Richard Beard - Lazarus Is Dead

Jesus breaks the spirit of this agreement. He can’t resist reaching out to reassure his friend, for in the parable the rich man begs Abraham to send the dead Lazarus to his living brothers, as ultimate proof that divine power is real.

‘ Abraham replied: “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.”

“No, father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”

He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses the Prophet, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead ”’ (Luke 16: 29–31).

Jesus is questioning the Lazarus project. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. He feels the horror of making Lazarus, his friend, suffer. Especially as he knows in advance that resurrection has a limited effect — he wouldn’t be divine if he didn’t. Are miracles worth it?

This is the question the parable asks. Presumably they are, if the aim is to create stories that last.

4

ISAIAH BRINGS THE news to Bethany in person, not the parable of Lazarus, but something stranger still. It sounds absurd, and Isaiah doesn’t expect anyone to believe it, but in Galilee Jesus has supposedly fed five thousand people with some bread and a couple of fish.

By now, for Lazarus, the pattern is established. Jesus performs a miracle, Lazarus moves closer to death.

Malarial sporozoites take advantage of the feeding of the five thousand, the fourth sign as recorded in the Gospel of John. They unclench from their long wait and invade the liver, where they breed into merozoites that rupture their host cells and escape to cause havoc in the bloodstream. Lazarus has a recurrent fever, and each wave of nausea corresponds to a new cycle of parasites breaking free.

The smallpox pustules, after bursting, deflate and dry up, forming a crust of scabs. Lazarus develops complications. The smallpox becomes haemorrhagic, and in places the internal bleeding makes his skin look charred, as if he’s been struck by lightning. This is the black pox. Meanwhile, the scabies mites continue to burrow and reproduce and move. They feel like worms beneath the skin, as if he’s already underground.

From the moment of the fourth sign, when the Jesus miracles become spectacular, Lazarus is visibly destined for death. The evidence can be extrapolated from salvaged memories and insights. Thomas Hardy rhymes Lazarus with cadaverous, and the Swedish Nobel prize-winner Pär Lagerkvist, in Barabbas (1950), conveys an accurate impression of how Lazarus must have appeared to contemporary observers. His face ‘was sallow and seemed as hard as bone. The skin was completely parched. Barabbas had never thought a face could look like that and he had never seen anything so desolate. It was like a desert.’

Lazarus sometimes asks his sisters how he looks.

‘Like our brother,’ they reply. ‘Really, not so bad. Maybe a little better today.’

Isaiah hasn’t seen Lazarus since he almost ruined the betrothal, and now the man disgusts him. He pulls out a silk handkerchief and holds it across his nose. He glances at Martha. ‘You knew I was coming. You might have cleaned him up.’

‘We did.’

Martha keeps a close eye on her brother, taking what she can of him while he’s still here, over-alert for any new signs of decline.

There are many new signs of decline.

Isaiah almost sits down, then changes his mind. He hitches up his clothes so they don’t touch the floor.

‘Of course, this latest miracle never happened,’ he says.

He repositions the leather phylactery strapped to his upper arm (‘ His kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end ’ Daniel 6: 26).

‘There are five thousand people who believe it did,’ Mary interrupts.

‘And thousands who weren’t there who don’t.’

Isaiah hastily replaces his handkerchief. If Jesus intended to convince the masses, he had missed his opportunity in Jerusalem. In Galilee he could do what he liked, because up in the sticks it hardly mattered.

‘I notice Lazarus has stopped sending us sacrifices. Maybe you should start again. For the sake of his health.’

‘Money,’ Lazarus says, and Isaiah flinches. The fiend can speak. ‘Can’t afford it.’

‘At the Temple we could make you a loan,’ Isaiah suggests. He speaks through the forgiving silk of his handkerchief. ‘In return you might have a word with Jesus. We’re getting tired of his stories. He sets us and the Romans on edge.’

‘Jesus means well,’ Mary says. She will not cover her nose while Isaiah is in the house, but the smell makes it hard to breathe. ‘He has done nothing to hurt you.’

‘We are the keepers of the vineyard,’ Isaiah reminds her, ‘and god doesn’t like miracles. Never has. I’m surprised Jesus doesn’t know that.’

Miracles are disruptive. When the dust settles there is always damage done — not all the hungry are fed, and not all the sick are healed. Not all the dead can rise, but Jesus doesn’t learn. He will know about the killing at Mount Deborah, but still he dupes a large crowd into believing he can change the world.

On behalf of the Sanhedrin, Isaiah has worked out an explanation for this latest miracle, a version of the incident that has circulated ever since. If it is credible now, it would have occurred to the sceptical at the time: the people of Galilee are selfish, which accounts for this recent episode. The Judaeans and Samaritans can agree that the selfish Galileans wouldn’t have wanted to share their food. They’d have kept hidden reserves until Jesus gave out the bread and fish he’d been saving for himself and the disciples.

Five thousand Galileans look at each other. As if by magic, their bags and pockets are suddenly full of the bread they’d been hiding and the fish they’d been hoarding for later. They can’t let Jesus seem more godly than they are. At heart the Galileans are selfish, but they are also jealous and competitive. They have negative traits to spare.

‘Besides,’ Isaiah adds, ‘in rural areas their eyesight is even worse than here. Who knows what anyone really saw?’

‘Couldn’t you poison him?’

‘If I wanted to.’

Yanav assures Cassius that none of his treatments have any guarantee of success. As a healer he makes estimates, he guesses, but for the fee he demands he has to be seen to be trying. Otherwise no one would believe he could heal.

‘Why isn’t he dying more quickly? He looks like it should be quick.’

Cassius has decided that for the benefit of Rome Lazarus should already be dead. After this most recent miracle his priority is to restore order, in the sense that what normally happens should happen normally, to remind the Judaeans what’s normal. The son of the widow of Nain dies and should consequently remain dead. Cassius sends his spies to report from the village, in case there’s a second revival, but this looks unlikely. The villagers have buried the body.

The dead are dead. This is the ending that Judaeans can safely expect, just as Jesus will turn out to be a provincial shaman defeated by the challenge of Jerusalem. His friend Lazarus is a hill farmer in a region with pre-Roman levels of hygiene. He falls ill. He sacrifices sheep. He employs a healer who is ignorant of Greek advances in observational science. Under the circumstances, it is normal that Lazarus’s health should fail. All things being equal, he will die.

The death of Lazarus will provide evidence of natural law functioning as usual in the universe. Death is the most predictable of life’s events. It is the opposite of a miracle.

‘Don’t lift a finger to help him.’

‘I’m a healer. The sisters will get suspicious.’