appens. No detail
is omitted, and no one misses the news. And this like all these other
incidents become the common property of the nation.

It is interesting to note in the language John uses[86] that the motive
underneath the action was not to reveal power but simply to keep an
appointment. But then Jesus never used His power to show that He had
power, but only to meet the need of the hour. Yet each exhibition of
power revealed indirectly, incidentally _who He was_.

There is an instance similar to this in the borrowed axe-head that swam
in obedience to Elisha's touch of power to meet the need of the
distressed theological student.[87] In each instance it is the same
habit of nature that yields homage to a higher power at work.

But though there is here no increase of power shown yet the action
itself was of the sort to appeal much more to the crowd. It has in it
the dramatic. It would appear to the crowd a yet more wonderful thing
than they had yet witnessed.

The giving of sight to the man born blind is distinctly a long step
ahead of any healing power thus far related in John's story. There is
here not only the chronic element, but the thing is distinctly in a
class by itself, quite outclassing in the difficulty presented any case
of mere chronic infirmity.

It was not a matter of restoring what disease had destroyed but of
supplying what nature had failed to give in its usual course. It was a
meeting of nature's lack through some slip in the adjustment of her
action in connection with human action. There is not only the appealing
dramatic element, as in the walking on the water, but the appealing
sympathetic element in that this poor man's lifelong burden is removed.

And then the seventh and last of these, the actual raising of Lazarus up
from the dead, is a climax of power in action nothing short of
stupendous. Of the six recorded cases of the dead being raised this is
easily the greatest in the power seen at work. In the other five, in the
Elijah record,[88] the Elisha,[89] the Moabite's body at Elisha's
grave,[90] Jairus' daughter,[91] and the widow's son at Nain,[92] there
was no lapse of time involved.

Here four days of death had intervened, until it was quite certain
beyond question that in that climate decomposition would be well
advanced. Utter human impotence and impossibility was in its last
degree. Man stands utterly powerless, utterly helpless in the presence
of death. It is not the last degr