sadducee (Acts 5:17), and held, as we know from other sources, the office of the high priesthood for ten successive years. This may not seem quite to agree with St. John’s description of him here, as “being the High Priest that same year;” nor are these words otherwise without their difficulty, implying, as they seem to do, that St. John accounted the High Priesthood a yearly office.^[48] This, as we well know, was not the fact. The High Priesthood at this time was by the Romans as vilely prostituted as, under very similar circumstances, the Patriarch’s throne at Constantinople is now by the Turks; it was shifted so rapidly from one to another, as sometimes to remain with one holder even for less than a year; but according to its institution was a lifelong office, and this very Caiaphas retained the dignity, if not for life, yet at all events much more than for a year. The language of St. John has sometimes been explained as though he would say that Caiaphas was High Priest for that ever-memorable year “when vision and prophecy should be sealed,”^[49] and the Son of God die upon the cross. Yet why suppose him to mean more than that Caiaphas was High Priest then ? whether he had been so before, or should be after, was nothing to his present purpose. He lays an emphasis on the fact that such he was at the moment when these words were uttered, because this gave them a weight and significance, which else they would not have possessed. They were not the words of Caiaphas; they were the words of the High Priest. “This spake he not of himself; but being High Priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation.” The fact that he who uttered these words was, when he uttered them, clothed with the highest office in the theocracy gives them an oracular, even a prophetic character in the eyes of St. John.^[50] This requires some explanation. That a bad man should have uttered words which were so overruled by God as to become prophetic, would of itself be no difficulty. He who used a Balaam to declare how there should come a Star out of Jacob and a Sceptre out of Israel (Num 24:17), might have used Caiaphas to fore-announce other truths of his kingdom.^[51] Nor is there any difficulty in such unconscious prophecies as this evidently is.^[52] How many prophecies of the like kind,—most of them, it is true, rather in act than in word, meet us in the whole history of the crucifixion! What was the title over our blessed Lord, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews,” but another such a scornful and contemptuous, yet most veritable, prophecy? Or what again the purple robe and the homage, the sceptre, and the crown? And in the typical rehearsals of the crowning catastrophe in the drama of God’s providence, how many a Nimrod and Pharaoh, antichrists that do not quite come to the birth, have prophetic parts allotted to them, which they play out, unknowing what they do; for such is the divine irony; so, in a very deep sense of the words, Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus.^[53] But the perplexing circumstance is the attributing to Caiaphas, because he was High Priest, these prophetic words—for prophetic the Evangelist plainly pronounces them to be, and all attempts to rid his words of this intention, and to destroy the antithesis between “speaking of himself and “prophesying” are idle.^[54] There is no need, however, to suppose (and this greatly diminishes the embarrassment) that he meant to affirm this to have been a power inherent in the High Priesthood; that the High Priest, as such, must prophesy; but only that God, the extorter of those unwilling, or even unconscious, prophecies from wicked men, ordained this further, that he in whom the whole theocracy culminated, who was “the Prince of the people” (Acts 23:5), for such, till another High Priest had sanctified Himself,—and his moral character was nothing to the point,—Caiaphas truly was,—should, because he bore this office, be the organ of this memorable prophecy concerning Christ, and the meaning and end of his death,^[55]

