42. Christ’s thanks to the Father on this occasion must not lead us to suppose that some unexpected favour had been conferred by the Father upon Him. He knew well that on account of the conformity of His will with that of His Father, He could ask nothing that His Father could refuse; but He returns thanks now, as He Himself tells us, in order that the people present might believe that the Father had sent Him. In other words, Jesus wished to make the raising of Lazarus a clear proof of His Divinity, by thus calling God to witness to the miracle before it was wrought. Unquestionably the raising of Lazarus from the dead is a most powerful proof of the Divinity of Christ. It was a manifest and public miracle performed in the presence of a whole crowd of witnesses (see 19, 31, 45), performed to prove that Christ had come from the Father (verse 42); that He was the resurrection and the life (verses 25, 26); that He was the Son of God (verse 4); that, in fact, He was all that which, a short time previously, and in Jerusalem itself, He had claimed to be, namely, the Lord of life, one with the Father (x. 28, 30). Such a miracle in such circumstances God could never have permitted, had Christ not been in truth all that He claimed to be. Rationalists have tried in various ways to explain away this stupendous miracle. Some say that the story is a pure concoction of St. John, else it would have been narrated by some other Evangelist. Others, that the death of Lazarus was merely feigned, a pious ruse in which Christ and Lazarus, as well as Martha and Mary were accomplices, with the object of inducing the people to accept and follow the teachings of Christ. But we need hardly point out how absurd it is to suppose, that St. John would attempt, fifty years after the Synoptic Evangelists, to invent and put forward such a minute account of an extraordinary event till then unheard‐of by the Jews. That the other Evangelists make no mention of this stupendous miracle is remarkable, but may be accounted for by the fact that prior to the history of the Passion, they confine their narratives almost entirely to what Christ said and did in Galilee. Hence they do not mention the healing of the man who had been ill for thirty‐eight years (John v. 5‐9), nor of the man born blind (John ix.), nor, for the same reason, the raising of Lazarus, all these miracles having occurred in Judea. The second theory mentioned above hardly requires refutation. Even His Jewish enemies never accused Christ of fraud or deception; and in this particular instance the Jews, many of whom were hostile to Jesus (verse 46), and no doubt investigated the miracle, had not the slightest suspicion of fraud. So certain were all, even the Pharisees, that the miracle was genuine, that without attempting to deny it, they merely bethink themselves what they will do with Jesus (verses 47, 48).