The Gospel According to Lazarus

by Richard Zimler

  The only scroll I own is an ancient copy of the first book of the Torah, which we refer to as In the Beginning. Its graceful Hebrew letters are complemented by tiny illustrations in the margins, and I read it by the flickering light of an ancient lantern, moving my fingertip over the figures of men and women, animals and trees and rivers, wishing I could disappear into a story that is not my own.

  To escape another wave of despair, I climb up to the roof, and Ayin is there waiting for me, and, when I reach out to him, he nuzzles his head into my hand to give me his consent, so I lift him on to my shoulder. Together we search the darkness in all directions, and, though we cannot find Goliath, I sense he is sitting on my street amongst the pilgrims.

  Gephen is waiting for us back inside my home. He curls around my ankle, eager for companionship, and he accompanies Ayin and me out my door and down the street. By Bethany’s new well, however, he seems to change his mind about joining us. Standing on its stone rim, he gazes out into the fields east of town, summing advantages and disadvantages, then jumps down and trots off towards home.

  I need the freedom of the night air and stars, however, and soon I am standing on the barren hill just beyond the plot of land we rent, gazing at the towers of Yerushalayim, which have been polished silver by the moonlight. To remain there and never go home again seems a worthy protest against all the events I cannot control.

  And yet I spend most of my time on that abandoned hilltop berating everyone who has ever wounded or wronged me, starting with Marta, who has excluded me from her heart since we were children, and ending with the Lord Himself.

  Is it progress to confess all my grudges to a God who may not exist?

  I walk east for a time along the road to Yeriho, towards the stream where I go to admire the sacred ibises that gather there in the early morning. For the first time in my life, I have no fear of brigands or bandits; even the most ruthless amongst them would surely keep his distance from me on learning that I am a living corpse. And even if they were to overcome their dread of contagion, what more could they take from me? I have spent all the silver I kept in my pouch on my generous-hearted Etruscan dictionary, and my clothes are worthless. To be left naked and shivering might even prove a blessing, for I would then be obliged to start over without even sandals to weigh me down.

  If you want to enter the Kingdom, you must give away everything, even the identity you have always had.

  It seems that only now – at the age of thirty-six – am I finally beginning to live out the most difficult parts of Yeshua’s teachings.

  Just before reaching the stream, I hear men’s voices coming from an encampment of pilgrims, and, as I would not want to converse with them, I tiptoe off the road and walk slowly forward along the raised border between a barley field and a grove of date palms. In spite of my caution, one of the men soon detects my presence. As Ayin and I take cover behind one of the palms, his squat, moonlit figure approaches, holding a dagger in his fist.

  I call out tamê – unclean! – so that he will take me for a leper.

  ‘We have nothing of value, so stay away from us!’ he shouts, and he slashes his blade through the darkness, back and forth.

  Perhaps being an outcast – with only a night-bird for companion – makes me more sensitive to what all of nature would have me understand; a short time later, after the man has returned to his companions, I wade into the stream, and its waters whisper that the journey through life is always arduous, no matter who we are.

  You did not have any right to expect that your way forward would be free of obstacles, it tells me, and when I look up into the firmament, questioning a thousand stars about what the afterlife looks like, they tell me, Even Aietos the Eagle will one day tumble out of the sky and leave us.

  Is that a moment of clairvoyance? It will seem so for a number of years, but, now that I am older, I see that a sanctum of dreams and visions has shaped all my most important decisions, so it seems only natural that it would also supply me with the strategy that I would come to use to try to save Yeshua.

  Why is the entirety of nature willing to address me on this night? If I am truthful, Yaphiel, I think it is because while standing in a stream beyond the borders of Yerushalayim and Bethany, free of expectations, I can be candid with myself.

