Richard Beard - Lazarus Is Dead

2

YANAV VOLUNTEERS TO deliver the message.

‘I know the road.’

‘The Romans will stop you,’ Mary says.

‘Maybe they won’t. I have a good reason for travelling as far from Bethany as I can. I’m the healer who couldn’t heal Lazarus. I’m escaping my failure.’

Neither the Romans nor the Sanhedrin will want Jesus near Jerusalem at the time of Passover. Pilgrims are arriving in their thousands, and at big annual festivals the potential for civic unrest is greater — they definitely don’t want Jesus in neighbouring Bethany intent on working a miracle. That’s why Yanav has to take the message. He has been the main source of Roman intelligence about Lazarus, and is therefore above suspicion.

Yanav knows that Lazarus has very little time. Even as he prepares his donkey, news arrives of another miracle, the last before the raising of Lazarus. This one is less striking, but Lazarus’s body couldn’t have coped with a third consecutive Jesus spectacular.

Jesus meets a man who has been blind from birth. The disciples ask whether his blindness is a punishment from above. ‘ “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” ’ (John 9: 3).

‘It is a sign,’ Mary says. No setback yet has lessened her faith, and she welcomes news of this latest miracle. ‘Lazarus is nearly blind. Jesus healed a blind man. How much more direct do you want him to be?’

‘Mary, I love you very much,’ Martha says, ‘and I hope Jesus can help, but maybe he’s forgotten about Lazarus. They were friends a long time ago.’

After feeding a crowd of thousands and walking across water, this healing of a blind man is difficult to interpret. Jesus seems to be going backwards, because healing is something he’s already done: the nobleman’s son, the paralytic at the Bethesda pool.

His powers may be dwindling. Yanav will have to hurry.

‘Jesus went back across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptising in the early days. Here he stayed and many people came to him’ (John 10: 40–41).

It will take two days for Yanav to travel from Bethany to Jesus at the river. Two days, and then in Bethany they will find out whether Jesus remembers, and if he cares. The son of god will have the power to heal Lazarus immediately he hears the news. Two days, if Lazarus can last that long.

The sixth miracle, where Jesus mixes mud and spit into the eyes of a man blind from birth, is weighty enough to fulfil its purpose. With the lightest touch, so close to the end, this gentle miracle breaches the final defences of Lazarus’s body. As the mystic poet Khalil Gibran records in Lazarus and His Beloved (1933), ‘He himself will never return. All that you may see is a breath struggling in a body.’

It is his mind that coerces his heart’s demand for breath, the resilient tumult of thoughts, the insistent pulse of memory. Lazarus remembers Amos, and wishes the truth or falsehood of miracles weren’t so vitally important. Miracles provide evidence of a god active in human affairs, and an attentive god could have saved his brother from drowning, could have helped Lazarus in his agony long before now.

‘Rest,’ Mary says. ‘It is done.’

‘Keep breathing,’ Martha urges. ‘Think ahead to your wedding. Are we allowing Absalom to speak?’

In Jerusalem Yanav is approaching the Roman checkpoint at the Damascus Gate. There are ten or twelve armed soldiers and, standing ahead of them, leaning against a pillar, Cassius picking at his fingernails with a brass pin.

‘The healer is fleeing,’ he says. He stands up straight and tosses the pin aside. Yanav hears it drop. ‘This can only be good news.’

‘Lazarus is dying. Today, tomorrow at the latest.’

‘If you’re leaving, I believe it. Unless you’re headed for the Galilee?’

Yanav’s face remains blank. He reminds himself that Cassius suspects everyone, all the time, but Yanav is confident that the gods are at work. Miracles, if true, are more intimidating than Rome. He needs to see for himself.

‘Further away,’ he says. ‘Somewhere I can repair my reputation.’

‘I’m sorry. An unfortunate consequence. But you’ve been well rewarded.’

‘I have. I’m not complaining. Send your report to Rome. Tell the consuls this is the end of the story.’

‘Glad to hear it. Is there anything else you think I should know?’

‘Don’t be friends with Jesus.’

1

A day goes by. Lazarus needs to stay alive for one more day, but his closeness to death is a glimpse of hell. Visions of hell are brought back to the living by the dying who are later spared. They remember how death feels — night pierces the bones, is inside the bones, and then the suffocation.

Lazarus struggles to breathe. Dragons squat round his neck and squeeze. His lips are sliced off and his tongue wrenched out. Flames scorch his nose and mouth, burning down his throat and splitting his innards.

He is stuck, always stuck, plunged so deep in a stinking pit of slime that even his clothes detest him. In a pit of slurry, of fire, in a pit of vomit or shit but always a pit because, come the end, the living look down from above. Mary and Martha look down at him, and he is below and he can’t reach up.

We all have to go through it. Hell is life in the instant before death. It is before, not after. This is how we know in such detail the logistics, transmitted from generation to generation. Survivors come back with the horror.

Lazarus prefers to suffer than to die: hell is preferable to death. When his soul threatens to drift, Lazarus heaves it back. After a year of sickness he needs one more day. One day, is all. He breaks it up hour by hour, determined to keep breath in his body.

His soul sometimes escapes, rising high above the specific wreckage of his body, and he knows when this is happening because his soul has perfect vision. It appraises the loose yellow-black skin of his body, but his disembodied self feels nothing, smells nothing. There is no smell in the afterlife.

At least, no sense of smell has featured in the many documented instances of near death experience. There is a pattern. An out-of-body sensation is followed by the tunnel, and finally the bright white light. Lazarus has a soul and it rises up. His soul enters the tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel is a light.

He had not expected it to be like this.

Lazarus refuses the light, turns and slides down the tunnel and drops with a clout into his rotten body.

In his hellish pinhole vision he sees individual tears on Mary’s cheeks. She is wringing her hands, as if she wants to pray but can’t find the place to start. Something new is wrong, something worse than when she was last looking down. Yanav will have reached Jesus by the river, and Mary believes Jesus can heal at a distance, like he did with the nobleman’s son. Jesus knows, and Lazarus is not improving.

The bible has more precise information. The New Testament remains the first place to look for remembered news about Jesus, and in Bethany there is little that Mary can add:

When he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was for two more days (John 11: 6).

1

FOR LAZARUS, IN the last hour before his death, there is no miracle, no seventh sign. The story as told by John abandons him, and a sequence he doesn’t understand is left, for him, unfinished: this is how death feels, and not just for Lazarus. Too soon; incomplete.

He cries fat salt tears. They stall on his cheeks. In the lion’s den or swallowed whole by a whale. Taken up in a chariot to heaven, but not like this, not fending at death but failing to keep it at a distance.