For your sake
What? How about for Lazarus? Mary? Martha? Does Jesus mean this? These guys have already witnessed a ton of miracles but Jesus says the Lazarus project is for them so that they can believe. What’s really bad about this is that they won’t. They’ll still run away. They’ll still deny. They’ll still betray him. You can tell the confidence they have in him by Thomas’s remark in the very next verse - he’s going to get himself killed in Bethany but let’s go and die with him. Jesus isn’t going to raise anyone from the dead, he’s going to die. Is this Jesus teachable moment about Lazarus or about resurrection itself? They obviously don’t believe he’s going to raise anyone from the dead. Who believes anyone could do that? Maybe it’s priming the pump for the big resurrection problem of seeing Jesus come back from the grave. It’s for their sake so they have some context to believe when Jesus shows up alive after they see him die.
I also think that some times the disciples are standing in for all of us. The “you” in this case isn’t just the twelve, but me. “I’m glad I wasn’t there so that the world would come to see and believe I am the Christ.”
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