  When my eyes are drawn skywards again, and they rest upon Vega, and for the first time since my youth, perhaps, I recall the new star that appeared within its halo when I was four years old and Grandfather Shimon carrying me on his shoulders up a hill to see it. Dozens of our neighbours from Natzeret were around us, braving the frigid gusts of wind, and everyone was whispering together. At the time, I did not suspect that they were speculating about whether an anointed king – a Mashiah – had been born amongst us. After a time, Grandmother Rut sat me on her lap and bundled me up, so that my memories of that icy, adventure-filled night are filtered through the reassuring weight of her woollen mantle.

  Why does that particular memory occur to me and not any of a hundred others?

  When I close my eyes to ask the ‘I’ who resides inside my darkness, it is Leah who gives me the answer by kissing my cheek.

  She does not need to say, The loneliness you’re now feeling also unites you to Yeshua, for I am well aware – and have been so for many years – that every time he takes my hand or even just smiles at me he poses a question that I try never to answer: can you love me without possessing me?

  An hour or so later, in Bethany, I spot a caped figure sitting by the old well, bent over himself, seemingly asleep. I am unable to see his face because he is wearing the wide-brimmed petasus typical of the Greeks of Alexandria. Might he be another of our Egyptian cousins? I excuse myself from the insistent pilgrims whom I have been blessing at my door and start towards him.

  When I am half a dozen paces from him, he thrusts out his staff. ‘Don’t move!’

  I jump back and tell him that I come in peace.

  Then, recognizing me, he lowers his weapon and laughs.

  I study his face in the moonlight, and everything that has taken place over these past few days seems a dream leading directly to this one moment, since the smiling man is Yosef, Yeshua’s father. And yet he has been dead for nearly a decade.

  I am living now in a dream of the Lord’s, I think.

  ‘No, I’m not a night-demon,’ Yosef tells me in an amused tone, misunderstanding my trepidation.

  His voice gives away his true identity. ‘You scared me!’ I whisper-scream.

  Yeshua takes off his hat and pats down his long hair to show me he is without horns, since we Galileans say that Mastema – the angel of lies – resembles a goat.

  ‘Without your beard you look just like your father,’ I tell him. ‘I’d forgotten.’

  ‘The best disguise is sometimes no disguise at all!’ he says, too pleased with himself for my liking.

  He starts towards me with open arms, but I thrust up my hands again to have him keep his distance; not only am I ritually unclean, but I must use my irritation if I am to have any hope of convincing him to flee Yerushalayim and find safety in the Galilee.

  The moonlight is too frail for me to see the radiant depth in Yeshua’s eyes, or I would know that the deepest part of his soul has ascended and that he is intoning hymns even as we speak.

  ‘You’re supposed to be in the Galilee,’ I tell him in a disapproving voice.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Nikodemos.’

  ‘So you’ve been checking up on me!’ he says in a gleeful voice, as though he has caught me enquiring into his private affairs.

  ‘Would you prefer for me to forget about you?’ I ask challengingly.

  He holds out his hands palm up – a sign of apology in our personal language. I would like to take them in mine, but his touch might dissuade me from insisting that he leave Yerushalayim.

  ‘We ought to go inside,’ I say.

  ‘First give me your hands,’ he replies.

  ‘I’m unclean. I was a
corpse. I shall be pure again only after my resurrection is seven days in the past. And, even then, I don’t know … Perhaps the priests will have to cleanse me with the ashes of a sacrificed beast.’

  He shakes his head as if I have misunderstood everything. ‘Would I have embraced you had your soul been defiled by death?’

  ‘How do you know it wasn’t?’

  He glares at me. ‘Lazar, if I tell you of earthly things and you do not believe me, then how will you believe me if I tell you of the heavenly things?’

  I give him my hands, as he has requested, and he covers his eyes with them, as though seeking shelter inside a darkness that only I can grant him. It is a moment that tugs me far out of myself, and I see us both as though from high above: two men standing at the shore of a deep ocean into whose limitless, life-giving depths only one of them can see.