What follows, “And not for that nation only, but that also He should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad” is not a meaning legitimately involved in the words of Caiaphas, but is added by the care of St. John, to hinder that limitation of the benefits of Christ’s death, which otherwise might seem to lie in them.; So grave a misinterpretation, now that the words had been adopted as more than man’s, it was well worth while to avert. Caiaphas indeed prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation, and (St. John himself adds) He indeed died not for it only, but also for the gathering in one of all the children of God scattered abroad through the whole world. Elsewhere he has declared the same truth: “He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole “world” (1Jn 2:2). Not the law, as the Jews supposed, but the atoning death of Christ was that which should bind together all men into one fellowship: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” The law was rather a wall of separation. It was only that death, and the life which sprung out of that death, which could knit together. We may compare Ephes. 2:13-22, as St. Paul’s commentary on these words of St. John. “The children of God” have this name by anticipation here; they are those predestinated to this; who, not being disobedient to the heavenly calling, should hereafter become his children by adoption and grace.^[56] Not otherwise, in a parallel passage, Christ says, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold” (John 10:16); others that should be hereafter his sheep. In a subordinate sense they might perhaps be termed “children of God” already; they were the nobler natures, although now run wild, among the heathen, the “sons of peace,” that should receive the message of peace (Luk 10:6); in a sense, “of the truth,” even while they were sharing much of the falsehood round them; so far “of the truth,” that, when the King of truth came and lifted up his banner in the world, they gladly ranged themselves under it (John 18:37; cf. Luk 8:15; John 3:19-21). In pursuance of this advice of Caiaphas it came now to a solemn resolution on the part of the Sanhedrim, that Jesus should be put to death, and “from that day forth they took counsel together for to put Him to death.” His death was resolved; the how to bring it about was all which they debated now. “Jesus, therefore,” whose hour was not yet come, “walked no more openly among the Jews, but went thence unto a country near to the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim, and there continued with his disciples,”—not indeed for long, for “the Jews’ Passover was nigh at hand” and He, the very Paschal Lamb of that Passover, must not be wanting at the feast. In the ancient Church there was ever found, besides the literal, an allegorical interpretation of this and the two other miracles of the like kind. As Christ raises those that are naturally dead, so also He quickens them that are spiritually dead; and the history of this miracle, as it abounds the most in details, so was it the most fruitful field on which the allegorists exercised their skill. Here they found the whole process of the sinner’s restoration from the death of sin to a perfect spiritual life shadowed forth; and these allegories are often rich in manifold adaptations of the history, as beautiful as they are ingenious, to that which it is made to declare.^[57] Nor was this all; for these three raisings from the dead were often contemplated not apart, not as each portraying exactly the same truth; but in their connexion with one another, as setting forth one and the same truth under different and successive aspects. It was observed how we have the record of three persons that were restored to life,—one, the daughter of Jairus, being raised from the bed; another the son of the widow, from the bier; and lastly, Lazarus, from the grave. Even thus, it was urged, Christ raises to newness of life sinners of all degrees; not only those who have just fallen away from truth and holiness, like the maiden who had just expired, and in whom, as with a taper newly extinguished; it was by comparison easy to kindle a vital flame anew; but He raises also them who, like the young man borne out to his burial, have been some little while dead in their trespasses. Nor has He even yet exhausted his power; for He quickens them also who, like Lazarus, have lain long festering in their sins, as in the corruption of the grave, who were not merely dead, but buried,—with the stone of evil customs and evil habits laid to the entrance of their tomb, and seeming to forbid all egress thence.^[58] Even this stone He rolls away, and bids them to come forth, loosing the bands of their sins;^[59] so that presently they are sitting down with the Lord at that table, there where there is not the foul odour of the grave, but where the whole house is full of the sweet fragrance of the ointment of Christ (John 12:1-3). All this Donne has well exprest: “If I be dead within doors (if I have sinned in my heart), why suscitavit in domo, Christ gave a resurrection to the ruler’s daughter within doors, in the house. If I be dead in the gate (if I have sinned in the gates of my soul), in my eyes, or ears, or hands, in actual sins, why suscitavit in portâ, Christ gave a resurrection to the young man at the gate of Nain. If I be dead in the grave (in customary and habitual sins), why suscitavit in sepulcro, Christ gave a resurrection to Lazarus in the grave too.”^[60]

Footnotes [1] Leben Jesu, p. 357.

[2] Stanley (Sinai and Palestine, p. 186): “Bethany, a wild mountain hamlet, screened by an intervening ridge from the view of the top of Olivet, perched on its broken plateau of rock, the last collection of human habitations before the desert hills which reach to Jericho,—this is the modern village of El-Lazarieh, which derives its name from its clustering round the traditional site of the one house and grave which give it an undying interest. High in the distance are the Perean mountains; the foreground is the deep descent to the Jordan valley. On the further side of that dark abyss Martha and Mary knew that Christ was abiding when they sent their messengers; up that long ascent they had often watched His approach; up that long ascent He came when, outside the village, Martha and Mary met Him, and the Jews stood round weeping.

