John 11

The Teacher is here and is calling you. Martha’s first act after confessing is to fetch her sister. The call is personal and private—Mary by name, not a crowd slogan.

Those who have said Yes, Lord often become messengers. The same Lord who asked Martha “Do you believe?” now calls Mary. Being called is an earnest address that expects her to rise.

Calvin: Master shows how these women ranked him. They had not profited as they might, yet they were devoted as disciples.

The call to Mary is Christ’s. Martha carries it, but the Teacher summons. Secret providence will also draw the Jews after her to the tomb they did not mean to see opened.

Heard—rose quickly—went. Mary’s slowness in the house becomes haste at his call. Wesley will note that falling at his feet makes amends for coming late.

Arminians find a faith-response in motion. The call is effectual in the sense that she actually comes; it is still a call she hears and answers, not a shove without her will.

Sudden departure, Calvin said, proved no ordinary reverence. The sheep knows the Teacher’s voice even in grief.

She rises because he calls. Quick obedience here grows from a word, the same pattern soon made visible when a dead man hears his name.

He waits outside. The meeting-place of v. 20 becomes Mary’s meeting-place too. He does not force a scene in the packed house first.

The Lord can be met on the road. Location is pastoral. He stays where a sister can reach him without yet turning the village into a riot.

He remains where Martha met him. Caution and purpose together: the audience will be those who follow Mary, thinking they go to weep.

Even the spot on the path is appointed. Witnesses will be led, as Calvin said of the Jews, where they did not intend to go.

They misread the haste as a trip to weep at the grave. Consolers become accidental witnesses.

Motives in a funeral crowd are mixed and ordinary. God will still set life in front of them. What they do with the sight remains their act—believe, or walk to the Pharisees.

Calvin: they think she goes to inflame grief, a common disease. They even accompany her toward excess rather than restrain it. Yet Christ had another design: that they might be witnesses of the miracle.

Secret providence leads men in darkness where they did not mean to go. The crowd’s supposition is wrong; their feet are still on time.

Wesley: she fell down at his feet—this Martha had not done; so she makes amends for slowness in coming. Same sentence as Martha’s, different posture.

Identical words can carry different worship. Falling down is faith’s body-language. The if-clause still hurts; it is spoken from the ground at his feet, not from a stand-off.

Calvin: falling at his feet honors him beyond ordinary custom; she would not have done it unconvinced he was the Son of God. The if you would have been here still wrongly limits his power to bodily presence.

Reverence and a cramped Christology can travel together. He will answer her grief with his own tears and then with a call that does not need to have “been here” on time.

He sees her weeping and the crowd weeping, and he is deeply moved and troubled. Wesley: he groaned, restraining tears at first; “he troubled himself”—affections not passions out of control, but voluntary emotions in his power, full of order and reason.

The Lord who is resurrection still chooses to feel with mourners. Sympathy is not weakness in the invitation. The One who will ask faith also enters the tears of those he calls.

Calvin: he groaned in spirit, conforming to mourners so far as to weep with them—proof of sympathy—and contemplated the general misery of the race he was sent to free. His feelings were sinless, bounded, founded on reason, unlike our unrestrained grief.

The Son clothed himself with human feelings, sin excepted, that we might have a Mediator who has endured distresses in himself. Trouble here is holy, aimed at the tyranny of death he is about to break.

Where have you laid him? He asks what he could know. Come and see—the mourners become guides.

He involves them. They must lead him to the cave, later take the stone, later unbind. Faith’s Lord does not flatten human action; he commands it.

He asks the place of burial as one walking with them, not as a magician skipping the grave.

The question draws the crowd to the exact spot of the sign. Come and see will become see the glory. Their knowledge of the tomb will certify that the man who comes out is the man they laid in.

The verse is only two words long in Greek. Wesley: out of sympathy with those in tears around him, and from a deep sense of the misery sin had brought upon human nature.

The shortest verse is not a shrug. The Lord of life cries at a friend’s grave. An invitation to believe is not icy. He is for the weeping, not above it.

Calvin located the feeling in what he saw—Mary and the rest weeping—and in the higher sight of the race’s misery. He shows he is as much affected by our distresses as if he had endured them himself.

Tears here are the champion’s, not the victim’s collapse. He weeps as he goes to war with death’s tyranny, a brother in feeling and Lord in power.

They read the tears as love, and they are not wrong. See how much affection he had for him—the sisters’ first message vindicated in public.

Classical Arminians take the crowd at this better word. Love is visible. Some will stop here, as if love were only affection without power; others will follow love into the next sign.

Calvin: this first opinion ascribes to him only what may belong to a man, yet it is more candid than the next verse’s slander. They speak with modesty they will not all keep.

Love is truly seen. It is not the whole of what the tears mean. The love that weeps is the love that delayed for glory and will soon call a corpse by name.

Wesley: they never dreamed he could raise him again—what a strange mixture of faith and unbelief. They remember the blind man and still shrink the miracle to prevention.

Last chapter’s light does not automatically become this chapter’s faith. The same people can grant he opened eyes and still not expect a grave to empty. Unbelief often sounds like a disappointed compliment.

