John 11 tells of Lazarus of Bethany, a village near Jerusalem, falling ill and dying while Jesus delayed his arrival. By the time Jesus reaches the tomb, Lazarus has been dead four days, a detail John underlines because contemporary Jewish belief held that the soul lingered near the body for three days before departing for good, ruling out any suggestion that Lazarus had merely been resuscitated from a death not yet complete. Jesus tells Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life," before calling Lazarus out of the tomb, still bound in his burial cloths.
John presents this as the seventh and climactic sign in the sequence that structures the first half of his gospel, and ties it directly to the plot against Jesus: the chief priests and Pharisees, John says, decided from that point that Jesus had to be put to death, since so public an act was drawing too many people to believe in him. In John's narrative, the raising of Lazarus is the immediate cause of the events that lead to the crucifixion. Bethany's location, under two miles from Jerusalem, put the episode within easy reach of the temple authorities in a way Jesus's Galilean miracles were not, which is part of why John gives it such weight in his narrative: an event witnessed that close to the city could not be ignored by those already wary of Jesus's following.