  With my hands pressed to Yeshua’s closed eyes, I chant the Shema, over and over, and a latch opens inside me, and what enters me is his trust so freely given that the borders between us begin to fade. His voice – when it speaks my name – sounds inside me, and being united with him changes the direction of all my thoughts, and I am rising towards a hope so full that it overflows my mind and appears to my inner eye as a shimmering black sun lifting into sky.

  You will enter the Kingdom when you make two into one, he has always told me. And yet we are too easily called away, and, in only the time it takes to hear his words spoken aloud to me once more, I return to myself, and the sun loses its dark fire, and he and I are separate once more.

  Lifting my hands away from his face, he kisses them, then gives them back to me. His movements – overly precise, as though he is fearful he may make a mistake – confirm to me that the breath-part of his soul – his neshamah – is still communing with the Lord and far from us.

  ‘I decided to remain in Yerushalayim,’ he tells me. ‘Though I have played a small trick on the Pharisees and their Roman masters.’

  ‘What kind of trick?’

  ‘They’re certain I have left for Capernaum.’

  ‘How did you convince them of that?’

  ‘I told Yehudah of Kerioth and several others that I would be going there.’

  I make no reference to the dangers that may accrue from trying to manipulate a traitor, but my expression must reveal my thoughts.

  ‘Lazar, I need to be here in Yerushalayim,’ he tells me, ‘where Elohim has set the thrones of judgement.’

  ‘And where’s Yehudah?’

  ‘I sent him to Capernaum yesterday and told him to wait for me.’

  ‘He’ll be angry with you when you fail to join him there.’

  ‘Let him be angry! If he stays in the Galilee, he won’t be obliged to betray me and his people.’

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ I say, taking his arm. ‘A man has been following me of late. He might be observing us even now.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘A giant, with dark hair and eyes. Annas must’ve sent him to follow me – to make sure I say nothing about how you revived me.’

  ‘This man won’t harm you.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  Yeshua’s answers with a pledge from the Book of Zechariah. ‘“Never again will an oppressor overrun my people, for now I am keeping watch.”’

  It does not occur to me until later that he quotes this particular verse to prepare me for what he will soon ask of me. I do sense, however, the he wants me to respond with a verse of Torah so that we might build a high protective wall out of our words; it is a practice we adopted as boys when we felt pressured by others.

  ‘“In peace I will lie down and sleep,”’ I say, ‘“for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.”’

  ‘“The children drink their fill of the abundance of Your house, and You give them …”’ Yeshua continues.

  As we renew the defensive battlements around us, I am reminded of what I have known since we were twelve years old:

  Yeshua is the word and the sign, the vowel never written, the twenty-third letter.

  He is the uptake of breath and exhale after each prayer.

  He is the seer and the seen, the speaker and the spoken, the lover and the beloved.

  He is the Torah into which God has breathed life.

  I lead him down the street to my home, my hand around his wrist, because he is often only vaguely aware of his steps when he has divided himself between the land of his birth and the Hekhal ha-Melekh.

  Once my front door is closed behind us, I put Ayin on my windowsill where the obscure sounds of the night will reassure him that he is where he is meant to be. When I turn around, Yeshua embraces me and rests his head on my shoulder. And there it is once more, the scent I have known all my adult life – of the fertile earth of the Galilee and the hundreds of miles of forgotten roads he has walked over the past months.

  Through Yeshua, I embrace the hidden beings who dwell inside him and give him their strength when his is depleted, and, though I am unlikely to ever even catch a glimpse of them, I beseech them to watch over him with all their care.

  If I could be envious of his power, would it seem less alluring to me?

  As I sit him down, the fear that he will sense my ongoing doubts about the afterlife closes in around me. He reads my discomfort in my manner and reaches up to caress my cheek. ‘There will be no death for those who come to the Lord of Heaven through me,’ he says.

  ‘I … I am not the man I was,’ I stutter.