Calvin: they maliciously slander him for not hindering death, applauding his power only to reproach its pause. Ingratitude complains, Why does he who used to help now disappoint?

Two diseases—subjecting God to the flesh’s wishes, and rude impatience that hurries him. They want a timely prevention; he intends a resurrection.

Deeply moved again, he comes to the tomb. A cave, a stone—ordinary Judean burial, like the patriarchs’ caves Wesley recalled.

He approaches the place of death rather than calling from a distance only. The stone is a barrier he will have others move. Glory will use hands.

Calvin: he does not come as an idle spectator but as a champion preparing for contest; he groans because the violent tyranny of death is before his eyes.

The cave and stone will magnify the power about to be shown. Four days, a sealed tomb, a crowd—then a voice. The wrestling is with death, not with the mourners’ manners only.

Take away the stone—a command to bystanders. Martha, who just confessed him as Christ, now names decay. Wesley: thus did reason and faith struggle together.

True faith can flinch at a smell. Her yes in v. 27 was not fake because her nose now objects. He does not discard her; he reminds her of the word she already heard.

Calvin: this is distrust, measuring God’s infinite power by the perception of the flesh. Nothing is more inconsistent with life than putrefaction, so she infers no remedy—and so far as she can, would keep Lazarus in the tomb.

We stretch one hand for aid and repel it with the other. Confused faith, even in the excellent, needs a second and third word before the stone moves.

Wesley: it appears Christ had said more to Martha than is recorded. If you believed, you would see God’s glory—belief as the way of seeing, not as a trick condition.

Listen here for a genuine if. Glory is not withheld from a sincere believer to prove a point; it is promised to faith. Martha is still being invited to trust the word she has, four days and odor notwithstanding.

Calvin: he reproves her for not forming a hope vigorous enough from the promise. Something more was said than John relates; this was meant when he called himself the resurrection and the life.

Faith opens eyes to see God’s power, and faith prepares the way for that power to be displayed toward us. Unbelief shuts God’s hands, as far as men can; he is not bound by their caprice, yet he often withholds the manifestation they have refused.

They take the stone; he lifts his eyes. Wesley: not as if he applied for assistance—there is not the least show of that. He wrought the miracle with an air of absolute sovereignty, as Lord of life and death, thanking the Father for the providential opportunity of showing forth his praise.

Sovereignty here is the Son’s own. Thanksgiving is public, so the crowd may know the Father’s fellowship with the Son who is about to call. Hands moved the stone because he said so.

Calvin: Martha, hearing the Son of God, permits the stone to be removed, relying on his authority while she still sees nothing. He thanks the Father, having been heard—glory of deity in the flesh, accommodated to dull senses.

The lifted eyes train others to the Father. He is not an independent wonder-worker; the sign will certify that the Father sent him, even as the voice that follows is his own divine power.

Always heard—yet he speaks aloud for the bystanders, that they may believe the Father sent him. The prayer is missional, aimed at a crowd that can still believe.

“That they may believe” is a sincere purpose toward people standing around a grave. The sign is not a private seal for an inner circle only. Whoever in that crowd who believes will have done what the spoken thanks was for.

Calvin: he anticipates the thought that he might not stand high enough with the Father to do as many miracles as he chose. Agreement is total; he need not pray as if uncertain, but he calls on the Father so men may be sure the work is divine.

Why not raise all the dead? A fixed limit was assigned to miracles, sufficient for confirming the gospel. The purpose “that they may believe” does not make faith a native power in the crowd; it sets the appointed means by which God creates it.

Wesley: he cried with a loud voice that all present might hear. Lazarus, come forth—he called him out as easily as if he had been not only alive but awake. The name keeps the call particular; the loudness keeps it public.

A command to a dead man is still a word meant to be heard. The God who sincerely invites the living “whoever believes” here shows that his voice can reach even a corpse. Ease is not coldness; it is sufficiency. The same Lord calls the spiritually dead by the gospel with a word that can be refused by the living and cannot be refused by Lazarus.

Calvin: by not touching with the hand, but only crying with the voice, divine power is more fully shown. How did he restore life but by the word? In raising Lazarus he exhibited a visible token of the spiritual grace we experience when his voice gives life.

This is effectual call. “Lazarus, come out” does not wait on the corpse’s cooperation. The voice that created now recreates. What the tomb displays, regeneration secretly answers: the dead hear the Son and live (John 5:25). Life is given by the call, not offered to a merely sleepy will.

The dead man comes out still bound. Wesley noted the wrappings: if buried Egyptian-style, the napkin might leave the face able to see the way. Free him, and let him go—others must finish what they can finish.

Life is Jesus’ gift; unwrapping is the community’s task. Those who watched are commanded to handle the miracle. New life is not meant to stay in graveclothes, and the command to unbind is a serious charge to the living.

Calvin: napkin and bandages prove he came out as he was laid in. Christ could have dropped the bindings himself; he intended to employ the spectators’ hands as witnesses.

They must touch the work they saw. The man lives because the voice lived in him; their unbinding certifies, it does not cause, the resurrection. So the church looses what Christ has already made alive.