So, Lazarus…
The condition of Lazarus – a man called back to the land of the living after four days cold and dead in the tomb and beginning to stink – is a condition so unthinkable, we can’t stop thinking about it.
Of course, Lazarus is not the only person we meet in the New Testament who is said to have come back from the dead. Matthew, Mark and Luke all claim that Jesus revived the young daughter of Jairus, a leader in the synagogue at Capernaum (Matthew 9.18-26; Mark 5.21-43; Luke 8.40-56). In an incident unique to Luke, Jesus raises the nameless son of a nameless widow in another Galilean town called Nain (Luke 7.11-17). And it’s not just Jesus who his credited with such miracles. In the Book of Acts, Peter revives the disciple known as Dorcas or Tabitha (Acts 9, 36-43), while Paul – not to be outdone by Peter – reanimates poor Eutychus, who fell asleep and toppled out of a window while listening to Paul hold forth late into the night at Troas (Acts 20.7-12). But Lazarus so eclipses all these others in our thinking that we hardly think of them at all.
Lazarus looms large in our imaginations, and the reason for this is not difficult to sniff out: it has everything to do, I think, with that bit about the stink. The others were all fresh from their deaths and rose up lightly from sickness or injury, never having been interred, still visible under the sun. But, rather like the Wicked Witch of the East, Lazarus isn’t merely dead; he’s really most sincerely dead and mouldering away in the windings of his grave clothes. He is decomposing in the dark, and the scene of his summons forth from the tomb holds all the terror and fascination of a horror flick. Depictions of this scene in ancient and medieval paintings look like story boards for the filming of Boris Karloff in The Mummy.
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id-6th century mosaic from the Basilica of Saint Apollinare, Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy
early 14th century fresco by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy
Lazarus is that repellent yet irresistible paradox – the living dead, the undead, the waking, walking returnee from whatever lies beyond – and, naturally, we want him to be our shaman, someone who can tell us what it’s like on the other side, what he saw there, what secrets he learned that might help us and heal us in our mortal predicament. But he disappoints. In one of the loudest of all the Bible’s howling silences, Lazarus never says a word, and no one ever bothers to ask him anything.
Small wonder, then, that numerous poets and novelists have felt compelled to fill this silence and have given us literary visions of who – or what – Lazarus became after he returned from the grave. And small wonder, too, that few of these visions are happy ones.
Take, for example, the short story entitled Lazarus by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, published in 1906. Andreyev’s Lazarus is more like a shade escaped from the dusty underworld of Sheol than a living man. He continues to bear the marks of incipient decay, in both his mind and his body, and becomes an object of aversion to others. His empty gaze, especially, exerts a baleful influence, driving others to despair and madness until the Emperor Augustus has his eyes burnt out of his head with a red hot poker. Blinded and outcast, he dies in the desert all alone. It’s about as pessimistic as twentieth-century pessimism gets.
Yet a century later when the Canadian writer John Derhak published his thriller The Bones of Lazarus in 2012, the picture was no rosier. Derhak’s Lazarus is an immortal zombie on a two-thousand-year-old mission to punish evil-doers by literally scaring them to death. And recall also that great last stanza from the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath:
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Science fiction fans will know that, in that genre, the name Lazarus almost always connotes something sinister. ‘The Lazarus Effect’, ‘the Lazarus Project’, ‘the Lazarus Experiment’ – all these are names for immortality quests that go horribly awry.
The condition of Lazarus is so unthinkable, we can’t stop thinking about it. And we can’t stop thinking about it, it seems, as something ghoulish – as something unholy, even – and thus as something it may have been reprehensible of Jesus to have inflicted on anyone, much less a beloved friend. This last complaint is the thought that motivates yet another work of fiction – Richard Beard’s 2011 novel Lazarus is Dead.
Now, I value the Bible as a driver of art and literature very highly and I would wish none of this creative elaboration away, however depressing, macabre, satirical, or downright silly it gets. But, probably, we are missing the gospel in John’s Gospel if Lazarus haunts us primarily as a figure of nightmarish dread.
No, I don’t mean that we are ignoring the obvious fact that the raising of Lazarus reprises the creation of Adam out of dust and breath and prefigures the resurrection of Jesus. I think we all get that about this story; it’s too self-evident to require much comment and has clearly been less interesting to many people than wondering what it’s like to be dead and come back to this life.
I mean that we are missing the slightly less obvious fact that the story of Lazarus is also about baptism and that, if we have been baptized, then Lazarus is us. The Gospel writer we call John was well versed in St Paul’s understanding of baptism as dying and rising with Christ and intended Lazarus to be a type or figure of the Christian initiate. We don’t need Lazarus to speak; we know exactly what it’s like to be him – and that is, frankly, not much different from the way we were before we were baptized. And yet. And yet…something has changed.
Since Ash Wednesday, Vanessa has been reminding us that, historically, Lent was a journey towards baptism for new initiates and that, over time, as infant baptism became the norm, it evolved into a journey towards renewing our baptism for those of us already initiated. But why do we need to do that? Isn’t the sacrament of baptism a once-and-for-all rebirth, incorporating us forever into the Body of Christ?
Over the past four weeks, as we have read and wrestled with the Gospel of John in our Lent Discussion Group, I have come to see the Fourth Gospel as – among other things – a treatise in narrative form on baptism as initiation into the mystery religion of Jesus, the eternally creating Word of God. And I have come to see the story of Lazarus of Bethany – his death and recalling to life – as a parable about baptism that helps me understand and, indeed, rejoice in the need for ongoing baptismal renewal.
For me, Lazarus has become a trope for the fact that we are composte – that we are composite relational beings, always undergoing processes of decomposition and re-composition in relation to myriad other things, – both internally and externally – but that to be baptized means that, in the midst of all this relational flux, Jesus is there – in our composition – and it is given to us to be constantly re-composed in relationship with him.
I am not the same person I was the day I was baptized at the age of 22 in 1984. When I look back at that person, I barely recognize her. I have died and come back to life several times since then. I have been decomposed and recomposed by many changes – both visible and invisible. All the cells in my body, I’m told, have been replaced, more than once. I have been divorced and remarried. For a period of twenty years, I ignored my baptism completely. My parents have died. I have gained twenty pounds. I am planning to acquire a new nationality.
Who am I?
Some Christians have argued that in baptism we acquire a new identity, and that this new identity claims our allegiance ahead of all other identities we might have – as if these were all neatly compartmentalized and separable. But this thing we call identity is fluid and composite at best. We are not identical to any of the categories with which we are often asked to identify. I am a human being, I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, I am of northern European descent, I am a Christian. I can be described as all of these things – but I am identical to none of them. They are all abstractions, after all, and I am wonderfully and fearfully particular, actual, weird and mysterious – especially to myself. We are not even identical to our ourselves over time.
Like God, the Trinity, we are relational beings. This is true not only of our bodies but also of our subjectivities. We really do get under one another’s skins and into one another’s psyches. The selves we experience are composed by and of the relations that make and remake us: our family members, our changing allies and opponents, the places and things that shape us. Often, we become aware of how our behaviour and sense of self shifts from one context or set of relationships to another. We feel that some relationships get us into trouble or prevent us from being who we want to be, while others seem to bring out our better capacities. Some relationships re-compose us better than others.
The story of Lazarus is there, I think, always to remind us that, when we are decomposed by the changes and chances of life, Jesus is there too to recompose us – not to make us identical with him, but to call us into our own best proper glory. To be baptized it to have chosen to be recomposed, again and again, in relationship with Jesus. And this can save us – save us from despair, from error and wrongdoing, from cynicism, from captivity to the past; in short, from our sins.
Amen