[3] Here, as throughout the Evangelical history, there is an exceeding scantiness in all the circumstantial notices concerning the persons mentioned; that only being related which was absolutely necessary to make the history intelligible; and all attention being directed to the portraying of the spiritual life and what bore upon this. Whether Martha may have been an early widow, with whom her sister and Lazarus, a younger brother, resided, or what may have been the constitution of the household, it is impossible to determine.—I cannot at all consent with Mr. Greswell’s ingenious Essay, On the village of Martha and Mary (Dissert, vol. ii. p. 545), of which the aim is to prove that in St. John’s designation of Lazarus, ἀπὸ βηθανίας means one thing, the present place of his residence, and ἐκ τῆς κώμης Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας another, the village of his birth, which he accounts to have been some Galilaean village, where the Lord had before been entertained by the sisters Luk 10:38), and from whence they had migrated to Bethany, during the later period of his ministry. Such a change of preposition without a change of

[4] Augustine (In Ev. Joh. tract, xl.): Non dixerunt, Veni. Amanti enim tantummodo nuntiandum fuit.....Sufficit ut noveris; non enim amas et deseris.

[5] Πρὸς θάνατον. So 1Jn 5:16; cf. 1Ki 17:17; and 2Ki 20:1 (LXX), where of Hezekiah it is said, ἠῤῥώστησεν εἰς θάνατον.

[6] Ἠγάπα here; but ϕιλεῖς, ver. 3. This last word might well be used in regard of Christ’s love to the brother; but it would have been contrary to the fine decorum of language to use it now that the sisters are included in his love.

[7] Maldonatus: Certum esse atque statum spatium diei, quod minui non possit; duodecim enim constare horis; intra id spatium si quis ambulat, sine periculo ambulare. Calvin: Vocatio Dei instar lucis diurnae est, quae nos errare vel impingere non patitur. Quisquis ergo Dei verbo obtemperat, nec quidquam aggreditur nisi ejus jussu, ilium quoque habere coelo ducem et directorem, et hâc fiduciâ, secure et intrepide viam ampere potest. Cf. Psa 40:11. Grotius: Quanto ergo magis tuto ambulo, qui praelucentem mini habeo lucem supracoelestem, ac divinam cognitionem Paterni propositi?

[8] Bengel, on the words ὁ ϕίλος ἡμῶν: Quanta humanitate Jesus amicitiam suam cum discipulis communicat.

[9] So Chrysostom, and Grotius: Discipuli omnimodo quærunt Dominum ab isto itinere avocare. Ideo omnibus utuntur argumentis.

[10] The use of the term κοιμᾶσθαι in this sense is abundantly frequent in the Old T., and not less in the New, as Mat 27:52; Acts 7:60; Acts 13:36; 1Co 7:39; 1Co 11:30; 1Co 15:6; 1Co 15:18; 1Co 15:20; 1Co 15:51; 1Th 4:13-15; 2Pe 3:4. So we have κοίμησις for the sleep of death, Sir 46:19. There is but one example of a use of ἐξυπνίζειν, similar to the present, namely, in the remarkable passage, Job 14:12 : Ἄνθρωπος δὲ κοιμηθεὶς οὐ μὴν ἀναστῇ ἕως ἂν ὁ οὐρανὸς οὐ μὴ συῤῥαϕῇ‚ καὶ οὐκ ἐξυπνισθήσονται ἐξ ὕπνου αὐτῶν. The nearest motive to this image may probably have been the likeness of a dead body to one sleeping. Yet there may well lie in it a deeper thought, of the state of the dead being that of a sleep—not indeed a dreamless sleep; but the separation of the soul from the body, as the appointed and indeed necessary organ of its activity, may and must bring about, not a suspension, but a depression, of the consciousness. Wherefore the state of the soul apart from the body is never considered in the Scripture as itself desirable, nor as other than a state of transition, the Scripture acknowledging no true immortality apart from the resurrection of the body (see Olshausen, in loc).

[11] Συμμαθητής‚ a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον in the N. T., occurs once in Plato, Euthyd. 272 c. Grotius makes μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ, with Lazarus; but ἀποθάνωμεν μετ᾿ αὐτοῦ, as Maldonatus well brings out, indicates fellowship not merely in death, but in dying, which, was impossible in the case of Lazarus, who was already dead. I know no other interpreter who shares this error.