  ‘You’ve heard me say many times that I’ve come for the sinners and heretics and for those who are troubled in spirit. Did you think I was lying?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘For now, I would ask you to put your fears and troubles aside for me if not for yourself. I need you to stay up with me tonight and remain alert.’

  Once we are seated across from each other, he shuts his eyes and chants as quickly as he can, reordering the letters of the secret names of God that Rabbi Baruch taught us when we reached adulthood. Soon his voice grows silent, and his breathing slows and deepens, and as he raises his hands …

  Here I must cleave to silence, for I am forbidden from speaking of the mysteries that Yeshua uses to untie his knots of mind and allow the Holy Spirit to enter him. I shall tell you, however, that he invokes the name of one angel aloud – Jahoel, the heavenly scribe.

  When he struggles to remove his cape, I lift it off of him. He sits with his legs crossed, and after I prop a cushion behind his back, he reaches urgently for my hand, and I know from experience to fetch him a cup of water, which I lift to his lips.

  To help him at such times seems the sacred duty for which I was born.

  His whispered prayers carry him off to the Lord, and the heat of his spiritual journey is such that steam-wisps begin to dance across his shoulders and hair. I brush his brow with a moist towel, then drip water from my cupped hand on top of his head. Beads of water run down his neck and back.

  What is it like to walk with God? Before Yeshua discovered the dangers of speaking of the Kingdom to the uninitiated, he used to occasionally scribble observations about his experiences, and I once discovered a parchment in his pouch where he had written a few fragments of poetry. Amongst them was a verse that he gave me permission to repeat: I am clothed in light, burning with radiance, in a world without shadows.

  I carry in two oil lamps from our storage cabinet and place one on each side of him for when he returns to this time and place; demons and shades are only too eager to take on human form, and the flames will deter them from stealing into our world when the Gate of Return opens.

  Once I neglected to perform this duty properly, and a foul-smelling demon in service to Asmodeus took up residence in my home for two days, and it was only by painting a menacing talisman of Tobit on all the doorways and ordering the evil wraith to leave us that Yeshua and I were able to send him back to his benighted realm.

  As I take a sip of water for myself, Gephen jumps on to my windowsill and sniffs at Ayin.
The owl bats him away with his wing, and the cat tumbles, twisting, into the room, landing – astonishingly – on all four feet.

  Gephen looks from me to Yeshua as though awaiting our praise, so I whisper that he is an acrobat of the highest order. I also ask him to return outside, flapping at him with my hands so there can be no error of interpretation, but he disregards me with regal indifference and patters over to Yeshua, climbing on to his thigh. I would chase him off, but Yeshua remains unperturbed and deep in trance, which frees me once again to become a man whose sole purpose is to watch over his friend. And yet I prove on this occasion a poor guard; some time later, I awaken to Yeshua cupping my chin.

  ‘The Lord has sent me to open the prisons this Passover and take all our captives to the Promised Land,’ he tells me.

  His hand is still burning with the heat of the Palace. I scent Gephen on his fingers.

  I sit up, but my mind is still drugged by slumber. I look around the room, but the cat is gone.

  ‘I sent him back to the courtyard,’ Yeshua says.

  ‘I must have fallen asleep,’ I say, as if that were not obvious.

  ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘And you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ His eyes glisten in the lamplight, and he gazes at me for a long time, as he does when he is astonished to see that so little has changed while he was away. ‘I have prepared an important place for you on the morning following the Sabbath,’ he tells me.

  ‘Where will you need me to be?’ I ask.

  ‘Many hundreds of my followers are coming from the Galilee. I’ll ride into the city of the Lord and trace its entire circumference, and you’ll be with me. Together we’ll enter the house and throw open its doors to one and all. “I shall take the battle chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Yerushalayim, and I shall destroy the arrows of war.”’

  I recognize his words as those of Zechariah, of course.

  To test if I understand him correctly, I reply with the next verse: ‘“See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey.”’