1 Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Laz- arus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.
2 There they made him a supper ;
and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.
3 Then took Mary a pound of oint- ment of spikenard, very costly, and
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anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the oint- ment.
4 Then saith one of his disciples, Ju- das Is *,riot, Simon's son, which should betray him,
5 Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor ?
6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.
7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone:
against the day of my burying hath she kept this.
8 For the poor always ye have with you: but me ye have not always.
9 Much people of the Jews therefore knew that, he was there : and they camo not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead.
10 But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death ;
11 Because that by reason of him, many of the Jews went away, aod believed on Jesus.
The chapter we have now begun finishes a most im- portant division of St. John's Gospel. Our Lord's public addresses to the unbelieving Jews of Jerusalem are here brought to an end. After this chapter, St. John records nothing but what was said in private to the disciples.
We see, for one thing, in this passage, what abounding proofs exist of the truth of our Lord's greatest miracles.
We read of a supper at Bethany, where Lazarus " sat at the table " among the guests, — Lazarus, who had been publicly raised from the dead, after lying four days in the grave. No one could pretend to say that his resur- rection was a mere optical delusion, and that the eyes of the bystanders must have been deceived by a ghost or vision. Here was the very same Lazarus, after several weeks, sitting among his fellow-men with a real material body, and eating and drinking real material food. It is hard to understand what stronger evidence of a fact could be supplied. He that is not convinced by such evidence as this may as well say that he is determined to believe nothing at all.
It is a comfortable thought, that the very same proofs which exist about the resurrection of Lazarus are the proofs which surround that still mightier fact, the resur- rection of Christ from the dead. Was Lazarus seen for 6everal weeks by the people of Bethany, going in and