John 11:35-37

“ Jesus wept. 36. The Jews therefore said, Behold how he loved him. 37. But some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that this man also should not have died? ”

The storm has passed; on approaching the tomb Jesus feels only a tender sympathy for the grief which had filled the heart of His friend at the moment of separation and for that which the two sisters had experienced at the same hour. The term δακρύειν, to weep, does not indicate, like κλαίειν (John 11:33), sighs, but tears; it is the expression of a calm and gentle grief. Baur does not allow that one can weep over a friend whom one is to see again. This feature, according to him, proves the unauthenticity of the narrative. Assuredly, if this Gospel were, as he believes it to be, the product of speculative thought, this thirty-fifth verse would not be found in it; Jesus would raise His friend to life with the look of triumph and a buoyant heart, as the true Logos who had nothing human but the appearance of man. But the evangelist has said from the first: “The Word was made flesh,” and he maintains the proposition with perfect consistency. “One does not raise the dead with a heart of stone,” says Hengstenberg. Hebrews 2:17 teaches us that he who wishes to assist an unfortunate one, should, first of all, sink deeply into the feeling of the suffering from which he is about to save him. It is a strange fact that it is precisely the Gospel in which the divinity of Jesus is most strikingly affirmed, that leads us also best to know the profoundly human side of His life. The very criticism of the German savant proves how little such a Jesus is the child of speculation. The solemn brevity of the clauses in these verses, John 11:34-35, must be observed.

Even at the side of this tomb we find the inevitable division which takes place about the person of Jesus at each of His manifestations in acts or words. Among the Jews themselves there are a certain number whose hearts are moved at the sight of these tears; sympathy for misfortune is neutral ground, the purely human domain, on which all souls meet which are not completely hardened. But some among them find in these tears of Jesus a reason for suspecting His character. One of two things: either He did not have the friendship for Lazarus which he now affects to feel, or He did not really possess the miraculous power of which He claimed to have given the proof in the healing of the man born blind; in any case, there is something suspicious in His conduct. Some interpreters give a favorable meaning to this question of the Jews, John 11:37 (Lucke, Tholuck, de Wette, Gumlich and also, up to a certain point, Keil). But the evangelist identifies, by the very form of the expression (some among them), these Jews of John 11:37 with those of John 11:46.

And with this sense it is not easy to understand the relation which can have existed between this question of the Jews and the new emotion of Jesus, John 11:38. Strauss finds it strange that these Jews do not appeal here to resurrections of the dead which Jesus had accomplished in Galilee, rather than to the healing of the man born blind. But it is precisely an evangelist of the second century who would not have failed to put into the mouth of the Jews an allusion to these resurrections, which were at that time well-known throughout all the Church by the reading of the Synoptics. The historical fidelity of the narrative of John appears precisely from the fact that the inhabitants of Jerusalem appeal to the last striking miracle accomplished by Jesus in this very city and before their eyes. This healing had occasioned so many discussions and so many different judgments that it naturally presents itself to their thought.