Biblion Bible Commentary
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I Am the Resurrection
John 11:17-27
17 So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already. · WEB
Martha meets him on the road with a reproach and a doctrine, and is given a person instead.
So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already John 11:17.
The number is given twice in this chapter and it is doing work. Bodies were buried the day of death, and a popular belief held that the spirit hovered near the tomb for three days; by the fourth, on any reckoning anyone held, the matter was closed.
Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about fifteen stadia away John 11:18. Under two miles — close enough for the city to walk out, which is why the sign becomes a political event.
Then when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary stayed in the house John 11:20. The two sisters behave exactly as they do in the other account of them, and neither is criticized for it.
"Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn't have died. Even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you" John 11:21–22.
The first sentence is a reproach and the account lets it stand. Mary will say the identical words a few verses later, so the sisters have plainly been saying it to each other for four days.
The second sentence is harder to read, and its vagueness may be deliberate — she is not asking for anything, and it may be closer to loyalty than to expectation.
"Your brother will rise again" John 11:23.
"I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day" John 11:24.
Her reply is correct doctrine, held firmly, and it is the standard hope of her people Daniel 12:2. This Gospel has already stated it four times in one chapter John 6:39–54. Nothing she says is wrong.
It is also, at that moment, no help at all. A doctrine about the last day is a long way from a graveside on a Tuesday, and she says it the way people do — as something believed and not felt.
"I am the resurrection and the life" John 11:25.
The answer moves the resurrection out of the calendar and into a person standing in front of her. She had it as an event on a date; he offers it as himself, present, on the road, four days late.
This is the fifth of the seven declarations, and it is the only one given to a single grieving person rather than to a crowd.
"He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies. Whoever lives and believes in me will never die" John 11:25–26.
The two clauses cover both cases and they are not a contradiction. The first is about believers who do die — and they do; Lazarus will die a second time, and so will everyone in this chapter. The promise is that dying is not the end of them.
The second is about believers now living, and never die has to be read with what the book has already established: the believer has passed out of death into life John 5:24. What ends at a grave is not the thing this Gospel means by life, and what a Christian meets there is what verse eleven called sleep.
"Do you believe this?" John 11:26.
The question is put to a woman whose brother is in a cave a few hundred yards away, before anything has been done about it. She is asked to believe it as a bereaved person, not as a relieved one.
"Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, God's Son, he who comes into the world" John 11:27.
She answers a larger question than the one asked, and her confession is as full as Peter's and made in worse circumstances. The book's stated purpose is that its readers may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God John 20:31 — and a woman standing on a road outside a cemetery has just said it in those words.
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