[ p. 302 ]
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS
Jo. xi. 1-53.
When our Lord left Jerusalem, a fugitive from the rage of her rulers, there was sorrow in His heart, and as He looked back upon her from the crest of Olivet, a lamentation broke from His lips. For He knew that she was doomed. Her people were dreaming of a King who should arise and emancipate them from the heathen tyrant, and there could be but one issue of their continual turbulence breaking out ever and anon in wild insurrection. Rome would ere long lose patience and quell the commotion with a strong hand. So it came to pass in the year 70, when the Holy City was stormed by Titus and her people scattered. It was her fond dream of the Messianic Kingdom as a kingdom of this world that was working her ruin, and her only hope lay in recognising the Messiahship of our Lord and owning His gracious dominion. He had made His appeal to her, and her rulers had rejected Him and driven Him away. But still His heart yearned over her, and all the while of His sojourn at Bethabara He was (Cf. Jo. xi. 41,42) hoping and praying that God would grant Him yet another opportunity of appealing to her and peradventure winning her ere it was too late.
And His desire was granted. A message reached Him from His friends at Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary, telling Him that their brother Lazarus, so dear to them and to Him, was very ill. Here He [ p. 303 ] recognised His opportunity. “This illness,” said He to His disciples, “is not to end in death but to serve the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” They supposed that He had reason for making light of it, all the more that He apparently dismissed it from His thoughts. Two days passed, and next morning to their astonishment He said to them : “Let us go back to Judaea.” They could not conceive His errand, supposing that all was well at Bethany. “Rabbi,” they exclaimed, “it is but now that the Jews were seeking to stone you, and are you going away back there ? ” “Are there not twelve hours in the day ?” He answered in proverbial phrase, meaning, as Thomas Fuller has it, that “God’s children are immortal while their Father has anything for them to do on earth.” Then He told them His errand : “Lazarus our friend has fallen asleep : I am going to awake him.” They took Him literally. “Lord,” they remonstrated, “if he has fallen asleep, he will get well.” So He put it plainly: “Lazarus is dead; and on your account, that you may believe, I rejoice that I was not there. But let us go to him.” They demurred and would have held back and perhaps have let Him go alone but for Thomas the Twin, ever prone though he was to see the dark side. His was that true heroism which apprehends the worst yet faces it. “Let us go too,” he cried, “that we may die with Flim!”
They would reach Bethany toward evening, and since Lazarus had died just after the tidings of his illness had been despatched to Bethabara and had been buried immediately as was necessary in the sultry East (cf. Ac. v. 6,10), his body had now been four days in the tomb. A Jewish sepulchre was commonly [ p. 304 ] a cave where the bodies were deposited in niches ; and it sometimes happened that a swoon was mistaken for death and a seeming corpse revived after being laid to rest. Hence the idea had arisen that the soul hovered about its tenement of clay, fain to reanimate it, for three days ; and only then, when corruption set in, did the mourners abandon hope and roll the stone to the mouth of the sepulchre and leave the mortal relics to decay. Lazarus had now been dead four days, and all hope was gone and his sisters were sitting in their desolate home. They were not alone ; for Lazarus had been widely esteemed and “many of the Jews/’ not only the local Rabbis but others from the neighbouring capital, had gathered to condole with them. But they were inconsolable. “If the Lord had been here,” was their ceaseless moan, “our brother would not have died.”
While they were mourning thus, the Lord and His disciples were making their way up the Ascent of Blood, and some neighbour espying them hastened to the bereaved home and told Martha of His approach. She hurried off to meet Him, and found Him at the burial-place—the cemetery or “sleeping-place,” as the primitive Christians so beautifully called it—which, according to the Jewish custom, as we have seen, was situated outside the village. His arrival rekindled hope in her breast. Her brother had indeed been dead four days, yet surely even yet the Lord might restore him. “Lord,” she cried, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died ! And now,” she added, “whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” “Your brother,” He answered, “will rise again.” She thought He was referring to the final [ p. 305 ] Resurrection, and this seemed to her poor comfort. It was just the sort of religious commonplace which the Rabbis had been repeating to her and Mary, and her heart was craving for an immediate restoration. “I know it,” she answered; “I know that he will rise again at the Resurrection on the Last Day.” “I,” said the Lord, “am the Resurrection and the Life. One who believes in Me, even if he be dead, will live ; and every one who is alive and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this ?” That rekindled her hope. “Yes, Lord,” she cried ; “I have believed that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the Saviour who is coming into the world.”
He inquired of her sister, and away she sped and, entering the room where Mary was sitting with the visitors about her, whispered to her: “The Teacher has come and is calling for you.” Mary started up and hastened out of doors. “She is away to the sepulchre to weep there” said the visitors, and they followed her, bewailing the dead after the heathenish fashion which prevailed among the Jews in those days and which had so pained the Lord when He visited the house of Jair (Cf Mk v. 38,39). On reaching the 38,39burial-place where the Lord was waiting, Mary fell at His feet and repeated the plaint which had been on her lips and Martha’s all those sad days : “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died !” Ere He could answer the Rabbis and others who had joined their train arrived, and their despairing lamentations, so ill according with His thought of death as a fading asleep to wake in the light of the Father’s face, distressed Him beyond endurance. “Where,” He cried impatiently, “have you laid him ?” The [ p. 306 ] clamour ceased, and they conducted Him through the cemetery to the cave where Lazarus was lying.
