Richard Beard - Lazarus Is Dead

Jesus turns towards Lazarus. His eyes smile sadly. He puts his hand on his old friend’s shoulder. Lazarus blinks. He wonders if his questions are stupid. He blinks twice. He opens his mouth to speak and Mary comes in with the nard.

What happens next is known widely. Mary interrupts the dinner, at last finding her role in the story. Everyone has to move and furniture must be shifted so that she can kneel at the feet of Jesus. She uncorks the flask of nard, pours out the perfumed oil and washes his feet with her hair.

Sometimes, Mary wants to say, words are not enough.

1

LAZARUS SPENDS THE night after his resurrection on the roof, under the stars. His house is full, and he is acting on a strong craving for open spaces.

He does not immediately sleep. He regrets not speaking with Jesus, to confirm his conviction of being brought back for a purpose. Now Peter has reclaimed him, at least until the morning, and Lazarus lies awake wondering if a resurrection can wear out, wear off. He gazes at the stars and breathes the clean night air slowly in, slowly out.

In the simplest terms, after he returns from the dead, is Lazarus happy or is he sad?

Saint Epiphanios, Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus (367–403 CE) claims that Lazarus will live on for another thirty years. In the next three decades, according to ecclesiastical tradition, he will only smile once.

This is a possibility.

On the other hand, the American playwright Eugene O’Neill ( Lazarus Laughed , 1925) depicts a Lazarus brimming with joy at his second chance among the living. ‘Laugh! Laugh with me! Death is dead! Fear is no more! There is only life! There is only laughter!’

Lazarus wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t experienced a little new-world optimism, like Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851): ‘all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; supplementary clear gain of so many months or weeks as the case may be’.

All the same, the documentary evidence weighs in the other direction. In front of the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus weeps, and weeping is a stubborn feature of the earliest salvaged memories about Lazarus. Johan Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924) describes ‘the popular belief, then widely spread, according to which Lazarus, after his resurrection, lived in a continual misery and horror at the thought that he should have again to pass through the gate of death’.

On the night before the day known in the Christian calendar as Palm Sunday, Lazarus turns onto his stomach on the roof of his house. Chin on hands, he stares over the moonlit hills of scrub and rock, and a Bedouin fire burns brightly in the distance, like an answering star to the heavens.

Lazarus has the feeling he’s being watched. He listens for a command, like those received by the prophets, then hugs himself and rolls from side to side. He chants ‘here I am, here I am, here I am’. God does not respond with the consoling near-echo of I am here.

Lazarus plans ahead for tomorrow, his second day back on earth. He won’t make the same mistakes twice. This time around he’ll keep Jesus close, and value their friendship as he did when they were young. He’ll trust that instinct, once so strong and now rekindled, that he and Jesus will live as heroes. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of his life: Jesus will explain about Amos, and clear up the differences between life and death.

‘Here I am,’ Lazarus whispers. ‘Here I am.’

His chant loses meaning, becomes a sequence of the sounds of nothingness, until eventually beneath the stars on the roof in Bethany, Lazarus falls asleep.

2

He shakes himself awake. Already the sun is halfway towards noon. He jumps up, makes a fresh start, bundles down the outside steps, shouts at Martha for his breakfast.

A disciple is sitting beside the door. Nathaniel? Matthew? Lazarus can never remember their names. This one like the others is bearded and dark-skinned, and smells of sweat and fish. His left eyelid is trembling.

‘Jesus asked me to thank you. Your hospitality was most welcome.’

‘Where is he?’

‘They left for Jerusalem, everyone except me.’

Balthazar or Andrew stands up and sniffs, testing the air. He raises his hand but instead of covering his nose he holds his eyelid still.

‘Can you tell me what death was like?’

‘He can’t have left. Not without letting me know.’

‘Was it very glorious?’

‘We haven’t had a chance to talk.’

Lazarus runs into the village square, as if to catch stragglers before it’s too late. Jesus is long gone, and in the village the mood has changed.

Bethany is exhausted. The mid-morning sunlight makes sharp edges along abandoned crutches, while bandages brown with tidemarks of blood curl and crack in the dust. There are charred stones around cold fires. This is what the absence of Jesus looks like.

‘Peter asks that you stay in Bethany.’ The disciple has followed Lazarus into the square. ‘We’ll send the doubters out from Jerusalem. When they see how alive you are, they’ll believe that Jesus is the one.’

It is the morning of Palm Sunday and Jesus has left Bethany leading a triumphal procession into Jerusalem. The true believers have escorted him, laying down palm leaves beneath the hooves of his donkey. The one remaining disciple is even now waving goodbye to Lazarus as he turns the corner of the Jerusalem road. He too has gone.

In Bethany, it follows that anyone left behind is an unbeliever. Three women drawing water at the well complain about a stolen donkey. Lazarus walks towards them. They turn their backs and call in their children.

He takes another step. The women raise their chins and pinch their noses.

Lazarus runs back to the house.

‘Mary went with him,’ Martha says.

She is on her knees scrubbing the spillage of last night’s perfume from the floor. Lazarus squeezes her shoulder, and she pushes her cheek against his knuckles to be sure he’s there.

‘I’ll make you some breakfast,’ Martha says. She aches to her feet, holding her back. ‘How are you feeling?’

Lazarus finds some bread in a jar, bites, chews, swallows. Takes another bite, more thoughtfully. He is waiting for a surge of strength, a sense of unstoppable euphoria.

‘Everything’s wonderful,’ he says. ‘Impeccable. I was dead and now I’m alive.’

‘Is it the money? Is that what’s worrying you?’

‘I’m not going to worry about money.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ Martha says. She uncorks one jar after another to see how much the disciples have left behind them. ‘At least we’ve got the house to ourselves.’

The gate creaks.

It is Isaiah, who is not in Jerusalem with the believers. He walks into the house unannounced.

‘I’m here to fetch you,’ Isaiah says. He has recovered his priestly composure since yesterday, but Martha won’t give up her brother so easily, not again.

‘Let the man breathe. His head’s still spinning.’

‘We need him to answer some questions.’

If Lazarus is true, then Isaiah and the priests of Jerusalem have wasted their lives. None of their prayers or devoutly observed rituals can save them, not if the saviour is a man who barely respects the Sabbath. Jesus and Lazarus, together, make fools out of every virtuous Jew, and out of the hypocrites too.

‘Lazarus, you have to tell us the truth. Jesus did not bring you back from the dead.’

‘Didn’t he?’

‘Seriously. You followed the rules in Leviticus, and like any sensible man you paid for sacrifices at the Temple. God was appeased and eventually he ensured your recovery.’