[12] Maldonatus: Theodor. Mopsuest., Chrys., et Euthymius recte fortasse indicant haec verba, quamvis maguam audaciae speciem prae se ferant, non audacis sed timidi esse hominis, amantis tamen Christum, a quo eum certum mortis, ut putabat, periculum avellere non posset. Bengel: Erat quasi medius inter hanc vitam et mortem, sine tristitiâ et sine laetitia paratus ad moriendum; non tamen sine fide.

[13] In Joh. Hom. Ixii.

[14] Αἱ περὶ Μάρθαν καὶ Μάρίαν, to signify Martha and Mary themselves and no other, is a Grecism of the finer sort, familiar to all. Olshausen and others, not denying this, yet find in the phrase here, that before the mourners from the remoter Jerusalem had arrived, there had already assembled some such, of their own sex, probably of their own kin, from Bethany itself, to whom, the later coming joined themselves; cf. Acts 13:13 : οἱ περὶ τὸν Παῦλον, “Paul and his company.”

[15] The days of mourning were thirty: of these the three first were days of weeping (fletus); then followed seven of lamentation (planctus); the remaining twenty of mourning (mœror).

[16] Maldonatus: Quia enim dixerat Martham obviam Christo processisse, ne quis miraretur, aut Mariana accusaret quod non et ipsa processisset, excusat earn tacite, dicens sedisse domi, ideoque nihil de Christi adventu cognovisse. Martha enim cognovit, quia credibile est domo aliquâ causa fuisse progressam, et solent qui foris in publico versantur,. multos colligere rumores, quos ignorant, qui domi delitescunt.

[17] She uses the word αἰτεῖν (ὅσα ἂν αἰτήσῃ), a word never used by our Lord to express his own asking of the Father, but always ἐρωτᾶν: for there is a certain familiarity, nay authority, in his askings, which ἐρωτᾶν expresses, but αἰτεῖν would hot; see my Synonyms of the N. T., §40.

[18] Grotius: Et hic infirmitas apparet. Putat ilium gratiosum esse apud Deum, non autem in illo esse plenitudinem Divinæ potestatis.

[19] This is the great thought of Wordsworth’s Laodamia. She who gives her name to that sublime poem does not lift herself, she has none to lift her, into those higher regions in which the return of the beloved would be a blessing and a boon; and thus it proves to her a joyless, disappointing gift, presently again to be snatched away.

[20] Ὁ ζῶν (Rev 1:8); ὁ ζωοποιῶν (Rom 4:17); ἡ ζωὴ ἡμῶν (Col 3:4); πηγὴ ζωῆς (Psa 35:9); ὁ μόνος ἔχων τὴν ἀθανασίαν (1Ti 6:16).

[21] Bengel: Mors Christi mortem enervavit. Post mortem Christi mors credentium non est mors.

[22] Rosenmüller, Alte und Neue Morgenland, vol. iv. p. 281; Geier, De Luctu Hebraeorum, vii. § 26

[23] Compare Cicero’s account of his first interview with a Sicilian mother whom the lust and cruelty of Verres had made desolate (In Verr. v. 39): Mihi obviam venit, et ita me suam salutem appellans, filii nomen implorans, mihi ad pedes misera jacuit, quasi ego excitare filium ejus ab inferis possem.

[24] An emphasis has been laid on the ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν, turbavit seipsum; thus by Augustine (In Ev. Joh. tract, xlix.): Quis enim eum posset nisi se ipse turbare? (cf. Be Civ. Dei, xiv. 9, 3); and by Bengel: Affectus Jesu non fuere passiones, sed voluntariæ commotiones, quas plane in suâ potestate habebat; et hæc turbatio fuit plena ordinis et rationis summæ. It would then express something of the μετριοπάθεια of the Academy, as opposed on the one side to frantic outbreaks of grief, on the other to the ἀπάθεια of the Stoics. His grief no doubt did keep this mean; but this active ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν must not be pressed; since elsewhere, on similar occasions, we have the passive, ἐταράχθη τῷ πνεύματι (John 13:21): cf. 12:27, with which this is in fact identical.

