John
Now there was a sick man, Lazarus, from Bethany, the village where
Mary and her sister Martha lived.
Mary was the woman who later anointed
the lord with fragrant oil and wiped his feet with her hair. It was her brother
Lazarus who was sick.
So the sisters sent a message to Jesus: “lord, the one
you love is sick.”
When Jesus heard this, he said, “This sickness is not going
to end in death, but it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be
glorified through it.”
Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus.
So when
he heard that Lazarus was sick he stayed two more days where he was.
After
this he said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.”
The disciples
said, “Rabbi, the Jews have just recently been trying to stone you, and you
are proposing to go there again?”
Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve
hours in a day? If anyone walks during the day, he does not stumble, because
he sees the light of this world.
If anyone walks during the night, he does
stumble, because there is no light in him.”
He said this, and then he said to
them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep and is sleeping,
but I am
going to wake him up.”
Then the disciples said to him, “lord, if he has fallen asleep he is going to get well.”
Jesus, however, had spoken about his death,
but they thought he was talking about natural sleep.
So Jesus then told them
plainly, “Lazarus is dead.
I am glad for you that I was not there, so that you
may believe. But let us go to him.”
Then Thomas (“the twin”) said to his
fellow disciples, “Why should we not go too, so that we may die with him?”
When Jesus arrived he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb
for four days.
Bethany was close to Jerusalem, about two miles away.
Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their
brother.
As soon as Martha heard that Jesus was coming she went out to
meet him. But Mary stayed in the house.
Martha then said to Jesus, “lord, if
you had been here my brother would not have died.
Yet even now I know
very well that whatever you ask from God, God is going to give it to you.”
Jesus reassured her, “Your brother will rise again.”
Martha said to him, “I
know that he is going to rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes
in me, even though he has died, will live again in the resurrection.
Everyone
who lives and believes in me will never die — ever.
Do you believe this?”
She replied, “Yes, lord, I believe absolutely that you are the Messiah, the
Son of God, who was destined to be born into the world.”
After saying this she went back and called her sister Mary, and spoke to
her in private, “The teacher is here and is calling for you.”
As soon as Mary
heard this, she got up immediately and went to him.
Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still at the place where
Martha had met him.
The Jews who were with her in the house consoling
her saw Mary get up quickly and go out. So they followed her, thinking that
she was going to the tomb to weep there.
When Mary arrived where Jesus
was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “lord, if you had been
here, my brother would not have died!”
When Jesus saw her crying and the
Jews who had come with her crying, he was indignant
and his spirit was
deeply moved.
He asked, “Where have you put him?” They said, “lord,
come and see.”
Jesus wept.
So the Jews were saying, “Look how much he
loved him!”
But some of them said, “Why could he who opened the blind
man’s eyes not also have prevented this man from dying?”
Then Jesus, indignant again, arrived at the tomb. It was a cave, and the stone was lying against it.
Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the dead
man’s sister, said, “lord, he is already stinking. It has been four days.”
Jesus
said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of
God?”
So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said,
“Father, I thank you that you heard me.
I know that you always hear me, but
because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe that You
commissioned me.”
After that he shouted with a loud voice,
“Lazarus, come out!”
And the man who had died came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Free him and let him go.”
Therefore many of the Jews who came to Mary and saw what Jesus was
doing believed in him.
But some of them went to the Pharisees and told
them what Jesus had done.
So then the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and
said, “What are we going to do in view of all the miraculous signs this man is
performing?
If we let him go on like this everybody is going to believe in
him! But that will mean that the Romans will come and remove our holy place and
our nation.”
One of them, Caiaphas, who was High Priest that year, said to
them, “You know nothing at all!
You do not understand that it is to your
advantage that one man should die for the people
rather than that the
whole nation should perish.”
He did not say this on his own initiative, but as
High Priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation,
and not for the nation only, but also to unite the scattered children of God.
So from that day onwards they plotted to kill Jesus.
Jesus was no longer
able to walk around in public among the Jews, but departed from there to the
countryside close to the sparsely inhabited areas, to a town called Ephraim.
And he remained there with his disciples.
The Jewish Passover festival was near, and many people went up to
Jerusalem from the countryside to purify themselves before the Passover season.
They were looking for Jesus and asking one another as they convened in the
Temple complex, “Do you think he is going to come up to the festival?”
The chief priests and Pharisees had given strict orders that anyone who knew
where Jesus was must report it so they could arrest him.
John