Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  Staying alive would take all his effort. Finding his depth. Reaching the shore. He wanted to help Amos, with his whole heart he wanted to save him, but only to the point where he had to save himself. That was as far as his saving would go. Ahead of him Amos went under. Lazarus thrashed with his arms. Amos drifted away from him. Lazarus felt the nearness of death and he knew, with absolute certainty, that above all else he wanted to live.

  Jesus stood on the shore, holding their clothes and sandals. He didn’t help because he couldn’t swim. He patiently watched Amos drown. He watched Lazarus save himself. He did not intervene.

  Lazarus remembers every detail—this is not a forgettable experience. On the shore, when he hauled himself out, Jesus had lost that look in his eye that said everything would turn out fine.

  The body was never found, or if it was Lazarus was never told. He didn’t ask.

  He travelled home to Nazareth on the back of a cart, surrounded by veiled women who took turns to press him close to their breasts. He couldn’t remember Jesus as a presence in the cart going home, but presumably he was there.

  3.

  3.

  Innocent people must drown in Lake Galilee. Blameless families are required to grieve. This must be so, otherwise no one would be frightened for the disciples in the storm.

  If Jesus is the son of god, then all stories both before and after exist in the service of this one incredible story. Every drowning makes its contribution to the glory.

  “When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Caper­naum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water” (John 6:16–19).

  Jesus walks on water. This is the next miracle, the fifth sign of the messiah as recorded in the Gospel of John.

  Several explanations are possible. Jesus is standing on an unmapped sandbar. The disciples, confused by threatening weather, experience a moment of collective hysteria. Glaucoma, trachoma, conjunctivitis. In a random sample of twelve first-century Galileans, as many as a third may have suffered from an eye complaint.

  Jesus walks on water; the body of Lazarus collapses. His skin retracts and his joints pop with fluid. Veins push outward through his black and yellow flesh. He jolts awake. The whites of his eyes are red.

  The fifth miracle sends his body into a dramatic decline. Overnight, at the Bethesda pool, he reaches the invalid stage where on the second morning his sisters talk about him as if he isn’t there.

  ‘Now, please,’ Mary begs. ‘Look at him. We have to send for Jesus.’

  ‘There’s nothing anyone can do,’ Yanav says. ‘It’s over.’

  Mary looks at Martha.

  ‘We promised,’ Martha says. ‘Disobeying his wishes could make him worse.’

  ‘How could he be any worse? He doesn’t know up from down.’

  ‘We promised him we wouldn’t send for Jesus.’

  His sisters argue. Lazarus notices a tremor on the surface of the water. He doubts his eyesight but then the reflections break up, clouds in the sky shimmering and cracking. No one else sees it. He could topple himself in, first into the pool as the angels pass by.

  He stares at the trembling water. He will hit the surface, sink, probably drown.

  ‘Send for Jesus,’ Mary pleads. ‘That’s all we have to do. Let me send a messenger.’

  ‘Stop,’ Lazarus says.

  The pool glasses over. It is difficult for Lazarus to speak, as if he’s slowly being strangled with the minimum of force. ‘Don’t send for Jesus. And get me away from the water. It’s dangerous.’

  Lazarus is going blind.

  On the road home to Bethany the darkness at the edge of his vision begins to close in. He sees a migrating crane, sunlight bright on the tips of its wings. He finds it easier to close his eyes than to work out what anything means.

  In the final stage of his illness, the various diseases blunder into each other, and the ability of his body’s defences to distinguish between self and not-self fades. His immune cells overwhelm some areas and miss the distress signals from others. His B-lymphocytes are unable to protect him. His T-lymphocytes recognise their doom and surrender.

  Death is filthy. Lazarus has no control over his bowels, and is exhausted after retching whatever thin gruel reaches his stomach. He wills his inner workings back into their rightful place, but doesn’t know what to imagine or how the unimaginable should properly fit together. The effort of not knowing defeats him.

  Poor Lazarus, like in the parable. Perhaps death is for the best, and if there is a heaven he may yet be comforted there.

  Mary crouches close to the creaking stretcher, praying into her brother’s ear. He beckons her closer still. It hurts him to speak, but if he stays silent the pain does not diminish.

  ‘What?’ Mary asks. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘Stop praying. Send for Lydia.’

  ‘I will not.’

  ‘Send for her. Please.’

  Jesus walks on water. Jesus stands on the shore with their clothes in his arms, watching Amos drown. The gap between these two events is the emptiness into which Lazarus subsides.