[25] Ἐμβριμάομαι (from βρίμη‚ Bριμώ, a name of Persephone of Hecate, and signifying The Angered, so called διὰ τὸ ϕοβερὸν καὶ καταπληκτικὸν τοῦ δαίμονος, Lucian; and cognate with fremo, βρῖθος‚ ϕριμάω) does “not mean to be moved with any strong passion, as grief or fear, but always implies something of anger and indignation. See Passow, s. v., who knows no other signification; and in like manner all the Greek interpreters upon this passage, however they might differ concerning the cause of the indignation, yet found indignation here expressed. The Vulgate rightly: infremuit; and Luther: Er ergrimmete im Geiste. Storr then has right when he says (Opuse. Acad. vol. iii. p. 254): Quern vulgo sumunt tristitiae significatum, is plane incertus esse videtur, cum nullo, quod sciamus, exemplo confirmari possit, Græcisque patribus tarn valde ignotus fuerit, ut materiam ad succensendum, quamvis non repertam in Mariæ et comitum ejus ploratu, quærerent certe in humanæ naturæ (τῆς σαρκός) Jesu propensione ad tristitiam, quam Jesus.... increpaverit (see Suicer, Thes. s. v.). The other passages in the N. T. where this word is used bear out this meaning. Twice it is used of our Lord commanding, under the threat of his earnest displeasure, those whom He had healed to keep silence (Mat 9:30; Mark 1:43); and once of those who were indignant at what Mary had done in the matter of the ointment (καὶ ἐνεβριμῶντο αὐτῇ, Mark 14:5). Compare the use of ἐμβριμᾶσθαι, Isa 17:13 (Symmachus) and Psa 38:4 (Symm. and Aquila), and ἐμβρίμημα ὀργῆς, Jer 2:8 (LXX). It is nothing but the difficulty of finding a satisfactory object for the indignation of the Lord, which has caused so many modern commentators to desert this explanation, and make the word simply and merely an expression of grief and anguish of spirit. Lampe and Kuinoel defend the right explanation; and Lange (Theol. Stud, und Erit. 1836, p. 714, seq.) has many beautiful remarks in an essay wherein he seeks to unite both meanings; but by far the completest discussion on the word ἐμβριμᾶσθαι. and its exact meaning here, is to be found in a later number of these same Studien, 1862, pp. 260-268 [26] See Suicer, Thes. s. v. ἐμβριμάομαι.

[27] Apollinarius: Ὡσεί τις γενναῖος ἀριστεὺς τοὺς πολεμίους ἰδὼν‚ ἑαυτὸν παρώξυνε κατὰ τῶν ἀντιπάλων.

[28] We may compare, for purposes of contrast, the words of Artemis in that majestic concluding “scene in the Hippolytus of Euripides, where, in the midst of his misery, Hippolytus asks,
Ὁρᾷς με‚ δέσποιν᾿‚ ὡς ἔχω‚ τὸν ἄθλιον;
and she answers,
Ὁρῶ‚ κατ᾿ ὄσσων δ᾿ οὐ θέμις βαλεῖν δάκρυ.
Full as is that scene of soothing and elevating power, and even of a divine sympathy, yet a God of tears was a higher conception than the heathen world could reach to. After indeed the Son of God had come, and in that strange and inexplicable way had begun to modify the whole feeling of the heathen world, long before men had even heard of his name, the Roman poet could sing in words exquisitely beautiful in themselves, and belonging to a passage among the noblest which antiquity supplies—
...mollissima corda
Humano generi dare se natura fatetur, Quæ lacrymas dedit: hæc nostri pars optima sensûs.
Juv. Sat. xv.
On the sinlessness of these natural affections, or rather on their necessity for a full humanity, see Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xiv. 9, 3.

[29] For thus the distinction between the κλαίοντες of the others and his ἐδάκρυσεν, which can scarcely have been accidental, would be preserved. Elsewhere (Luk 19:41) the κλαίειν is itself ascribed to Him. Here, however, as Bengel puts it well, Lacrymatus est, non ploravit.

