Richard Beard: Lazarus Is Dead

Whatever Lazarus has, we know it was fatal. It is not, however, infectious. He lives with his two sisters: ‘ Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair ’ (John 11: 1–2).

Their brother is falling ill, and towards the end of his illness the sisters will send for Jesus, and run to the gate when he arrives. Even when Lazarus is dying they will be healthy and able to make decisions. They are not sick at his deathbed, nor four days later when he comes back to life, nor in the brief time after his resurrection before Jesus leaves Bethany for Jerusalem.

Martha and Mary’s evident vigour eliminates tuberculosis and smallpox, diseases that are highly infectious.

Lazarus gestures Absalom, the Rabbi and chief Elder of Bethany, to settle himself on a stool. ‘Our door is always open.’

Absalom has flyaway eyebrows that frighten children, but in the house of Lazarus he sits and squeezes his hands between his knees. He is no stranger here because Lazarus has a gift for friendship, and he makes Absalom welcome by despairing of the shocking weather — not a cloud in the sky — then bemoaning the price of sheep.

Lazarus is an incomer, but in his thirteen years in Bethany he has brought trade to the village and proved his loyalty by investing in a family tomb. Bethany is where he plans to die. ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

Absalom’s eyes moisten. ‘It was a blessing.’ His eyebrows lower, hiding his grief. ‘Water, wine,’ he says, then abruptly looks up. ‘You’ll have heard about this wedding in Cana. What do you think?’

‘I think we have enough excitement of our own. The Temple priests are buying fewer lambs than they promised. We have to make sure that any lambs they do take are ours. That’s why today we’re going to see Isaiah.’

Malaria? Bethany is a village at the top of a hill. The wind blows, water is scarce and mosquitoes do not flourish. Lazarus owns his own tomb, so he is not poor, and therefore unlikely to suffer from malnutrition. Dysentery is caused by inadequate domestic hygiene, and Lazarus has his two sisters to cook and clean for him, with Martha famous down the ages for her commitment to housework.

Eye diseases are rarely fatal. As for scabies, it doesn’t kill unless the victim is incredibly unfortunate.

Whereas Lazarus was born lucky. In another piece of vital information offered by the Gospel of John, Lazarus is the friend of Jesus.

Among all the people Jesus knows, and all the people Jesus meets, Lazarus is unique in the Christian New Testament. Not in coming back from the dead (there were others) but in being named as Jesus’s friend. Jesus has disciples, some of whom he loves, but Lazarus is his only recorded friend.

And famously, unforgettably, in the shortest verse of the bible, Lazarus can make Jesus weep.

6

Friendships have to start somewhere; a definite place, a specific time. Lazarus and his sisters live in Bethany, in the south of Judaea near Jerusalem. Jesus grew up a hundred miles north in Nazareth. There is no biblical explanation of where or when Lazarus first became friends with Jesus.

There are, however, sources of information other than the gospels.

In the informal record Lazarus is everywhere. He appeals strongly to the imaginative mind, a recognisable figure on frescoes and marble reliefs throughout the ancient world. He and Jesus are the two characters most frequently depicted on the monuments of the Christian necropoli in Rome.

The story of Lazarus spreads by ripples and echoes: he appears in mosaics and sculptures, on ancient crockery and early Christian lamp covers. The iconographers of the early Church make him gleam with precious metals and, later, the painters of the Renaissance adore him.

In literature, as in the visual arts, Lazarus is remembered out of all proportion to his brief appearance in a single gospel, his name more familiar than any but the closest disciples. In the course of two thousand years Lazarus has featured in medieval hagiographies, in mystery play cycles and illustrated manuscripts. He attracts the attention of French philosophy and the American stage, English poetry and the Russian novel.

These are the sources other than the bible that can enlighten the biography of Lazarus.

‘Fine,’ Lazarus says. ‘Now. But make it quick. We’re leaving for Jerusalem.’

Martha his sister is a local touchstone, instantly recognisable to writers native to the region: ‘Martha was the very embodiment of work,’ says the Israeli writer Sholem Asch in The Nazarene (1939). ‘I can still see her standing in the yard, in the cool damp of a winter’s day, washing clothes in a pail, or stooping over the open oven baking flat cakes, or else boiling lentils and greens in a great earthen pot: her squat, thick body wrapped in a sackcloth dress, her legs, red and swollen, showing beneath the skirt, which was too short…if she was not cooking, she was scouring vessels; if she was not washing clothes, she was in the garden tearing out weeds.’

She also takes care of the money, and is therefore the first to notice when trade falls off.

Lazarus is selling fewer sheep into the Jerusalem Temple. Martha has heard about his ‘distractions’, of course she has, just like everybody else, but this is more serious. His regular customers are leaving the city to get baptised in the River Jordan, where the atonements offered by Jesus are free. Sacrificial lambs on the other hand, like the ones sold by Lazarus, don’t come cheap. Nor do they cancel out sins to the apocalypse and beyond.

Even the sick, until recently a captive market, have started to look elsewhere. Instead of offering sacrifices at the Temple they gather outside the city walls, hoping to be first into the Bethesda pool when the surface of the water trembles.

Something out there is changing, something is wrong.

‘You have to make more of an effort, brother. You’re not as young as you used to be.’

‘Martha, stop worrying. For as long as there’s a god, sheep will be needed for sacrifices. That’s how it’s been since the time of Abraham. And anyway, I have a plan. I always have a plan, and if this works out we’ll be settled for life. All three of us.’

‘We need Isaiah at the Temple to like you. Don’t push your luck.’

‘I always push my luck,’ Lazarus says. ‘And he’s going to like me very much indeed.’

The question about when Lazarus befriended Jesus is partially answered in a book by the Portuguese novelist and Nobel prize-winner José Saramago. In The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Saramago identifies a moral flaw in the popular story of the nativity. Come and take a closer look at Bethlehem, Saramago says, where ‘the ashen shadows of twilight merge heaven and earth’, and from where construction workers travel daily to the site of Herod’s new Temple in Jerusalem.

Joseph, husband to Mary and father to Jesus, is cutting scaffold at the Temple when he overhears soldiers discussing an imminent massacre of children. He is horrified. Even more so when he learns where the slaughter will happen. Bethlehem, his own village, where he left his wife and child safe among other wives and children.

In the gospel according to Matthew, Joseph is forewarned by ‘ an angel of the Lord ’ (Matthew 2: 13), who appears to him in a dream.

Either way, angels or soldiers, Joseph and Mary know in advance about the massacre. They need, urgently, to flee into Egypt so that one-year-old Jesus survives. It is his destiny.

Saramago dwells on the moral implications. Joseph and Mary escape into the desert. They knowingly leave the remaining Bethlehem children to die.