  Were they friends? Not really. Not after Amos died.

  Jesus spent weeks afterwards in the synagogue, searching through the holy scrolls. He’d find obscure references to console his friend—‘Come, let us return to the lord. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds’ (Hosea 6:1)—but to Lazarus these were only words.

  Amos was gone, and when you’re dead you’re dead. That’s what the Sadducees believed, and their scriptural evidence was easier to find—‘the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate and their jealousy have long since vanished; never again will they have a part in anything that happens under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 9:5–6).

  Lazarus wept. Jesus watched. Lazarus wiped his eyes and walked away.

  He grew the first hairs of his beard—again Lazarus was first. He shaved them off. The Rabbi urged the Nazareth villagers to allow for the boy’s anger and tolerate his wayward behaviour. This flaunting of the laws was grief, or growing up. All being well, he’d soon return to the fold.

  To Lazarus, their tolerance made no difference, because god destroys both the blameless and the wicked. He could be understood or forgiven or ignored, without consequences—their god, if he existed, acted as if he didn’t. Amos was dead. There were no divine interventions.

  Jesus grew his hair and his beard like everyone else, as if god were not at fault and god was watching and god cared. Jesus kept himself busy. He had sheep troughs to hollow, and advanced classes on the intricate rituals of the Torah. Lazarus sometimes despised him, watching silently as Jesus sanded a nut bowl.

  ‘How special is it just doing what your dad does? We can be more important than this.’

  Joseph told Lazarus he was a fool for wanting to leave the village. Lazarus called Joseph a hypocrite. He and Mary had left Bethlehem for a better life, and Lazarus wanted the same.

  ‘Those were exceptional circumstances.’

  ‘Were they?’

  ‘It was ordained.’

  ‘Why should this be different?’

  Lazarus and Jesus should have been living in the mountains like lions. Or not in the mountains, but anywhere else but Nazareth.

  Their friendship, however strong it had once been, was never destined to last. Quite the opposite. The two boys had to be uncoupled, placing one at either end of the country. Some decisive event had been necessary to prise such friends apart, and that event was Jesus standing inept on the shore as Amos drowned in the lake. Their separation was in the design.

  2.

  Lazarus regrets everything. If this is how life ends he must have made mistakes. He’d planne
d to live enough life for all three of them.

  He remembers the pressure of his early ambition, hot and tight enough to burst. In Nazareth the streets narrowed, the houses shrank to nothing, and he lay awake for long afternoons listening to silence and his echoing solitude. He was dissolving, at one with the dates and figs melting to treacle outside. He has the same feeling now that he’s dying.

  Joseph said he was too young to leave Nazareth, and anyway none of them were city people. Jerusalem would swallow him whole, while Galilee was safe and his friends were there to help him. Lazarus laughed. He remembered the shore.

  Menachem the Rabbi supplied the opportunity. He had always said the two Bethlehem boys were special, but it was Lazarus he took aside. His cousin Absalom near Jerusalem had an opening in the sheep trade. It wasn’t much, but a young man with a pragmatic outlook could make a comfortable living. If he worked hard and made connections at the Temple, he could earn himself a fortune.

  Martha and Mary would travel with him, to keep him company and help him set up house. Luckily, neither of his sisters was married.

  ‘You are the one I have chosen.’ Menachem’s milky eyes focused somewhere to Lazarus’s left. ‘King David, too, left home in his youth. A great future awaits you in Bethany, I’m sure of it. I have prayed for you, Lazarus of Nazareth. God will do the rest.’

  Lazarus found Jesus in Joseph’s workshop. It was a long time since their last proper conversation.

  ‘I’m going to Jerusalem. Menachem has it all plotted out.’

  Jesus was experimenting with fasting, hoping for visions of the heavenly mystery. In real time this meant he was planing the edge of a door in the wrong direction. He could have hurt himself.

  ‘You should come. We’ll earn enough for two. Easily.’

  It was the final appeal Lazarus would make to their friendship. Despite Amos, he was prepared to make a last effort, because he’d have sworn they still had feelings in common, like not feeling at home in Nazareth.

  ‘Jerusalem,’ Lazarus repeated, as if the name of the city spoke for itself. Literally anything was possible in Jerusalem, and he could see that Jesus was tempted.

  But it was too late, with too much left unspoken. They were friends, yes, but Jesus would soon be a carpenter, like his father before him. Lazarus had grander schemes in mind; he was leading the way and he could sense that Jesus was jealous. Jesus wished he were Lazarus, but no one gets everything they want.