[30] Rosenmüller, Alte und Neue Morgenland, vol. iv. p. 281. In like manner the Greeks buried for the most part, and with only rare exceptions, without the walls of their cities (Becker, Charikles, vol. ii. p. 188).

[31] See Winer, Realwörterbuch, s. v. Gräber.

[32] Becker (Charikles, vol. ii. p. 190) observes the same of the μνήματα among the Greeks. For the poorer and more numerous classes there were common burial-places, as with the Romans also. See his Gallus, vol. ii. p. 293; and the Diet, of Or. and Roman Antt. s. v. Funus, p. 436.

[33] Τὰς περὶ Μάρθαν καὶ Μαρίαν. Lampe: Nec facile occurret phrasis nisi de personis illustribus, qui amicorum aut ministrorum grege cincti erant. Colligi ergo ex eâ quoque hie potest quod Marth a et Maria lautioris fortunæ fuerint.

[34] Εὐγενέστεραι.

[35] Iliad, xxiv. 18-21.

[36] It is singular how generally this ἤδη ὄζει has been taken in proof of that, whereof it is only a conjecture, and, I am persuaded, an erroneous one. Indeed the following τεταρταῖος γάρ ἐστι is decisive that Martha only guess. es from the common order of things that corruption had begun. Yet Augustine (In Ev. Joh. tract, xlix.): Resuscitavit putentem. Tertullian (De Resur. Cam. 53) speaks of the soul of Lazarus, quam nemo jam foetere senserat. Hilary (Be Trin. vi. § 33): Foetens Lazarus. Ambrose says of the bystanders (Be Fide Resurr. ii. 80): Foetorem sentiunt. Bernard (In Assum. Serm. iv.): Foetere jam coeperat. Sedulius: Corruptum tabo exhalabat odorem. And a most offensive description in Prudentius (Apotheosis, 759-766), Chrysostom (Horn. lii. in Joh.), and Calvin: Alios Christus suscitavit, sed nunc in putrido cadavere potentiam suam exserit. In the Letter of Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius (Thilo, Codex Apocryphus, p. 807) this circumstance, as enhancing the wonder of the miracle, is urged with characteristic exaggerations: Νεκρόν τινα Λάζαρον τετραήμερον ἐκ νεκρῶν ἀνέστησε‚ διεϕθαρμένον ἤδη ἔχοντα τὸ σῶμα ὑπὸ τῶν ἐλκογενήτων σκωλήκων‚ καὶ τὸ δυσῶδες ἐκεῖνο σῶμα τὸ κείμενον ἐν τῷ τάϕῳ ἐκέλευσε τρέχειν· καὶ ὡς ἐκ παστοῦ νυμϕίος‚ οὗτος ἐκ τοῦ τάϕρου ἐξῆλθεν‚ εὐωδίας πλείστης πεπληρωμένος.

[37] Chrysostom (Horn. lxiv. in Joh.) enters at large upon this point. Maldonatus observes: Nihil enim aliud his verbis quam essentiae voluntatisque unitatem significari. Cf. Ambrose, Be Fide, iii. 4.

[38] This κραυγάζειν is nowhere else attributed to the Lord: cf. Mat 12:19 : οὐδὲ κραυγάσει.

[39] Cyril calls it θεοπρεπὲς καὶ βασιλικὸν κέλευσμα.

[40] Hilary (Be Trin. vi. § 33): Nullo intervallo vocis et vitae.

[41] Θαῦμα ἐν θαύματι: cf. Ambrose, Be Fid. Res. ii. 78; and so Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. 51:21): Processit ille vinctus: non ergo pedibus propriis, sed virtute producentis.

[42] Κειρίαι=τὰ σχοινία τὰ ἐντάϕια=ὀθόνια (John 19:40)=vincula linea (Tertullian).

