Passage

John 11.39-40

Book: John · NASB95

Verse

"Jesus said, 'Remove the stone.' Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him, 'Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.' Jesus said to her, 'Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?'" (John 11:39-40, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

NASB95 (NASB95)

"37. But some of them said, 'Could not this man, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man also from dying?' 38. So Jesus, again being deeply moved within, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone was lying against it."

"39. Jesus said, 'Remove the stone.' Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him, 'Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.' 40. Jesus said to her, 'Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?'"

"41. So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, 'Father, I thank You that You have heard Me.' 42. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me." (John 11:37-42, NASB95)

Setting

Speaker: Jesus (in dialogue with Martha) and Martha (sister of Lazarus and Mary).
Audience: Mary, Martha, the disciples, and the Jews who had come from Jerusalem to mourn with the sisters (Jn 11:19, 33, 36, 45).
Location: Bethany, ~2 miles east of Jerusalem (Jn 11:18); at Lazarus's tomb (a typical 1st-c. Judean cave-tomb sealed with a rolling stone).
Time period: c. AD 30, shortly before the final Passover and the triumphal entry. The Lazarus sign provokes the Sanhedrin's plot against Jesus (Jn 11:46-53), making it the structural pivot toward the passion narrative.

Theological reading

1. The seventh-and-climactic Johannine sign

John structures his Gospel around seven signs (sēmeia), each revealing Jesus's identity. The Lazarus-raising (Jn 11:1-44) is the seventh and climactic sign, the resurrection-prelude before Jesus's own resurrection. Verses 39-40 capture the structural pivot: Jesus issues the operative command ("remove the stone"), Martha voices the natural human objection ("by this time there will be a stench"), and Jesus reframes via a faith-glory paradigm: "if you believe, you will see the glory of God." The sign-narrative then proceeds to demonstrate that the eschatological glory of God is operative in the present-active power of the Christ.

2. Christological-divine claim

The passage is one of John's most concentrated christological moments. The wider chapter has already established the egō eimi claim: "I am the resurrection and the life" (v. 25, paired with the climactic egō eimi triad of John 8.24 / John 8.58 / John 14.6). Verse 40's "the glory of God" (tēn doxan tou theou), visible in Jesus's act, predicates divine-glory-manifestation on the Son. The reader who follows the Johannine theology already in motion at John 1.1 sees this as Trinitarian-Christological: the Son acts with the Father's authority + makes the Father's glory visible in Himself (cf. Jn 1:14: "we saw His glory"; Jn 17:5: "the glory which I had with You before the world was").

3. Faith as condition for seeing, but not for the act

Jesus does not say "if you believe, the resurrection will happen", He says "if you believe, you will SEE the glory of God." The grammar is precise. The miracle's occurrence is grounded in Jesus's authority + the Father's responsiveness (vv. 41-42); the seeing is grounded in the witness's faith. This distinction is theologically load-bearing:

The miracle is not faith-contingent in its occurrence (Lazarus would rise whether or not Martha believed, God's act is sovereign)
The recognition / cognition / saving-impact of the miracle IS faith-contingent, those who don't believe will see the corpse rise but won't see "the glory of God" in it. Cf. Jn 11:46, some witnesses immediately reported Jesus to the Pharisees (saw the act, not the glory).

This pairs with the Pauline natural-vs-spiritual-discernment logic of 1 Cor 2:14 ("a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God… they are spiritually appraised"). The same event can be evidence-of-divine-glory or just an unexplained-anomaly, depending on the noetic state of the observer.

4. The stench-objection, Martha's realism + the miracle's specificity

Martha's "by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days" is realistic-Judean-mourning-language. By 1st-c. Jewish reckoning, decomposition had set in by the fourth day; the "third-day" rabbinic idea was that the soul lingered for three days before final departure. By day four, the body was understood to be decomposed beyond any natural recovery, including beyond any conceivable misdiagnosis of death (the "swoon-theory" / "wasn't really dead" reading is structurally precluded by John's narrative emphasis on the four-day delay). The specificity is theologically important: Lazarus is unambiguously dead; Jesus's act is unambiguously miraculous.

5. Patristic and Reformation reception

Origen (Comm. on John book 28), extensive treatment of the Lazarus episode; emphasizes the seventh-sign structure and the Christological-glory revelation.
Augustine (Tractates on John 49), "Lazarus came forth from the tomb. The Lord, by raising him, gave a sign of those who believe and rise from the death of unbelief to the life of faith." Augustine reads the sign sacramentally, the physical resurrection figures the spiritual.
Chrysostom (Hom. on John 62-63), reads Martha's hesitation pastorally as the believer's wavering faith in the midst of grief; Jesus's response is the gentle correction that recalls promised glory.
Aquinas (Lectura super Ioannem on John 11), divides the passage into: Christ's authority (divine, supernatural), Martha's realism (natural, well-grounded), Christ's faith-instruction (the seeing IS in the believing). Aquinas's threefold structure remains influential.
Calvin (Comm. on John 11:40), "He intimates that they were going to behold a clear proof of the divine power; for the glory of God appears in the work of God when He acts as God." Calvin's reading: the miracle is the evidential anchor for the Christological claim.
Modern scholarship: D. A. Carson (Pillar 1991, pp. 416-420), Andreas Köstenberger (BECNT 2004), Craig Keener (The Gospel of John 2003), Richard Bauckham (The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple 2007). Bauckham reads the seven-signs structure as a deliberate Christological architecture culminating in Lazarus + the resurrection.

Key words (Greek)

G4100 - pisteuo, pisteuō (believe, trust), Jesus's eàn pisteúsēs (subjunctive aorist with eàn) is the conditional that anchors the faith-glory exchange. The same Johannine-faith verb that appears 98× in the Gospel.
G1391 - doxa, doxa (glory), tēn doxan tou theou ("the glory of God"). In Johannine theology doxa is the visible manifestation of divine character + power; the equivalent of Hebrew kavod. Jesus's signs are doxa-revealing acts (Jn 1:14; 2:11; 11:4, 40; 12:28; 17:5).
sēmeion (G4592, "sign"), the structural Johannine miracle-vocabulary; Lazarus is the seventh and climactic sēmeion.
anistēmi / egeirō (G450 / G1453, "to raise"), the resurrection vocabulary applied to Lazarus here and to Jesus's own resurrection in Jn 20-21; the Lazarus-act prefigures Jesus's own.

Cross-references

John 11:25-26, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies", the central egō eimi claim of the chapter; v. 39-40 is the operational test of v. 25-26
John 1:14, "we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father", Johannine doxa-prologue; v. 40 fulfills the prologue's promise
John 2:11, first sign at Cana: "He manifested His glory", first-sign structural parallel to seventh-sign Lazarus
John 17:5, "the glory which I had with You before the world was", Jesus's High Priestly-Prayer connection to the doxa-vocabulary
John 20:31, "these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name", the Gospel's summary of the seven-signs purpose
1 Corinthians 15:20-23, Christ as firstfruits of the resurrection; Lazarus prefigures the bodily-resurrection eschaton
Hebrews 11:35, "women received back their dead by resurrection", OT-and-NT resurrection-by-prophet tradition that Lazarus stands in continuity with (cf. 1 Kgs 17:17-24 Elijah; 2 Kgs 4:32-37 Elisha)