Lazarus is Dead (22 page)

‘What was he like?'

Lazarus describes Jesus on the shore, watching Amos drown. The pilgrims want Jesus on the cross.

‘There was no cross,' Lazarus corrects them. ‘He died nailed to an olive tree.'

They prefer the cross, and Lazarus is old and forgetful. Christians everywhere can picture the Roman cross. It is a shared image that unites the oppressed across the empire.

‘Tell us about the sign above his head.'

‘There was no sign.'

On the island of Cyprus, in the town of Larnaca, the local tradition has a story about Lazarus smiling. He lives here for thirty years, until one day in the market he sees an urchin stealing a pot. He reputedly says: ‘the clay steals the clay', and he smiles.

The nature of this smile is not known.

In other Larnaca traditions Lazarus works miracles, including transforming a vineyard into a salt lake. What is certain, because it is preserved in the architecture of the island even today, is that the episcopal thrones in every church of the town bear the icon of St Lazarus, and none of them the image of Jesus.

 

The early Jesus Christians failed to erase Lazarus from their Church. In addition to the Gospel of John, and the architectural remains on the island of Cyprus, and the persistent imaginative revivals, Lazarus is embedded in the Christian liturgy.

The followers of Jesus repeatedly insist that Jesus is the son of god.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only son of God.

Centuries of theological exposition have misunderstood the emphasis in this memorable line of the creed. Clearly, no one doubted the arrival of a messiah, and in the Gloria there is the same insistence on identity, on who and not what:
For you alone are the holy One, you alone are the lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ.

Lazarus haunts the insistent and foundational words of Christianity. Jesus is the son of god,
not
Lazarus. Once upon a time it was necessary to insist that this was so. Think back to the pictures, and the images that survive of onlookers bowing down to Lazarus.

The story of Lazarus resists the pressure of the early Church, and miraculously Lazarus survives. He comes back to life in mosaics and sculptures, on recovered crockery and early decorative lamp covers. He is gilded on countless icons, and carved into the monuments of the necropoli of ancient Rome. All anyone has to do is look.

Lazarus is indestructible.

 

He may even have been happy.

The Larnaca fragment that made Lazarus smile is less convincing than another story offered by the Chinese mystic Wei Wu Wei, in
The Tenth Man
(1966). Wei claims to know the joke sent by god to make Lazarus laugh.

Ten theology students are travelling from one Master to another. They cross a river in spate, but are separated by the strength of the current. When they reassemble on the other side, the students count each other to check everyone has made it safely across. Each holy man counts nine other students of theology. Alas, they bewail their poor drowned brother.

A passing traveller asks them why they're weeping. He counts the students and assures them that all ten are alive and well. The students count again, and call the stranger a fool. They refuse to be consoled.

In his anguish, one of the trainee theologians goes to the riverside to wash his grief-stained face. He leans over a clear pool and calls out that he has found their brother, drowned at the bottom of the river. Each man in turn tearfully looks down into the water.

They all see him, but he is too deep to reach, so they conduct his funeral at the place on the riverbank nearest the body.

The traveller returns in the other direction. The students amuse him, so he asks them what they're doing now. He bursts out laughing, then tells them they've celebrated their own deaths as well as the deaths of all the others. This means all ten of them must be truly dead, deader than anyone who ever lived, dead twice over.

 

‘On learning this each student was instantly awakened, and ten fully enlightened holy men returned to their monastery to the intense delight of their grandmotherly old Master' (
The Tenth Man
).

Lazarus too must have made significant spiritual progress, if by now he can laugh at a drowning.

 

Belief is the problem. Some people refuse to believe anything unless they see it with their own eyes, like the students of theology at the river. Even then, what they see may not be true.

Jesus predicted it would be like this, in the parable that mentioned Lazarus by name—
‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead'
(Luke 16:31). There is only so much a god can do.

The disbelievers have endless reserves of ingenuity: a parable by Jesus about a man named Lazarus is unconnected with Lazarus his friend. No one saw Jesus emerge from the tomb, and therefore it never happened. No one saw Lazarus die.

After Lazarus, the spectacular miracles come to an end. Smaller miracles are not infrequent, even today, and people notice but often say nothing. These less flagrant signs and wonders are easier to accommodate. They leave no distasteful smell.

 

Lazarus dies and he doesn't die. He doesn't die and he dies.

I want to keep him alive, even at the very end, because with the Lazarus story no ending can be stated with certainty. On the frontier between life and death, in his case, all normal rules are suspended.

In his novel
Behold the Man
(1969), Michael Moorcock explains the resurrection of Jesus by giving him the capacity to time travel. This accounts for his adeptness at prophecy, and also for his sudden disappearance from first-century Jerusalem.

If time travel can apply to Jesus, then it may also help with Lazarus. Lazarus and Jesus are time travellers, and their portals are inside the tombs. Lazarus goes first, a detail that never changes, but one of the two friends, tragically, will not return alive.

I can be convinced by this. If there is ever time travel there will always have been time travel, and Cicero will turn out to be right: what cannot happen does not happen. Lazarus and Jesus are pioneering time-travel friends, in the early days of the science. They are far too conspicuous when they arrive in first-century Palestine, not believable as inhabitants of that particular time and place.

Their trip is a fiasco, Lazarus returning to the future with the crucified body of Jesus in his arms. Regulations are put in place to avoid repeat catastrophes of this kind, and since then those regulations have been studiously observed. Time travellers are much more discreet. Though that could always change, from one day to the next.

We need to open our eyes. Life is full of possibility.

Lazarus may never have died.

Everyone owes nature a death, and Lazarus has paid his debt. In five hundred and sixty years from now, in the year 2570
CE
, Lazarus will be identified trudging across a desolate, beast-filled desert in the ruined state of Utah. This is how we find him in Walter M. Miller's
A Canticle for Leibowitz
(1959). He is still wandering sixty years later (2630
CE
), and rejecting the adoption of the symbol of the cross—he throws rocks at Catholic novices engaged in their Lenten fasts.

With Lazarus anything is possible, but if he were alive today we would know that as a fact. I think.

 

He colludes in his own second death. He accepts that he has to die twice, an anomaly that his friend Jesus learns to avoid. Lazarus trials the problem so that Jesus can know. In this sense, as in so many others, Lazarus is the teacher.

Lazarus lays down his life twice for his friend. No one else can do this but Lazarus, and genuinely there is no greater love. He is the only named friend of Jesus.

I think he lives at least another thirty years, as Church tradition indicates. He reaches a good age and he comes to know happiness, to the extent that several testimonies insist on him smiling.

And even though Jesus requires his friend to die a second death, Lazarus knows that death is not the end. There is something beyond. The second time, so as not to distract from the story of Jesus, Lazarus will die without drawing attention to himself, far from Jerusalem and Rome. He dies in Cyprus or Marseilles, generously moving aside.

Angels may carry him to heaven, where the prophet Abraham may await. He will be reunited with Eliakim and his mother Sarah and with Amos. He had not remembered that it would be like this.

He returns to what is beyond. Jesus walks forward from the shore.

Richard Beard is the author of four novels, including
The Cartoonist
(Bloomsbury, 2000) and
Dry Bones
(Secker & Warburg, 2004), and three works of nonfiction. He is the Director of the National Academy of Writing in London.
Lazarus Is Dead
is his North American debut.