[43] Of Lazarus himself we have but one further notice (John 12:2), but that, like the command to give meat to the revived maiden (Mark 5:43), like the Lord’s own participation of food after the resurrection (Luk 24:42; John 21:13), a witness against anything merely phantastic in his rising again. He is generally assumed to have been much younger than his sisters; one tradition mentioned by Epiphanius makes him thirty years old at this time, and to have survived for thirty years more. The traditions of his later life, as that he became bishop of Marseilles, rest upon no good authority: yet. there is one circumstance of these traditions worthy of record, although not for its historic worth,—that the first question he asked the Lord after he was come back from the grave, was whether he should have to die again; and, learning that it must needs be so, that he never smiled any more. Lazarus, as a revenant, is often used by the religious romance-writers of the Middle Ages as a vehicle for their conceptions of the lower world. He is made to relate what he has seen and known, just as the Pamphylian that revived is used by Plato in the Republic for the same purposes (Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pp. 167-169)

[44] Euthymius: Oὐχ ὡς θαυμάζοντες‚ ἀλλὰ διαβάλλοντες ὡς γόητα.

[45] Τὸν τόπον. Does this signify their city or their temple? A comparison with 2Ma 5:19 makes one certainly incline to the latter view; and cf. Acts 6:13-14; Acts 21:28. The temple, round which all their hopes gathered, would naturally be uppermost in the minds of these members of the Sanhedrim; while to the city we nowhere find the same exaggerated importance ascribed. Yet many make τὸν τόπον = τὴν πόλιν ἡμῶν, as Chrysostom, who in quoting the passage substitutes, apparently unconsciously, πόλιν for τόπον. So likewise Theophylact, Olshausen. ’

[46] Corn, a Lapide: Si omnes credant Jesum esse Messiam, regem Judaeorum, irritabuntur contra nos Romani Judaeae domini, quod no’bis novum regem et Messiam, puta Jesum, creaverimus, ac a Caesare Tiberio ad eum defecerimus; quare armati venient et vastabunt et perdent Hierosolymam et Judaeam, cum totâ Judaeorum gente et republicâ.

[47] In Ev. Joh. tract, xlix.: Hoc autem timuerunt, ne si omnes in Christum crederent, nemo remaneret, qui adversus Komanos civitatem Dei templumque defenderet.

[48] Augustine (In Ev. Joh. tract. xlix.) notes the difficulty, though he has a singular accumulation of mistakes in his explanation. Among others, that Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, was High Priest; a mistake continually re-appearing in the Middle Ages. It grew out of an inaccurate understanding of Luk 1:9.

[49] Lightfoot, Serm. on Judg xx. 27 (Pitman’s edit. vol. vi. p. 280).

[50] Bengel: Ubique occurrit Johannes interpretationi sinistrae.

[51] Augustine, adducing this prophecy, exclaims (Semi, cccxv. 1): Magna vis est veritatis. Oderunt veritatem homines, et veritatem prophetant nescientes. Non agunt, sed agituv de illis.

[52] It exactly answers as such to the omina of Roman superstition, in which words spoken by one person in a lower meaning are taken up by another in a higher, and by him claimed to be prophetic of that. Cicero (Be Divin. i. 46) gives examples; these, too, resting on the faith that men’s words are ruled by a higher power than their own.

[53] We have an example of this in the very name Caiaphas, which is only another form of Cephas, being derived from the same Hebrew word. He was meant to be what Eusebius, with reference to the peace-making activity of Irenaeus (εἰρηναῖος) in the Church, calls him, ϕερώνυμος: he should have been “the Rock;” here too, as in names like Stephen’s (στέϕανος, the first winner of the martyr’s crown), the nomen et omen was to. have held good. And such, had he been true to his position, had the Jewish economy past easily and without a struggle into that for which it was the preparation, he would naturally have been; the first in the one would have been first in the other. But as it was, he bore this name but in mockery; he was the rock indeed, but the rock on which, not the Church of Christ, but the synagogue of Satan, was built.—In the Syrian Church there are curious legends of the after life of Caiaphas, and his conversion to the faith (Thilo, God. Apocryphus, p. xxix.).

[54] Wolf, Cures (in loc), gives some of these. It has likewise been proposed to put a stop after προεϕήτευσεν, and to find here a device on the part of Caiaphas for silencing opposition, and causing his own opinion to carry the day: “This he spake, not as though he was giving his own opinion (οὐκ ἀϕ᾿ ἑαυτοῦ, but taking advantage of the old belief, that on great emergent occasions the High Priest would be endowed with oracular power, he professed now to be uttering words directly given him by the inspiration of God.” And then on ὅτι ἔμελλεν κ.τ.λ. are words of the Evangelist: He did this, and succeeded in so getting the decree of death to be passed, for Jesus was about to die for the people.

