John 19:35 And the one who has seen bears witness and his witness is true; and he has perceived that he is telling the truth, so that you also may find faith. 

John the Baptist came to bear witness   that the Christ, the Son of God, the Logos was coming into the world. He bore witness so that he could help prepare the way for the coming of God into our own midst, into the very center of our own being. John was the highest born of women, that is, he was almost an angel but still a human being. He was in a sense the best of what was possible for human beings to become out of the past.

Even after his death, he remained united with the circle around the Christ. He continued to bear witness and to hold a kind of over-consciousness for the group who moved with Christ but did not yet understand him and all that he had to bring.

In the middle of the Gospel of John we witness the transformation of another young man who had reached a certain level of preparation by following the rights and practices of his religious culture. He had prepared his soul to be able to ask the question “Now how do I attain eternal life?” And it is through a deathlike experience, an initiation into a new kind of being that Lazarus is called into a new life, becoming the very first new human being, reborn through the spirit of Christ, that is, awakened in Christ in him.

This happens before Christ Jesus goes through death and resurrection and becomes the new “Adam,” the new ancestor for all future human beings, through whom the forces of death can be overcome. It is therefore right to call the raising of Lazarus a miracle, because it happens before Christ’s own resurrection, so that someone would be there to witness the process that Christ goes through as he dies upon the cross, becoming fully human in that moment of culmination. There had to be one who had been readied to bear witness of it.

Who could have told us of these events were it not for him? Through his raising he could unite with the spirit brother of the Disciples, John the Baptist, and together be initiated that the Word of God be born within their soul. This is why Lazarus receives the new name John. He is reborn to a new task, the task of continually preparing the way of the Lord. The Baptist prepared Christ’s coming to earth, now Lazarus-John prepares the way that we may each become more fully human, and come to awaken to Christ in us.