John 11

1A certain man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, the village where Mary and her sister Martha lived.

2Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair, and it was her brother Lazarus who was sick.

3The sisters therefore sent a message to him: “Lord, look, the one you love is sick.”

4On hearing this, Jesus said, “This sickness is not headed for death; it is for God’s glory, so that through it the Son of God may be glorified.”

5Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.

6So when he heard of the illness, he then stayed on two days in the place where he was.

7Then, after this, he told the disciples, “Let us head back to Judea.”

8“Rabbi,” the disciples said to him, “only recently the Jews were trying to stone you, and you are going back there again?”

9Jesus answered, “Does the day not have twelve hours? Whoever walks in the daytime does not stumble, since he sees this world’s light.

10But whoever walks at night stumbles, since the light is not in him.”

11He said these things, and then he told them, “Lazarus our friend has fallen asleep, but I am on my way to wake him.”

12So the disciples said to him, “Lord, if he is sleeping, he will be all right.”

13But Jesus had been talking about his death, while they supposed he was speaking of ordinary sleep.

14Then Jesus said to them in plain words, “Lazarus has died.

15I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may come to believe. Now let us go to him.”

16Then Thomas, the one called the Twin, told his fellow disciples, “Let us go as well, so that we can die with him.”

17On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days already.

18Bethany was near Jerusalem, about fifteen stadia away.

19Many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them about their brother.

20Martha, when she heard that Jesus was on his way, went to meet him; but Mary remained sitting at home.

21Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

22Yet even now I know that God will grant you whatever you ask him for.”

23Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

24“I know he will rise again,” Martha said to him, “in the resurrection at the last day.”

25Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live,

26and no one who lives and believes in me will ever die. Do you believe this?”

27“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I have come to believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.”

28After she said this, she left and secretly called her sister Mary: “The Teacher is here and is calling you.”

29When Mary heard, she quickly got up and started toward him.

30Jesus had not yet entered the village; he was still at the spot where Martha had met him.

31The Jews who were with her in the house comforting her saw how quickly Mary got up and went out, so they followed her, supposing she was on her way to the tomb to weep there.

32Mary came to the place where Jesus was, and when she saw him, she fell down at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

33When Jesus saw her crying, and saw the Jews who had come with her crying as well, he was deeply moved in spirit and was troubled within himself.

34“Where have you put him?” he asked. “Lord, come and see,” they told him.

35Jesus wept.

36The Jews then said, “Look how much he loved him!”

37But some of them said, “This man opened the blind man’s eyes. Could he not also have prevented this man from dying?”

38Jesus, once again deeply moved within himself, went to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid over it.

39“Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, said to him, “Lord, by now he stinks, for this is the fourth day.”

40Jesus said to her, “Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see God’s glory?”

41So they removed the stone. Jesus raised his eyes upward and said, “Father, thank you for hearing me.

42I knew you always listen to me, but I said it because of the crowd standing around, so that they may believe that you sent me.”

43After saying this, he shouted at the top of his voice, “Lazarus, come out here!”

44The dead man came out with his feet and hands tied with strips of cloth, and his face was bound up in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Untie him and let him go on his way.”

45As a result, many of the Jews who had come to Mary and had watched what he did believed in him.

46But some of them went off to the Pharisees and reported to them the things Jesus had done.

47So the chief priests and the Pharisees brought the council together and said, “What are we doing? This man is performing many signs.

48If we let him carry on this way, everyone will put their faith in him, and then the Romans will come and take from us both our place and our nation.”

49But one of them named Caiaphas, the high priest that year, said to them, “You do not know anything.

50You are not considering that it is to your advantage for one man to die on behalf of the people rather than for the whole nation to be destroyed.”

51He did not say this on his own initiative; rather, since he was high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation,

52and not for the nation alone, but also to bring God’s scattered children together into one.

53From that day on, then, they laid plans to kill him.

54As a result, Jesus stopped moving about publicly among the Jews. He left there for the area close to the wilderness, to a town named Ephraim, and he remained there with the disciples.

55The Jewish Passover was drawing near, and before the Passover many people went up to Jerusalem from the countryside to purify themselves.

56They kept searching for Jesus, and as they stood around in the temple they were saying to each other, “What is your opinion? Is he really not coming to the festival?”

57The chief priests and the Pharisees had commanded that whoever knew his whereabouts should inform them, so they could take him into custody.