[55] Vitringa (Obss. Sac. vi. 11): Visus est Caiaphas Joanni fatidicum et ominosum quid proferre. Et vere sententia ejus hujusmodi est, ut altiorem aliquem sensum condat.....Supponit igitur Apostolus non fuisse alienum a Pontifice Hebraeorum illo tempore προϕητεύειν, oracula fundere, et nescium etiam mandata Numinis profari. A Pontifice, inquam, hoc solum respectu Deo commendabili, quod Pontifex esset; cum caeteroquin personae ejus nulla essent merita, quae facere poterant, ut Deus illius rationem haberet. Sed cum Deus Pontifices constituisset in ilia gente, publicos. suae legis voluntatisque interpretes, etianisi eos in universum propterea neutiquam exemisset omni errore judicii in re religionis; placuit illi Caiaphas Pontificis potius quam ullius alterius Assessoris linguam in dicenda sententia” ita moderari, ut, praeter animi sui consilium, de necessitate et vero fine mortis Christi sapienter loqueretur, veramque ederet confessionem, ac si non tanquam Caiaphas sententiam pronunciasset! On the special illumination vouchsafed to the High Priest as bearer of the ephod, see Bahr, Symbolik, vol. ii. p. 136.

[56] Augustine, Ep. 187:12.

[57] See, for instance, Augustine, Quaest. lxxxiii. qu. 65; Bernard, Be Assum. Serm. iv.

[58] Gregory the Great (Moral, xxii. 15): Veni foras; ut nimirum homo in peccato suo mortuus, et per molem malae consuetudinis jam sepultus, quia intra conscientiam suam absconsus jacet per nequitiam, a semetipso foras exeat per confessionem. Mortuo enim, Veni foras, dicitur, ut ab excusatione atque occultatione peccati ad accusationem suam ore proprio exire provocetur (2Sa 12:13). Thus too Hildebert, in his poem, De Ss. Trinitate, one of the noblest in the Christian hymnology—
Extra portam jam delatum,
Jam foetentem, tumulatum,
Vitta ligat, lapis urget;
Sed si jubes, hic resurget.
Jube, lapis revolvetur,
Jube, vitta dirumpetur.
Exiturus nescit moras,
Postquam clamas; Exi foras.

[59] Sometimes Augustine makes the stone to be the law; thus In Ev. Joh. tract, xlix.: Quid est ergo, Lapidem removete? Littera occidens, quasi lapis est premens. Removete, inquit, lapidem. Removete legis pondus, gratiam predicate. “Loose him, and let him go,” he refers to release from Church censures; it was Christ’s word which quickened, the dead, who yet afterwards used, the ministration of men to restore entire freedom of action to him whom He had quickened (Enarr. in Ps. 101:21; Serm. xcviii. 6): Ille suscitavit mortuum, illi solverunt ligatum.

[60] The other raisings from the dead nowhere afford subjects to early Christian Art; but this continually, and in all its stages. Sometimes it is Martha kneeling at the feet of Jesus; sometimes the Lord is touching with his wonder-staff the head of Lazarus, who is placed upright (which is a mistake, and a transfer of Egyptian customs to Judaea), and rolled up as a mummy (which was nearly correct), in a niche of the grotto; sometimes he is coming forth from thence at the word of the Lord (Münster, Sinnbilden d. Alt. Christ, vol. ii. p. 98).—From a sermon of Asterius we learn that it was a custom in his time, and Chrysostom tells us it was the same among the wealthy Byzantines, to have this and other miracles of our Lord woven on their garments. “Here mayest thou see,” says Asterius, “the marriage in Galilee and the waterpots, the impotent man that carried his bed on his shoulders, the blind man that was healed with clay, the woman that had. an issue of blood and touched the hem of his garment, the awakened Lazarus; and with this they count themselves pious, and to wear garments well-pleasing to God.”

Notes On The Miracles Of Our Lord

Richard Trench's scholarly examination of Christ's miracles, analyzing the biblical terms 'wonders,' 'signs,' 'powers,' and 'works' to reveal different aspects of the miraculous.

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