  Out in the square the children play sick man tag, keeping one eye open for Jesus, who could appear in Bethany at any time.

  There are plenty of visitors who arrive in his place.They drift in from the villages and from Jerusalem. Most are strangers but some are friends, because Lazarus had many friends. They want to pay their respects.

  ‘My brother is not dead.’ Martha turns them away. ‘You’ve wasted your journey.’

  But Martha can’t stop them leaving gifts and offering compliments. They act as if Lazarus is accomplishing a very difficult task, and make it worse by not speaking ill of him, as if there is no hope.

  Isaiah makes the trip from Jerusalem.

  ‘I was wondering about the date for the wedding,’ he says, but his pretence can’t last. He hands Martha a bag of coins, and closes her hands around it. ‘Lazarus was a good man. It is the least our family can do. You should take him to see his tomb.’

  ‘He can’t see.’

  ‘There is comfort in being well prepared.’

  ‘Our brother is very ill,’ Martha says. ‘Even small distances are a challenge.’

  In this period of terminal decline Cassius visits Bethany several times, and not always in disguise. In battle uniform he rides into the village, accompanied by officers on restless chargers from the garrison. Cassius manoeuvres his immense black horse as far as Lazarus’s gate.

  Martha comes to the doorway. She squints into the sunlight and dries her hands on a cloth. The Roman horse sniffs in her direction, as if curious to know whether she’s edible. Cassius leans forward in the saddle.

  ‘Any signs of improvement?’

  Martha turns and goes back inside.

  Cassius smiles. Jesus can walk on water but he can’t help Lazarus.

  Yanav comes out to ask Cassius to leave the family in peace.

  ‘With pleasure,’ Cassius says, wheeling his horse away. He calls back over his shoulder. ‘And thank you. You’ve done an excellent job.’

  1.

  Lazarus insists at all times on lamps that are filled and lit.

  ‘Send for Jesus,’ Mary says. She can’t think it and not say it. ‘Send for Jesus. Send for Jesus. Send for Jesus.’

  ‘More oil, more wicks,’ Martha says. ‘Don’t let any go out.’

  People can get used to anything, except dying. Lazarus has known for years that Jesus is not coming to Bethany and he will not come. In the day as at night he tells the passing of time in the guttering of flames in oil. He is terrified when a wick starts to flicker and smoke.

  More lamps! More! Don’t let the light go out.

  Lazarus rarely speaks. When he makes the effort, it is to curse the winter of his birth. He should have been killed in the Bethlehem slaughter, as good as dead from the moment he left the womb.

  ‘Fight,’ Mary says. ‘Stay alive long enough for him to come.’

  ‘Mary, Jesus has had his chance. He was in Jerusalem. He didn’t want to see us.’ Martha has no patience for false comforts. She asks Yanav if there’s anything else they can do.

  He shakes his head. Yanav tends to Lazarus’s hair, cropping it so short the ridges of his skull are visible. Every other day he shaves him. The smallpox scabs have dried and Yanav smoothes oil over the pocked skin of Lazarus’s face, consoling him with long strokes of the Syrian copper blade.

  Martha takes her brother’s hand, and Lazarus grips on hard. If he holds on tight enough she’ll lift him to his feet. If she lifts him gently he can walk.

  ‘Where do you want to go, Lazarus?’

  He pulls, but he does not rise up. His wasted arms tremble.

  ‘Lazarus, where?’

  He falls back.

  He tries to speak, tries to say. His thoughts and memories and feelings have come to nothing. It doesn’t matter how much anyone learns. Poc. The knowledge disappears. One thing after another, and Lazarus plucks imaginary objects from the air. The opportunity to marry. Poc. The decision to be good, or the chance once more to see Lydia naked. Poc poc. To have children of his own and to show them the glory of the Temple. Poc.

  Months ago, work had slipped from his power. Then Jerusalem, then Bethany, then his own yard. He has this room. He has Yanav the healer and his sisters.

  Martha takes Mary in her arms. They are both exhausted.

  ‘Don’t cry, Mary. Don’t cry, my baby girl.’

  They break apart, and holding hands they need only a brief second of eye contact. They turn to face their brother and Martha takes an audible breath.

  ‘We’re sending for Jesus,’ she says. ‘Whether you like it or not.’

  2.

  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 hav
e 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 once 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.