These things spake he, and probably many more words expository of the vast principle of service which he here propounded; and after this (for μετὰ τοῦτο implies a break, during which the disciples pondered his words) he saith, Our friend Lazarus; implying that Lazarus was well known to the disciples, and that the Lord classes himself here, in wondrous condescension, with them.
He elsewhere speaks of the twelve as his "friends" (John 15:14, John 15:15, where he made it a higher designation than δοῦλοι; see also Luke 12:4). John the Baptist also calls himself "the Bridegroom's friend" (John 3:29).
Though Lazarus had passed into the region of the unknown and unseen, he was still" our friend." Hath fallen asleep. Meyer says that Jesus knew this by "spiritual far-seeing;" and Godet thinks that he knew it by supernatural process, and had known it all along.
It does not require much beyond what we know to have occurred in thousands of instances, for our Lord to have perceived that his friend had died—had, as he said, "fallen asleep," in that new sense in which Jesus was teaching men to look on death.
But I go, that I may awake him out of sleep ( ἐξυπνίσω is a late Greek word; of. Acts 16:27). Wunsche says the Talmud often speaks of a rabbi's death under the form of" sleep" ('Moed. K.,' fol. 28, a; cf.
Matthew 9:24; 1 Thessalonians 4:14). Homer spoke of death and sleep as "twin sisters," Christ's power and consciousness of power to awake Lazarus from sleep gives, however, to his use of the image a new meaning.
It is not the eternal sleep of the Greek and Roman poets.