At the moment His resentment of their lamentation would naturally be construed as insensibility, but as they went they observed His eyes aswim with tears. “See/’ whispered some, “how He loved him ! But not even in that solemn hour could the Rabbis forget their animosity, and some of them sneered. Here was the man so recently supposed to have opened the eyes of one born blind, and all he could now do was to shed unavailing tears ! If he had really opened the blind man’s eyes, he surely could have prevented the death of Lazarus.
And indeed why should He have wept? This is an old question, and some fifteen centuries ago it was thus answered by that gracious teacher, St. Isidore of Pelusium : “He was about to raise him for His own glory. He wept for him, saying in effect: ‘ One who has entered within the haven I am calling back to the billows; one who has been crowned I am bringing back to the lists/”
By the bright waters now thy lot is cast;
Joy for thee, happy friend ! thy bark hath past
The sea’s rough foam !
Now the long yearnings of thy soul are stilled ;
Home, home ! thy peace is won, thy heart is filled :
Thou art gone home !”
He knew what lies behind the Veil, and how well it is with those who have fallen asleep and rest with God. And therefore He wept—not because Lazarus was dead but because He must interrupt his blessed repose.
[ p. 307 ]
Thus agitated, He reached the sepulchre. “Remove the stone,” He said. “Lord,” remonstrated Martha, ever practical, “he is now decomposing; for he has been dead four days.” “Did I not tell you,” He answered, “that if you believe, you will see the glory of God ?” The stone was removed and, standing by the open sepulchre, the Lord prayed aloud. In the days of His flesh His supernatural power was a gift of God, and ere working a miracle He was wont to pray; but now His prayer was not a request for heavenly aid. This He had already sought, and His prayer was a thanksgiving for the opportunity vouchsafed Him of attesting His Messiahship and perchance even now winning those men of Jerusalem. “Father, I thank Thee that Thou didst hear Me. I knew that Thou always hearest Me, but for the sake of the multitude that stands by I spoke, that they may believe that Thou didst commission Me.” Then in loud, ringing tones He cried : “Lazarus, come forth !” and like one suddenly awaked from sleep Lazarus came forth, swathed in cerements.
It was by the power of God that the miracle was wrought; and why indeed should it be judged a thing incredible that God should raise the dead—that the power which fashions the embryo in the womb, makes it live, brings the child to birth (Ac. xxvi. 8), and makes him grow in stature and understanding, should reanimate a lifeless form and repair in a moment the wastage of decay ? Most truly says St. Augustine, “It is more to create men than to resuscitate them” ; and while the greater mystery is continually enacted before us, dare we pronounce it impossible for the Creator, when He will, to perform the lesser marvel ?
[ p. 308 ]
And what came of the miracle ? “Many of the Jews,” says the Evangelist, “those, namely, who had come to Mary and beheld the thing which He did, believed in Him.” As we have seen, they were Rabbis ; and not only had they, like so many of their order, been impressed by the Lord’s claims but, being their friends, they would be influenced by the testimony of Lazarus and his sisters. And now their lingering doubt was conquered by the marvel which they had witnessed. Some of them belonged to Jerusalem, and on their return thither they reported to the leaders of their party what had happened at Bethany and confessed their faith in our Lord.
It was a startling development, and the Sanhedrin convened to consider it. It would have been strange if those high councillors, representing the parties of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, who had long ago pronounced against our Lord and were watching for an opportunity to arraign Him, had credited the report. They would regard this latest miracle, like all the others which He had wrought, as an imposture; yet they recognised it as a serious aggravation of an already dangerous situation, since by confirming the popular faith in His Messiahship it would fan the flame of revolutionary zeal and provoke the imperial government to stern measures. What steps should be taken ? was the question. “If we let this fellow alone as we are doing, every one will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and do away with our Holy Place and our nation.”
It was the feeble attitude of weak men confronted by dread alternatives—on the one hand the risk of a popular insurrection should they, as they fain would [ p. 309 ] take stern measures with the impostor, and on the other the grave consequence which must ensue if they let him alone ; and it fretted the masterful spirit of the Chief Priest Joseph Caiaphas, who in virtue of his office was President of the court. He was, like all the priestly order, a Sadducee; and with aristocratic contempt of the populace and that insolence which, as the historian Josephus testifies, characterised the Sadducees, he angrily interposed, denouncing the pusillanimity of his irresolute colleagues. “You know nothing,” he cried ; “you never consider that it is to your interest that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation be not destroyed.” It was a plain statement of the issue : Jesus must be put to death or the nation would perish. It was the judgment of a strong, resolute, and overbearing leader, and it was accepted by the court.
The judgment was more profoundly true than either Caiaphas or his colleagues realised. “This,” observes the Evangelist, “he said not of himself, but, being High Priest that eventful year, he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only but that He might gather into one the scattered children of God.” There was indeed a dramatic fitness in the utterance by the lips of the High Priest of that unconscious prophecy of the Infinite Sacrifice which redeemed the world. And there was in it also a tragic irony, since in decreeing the death of our Lord the Sanhedrin decreed the national disaster which they thought thereby to avert.