Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  ‘Rest,’ Mary says. ‘It is done.’

  ‘Keep breathing,’ Martha urges. ‘Think ahead to your wedding. Are we allowing Absalom to speak?’

  In Jerusalem Yanav is approaching the Roman checkpoint at the Damascus Gate. There are ten or twelve armed soldiers and, standing ahead of them, leaning against a pillar, Cassius picking at his fingernails with a brass pin.

  ‘The healer is fleeing,’ he says. He stands up straight and tosses the pin aside. Yanav hears it drop. ‘This can only be good news.’

  ‘Lazarus is dying. Today, tomorrow at the latest.’

  ‘If you’re leaving, I believe it. Unless you’re headed for the Galilee?’

  Yanav’s face remains blank. He reminds himself that Cassius suspects everyone, all the time, but Yanav is confident that the gods are at work. Miracles, if true, are more intimidating than Rome. He needs to see for himself.

  ‘Further away,’ he says. ‘Somewhere I can repair my reputation.’

  ‘I’m sorry. An unfortunate consequence. But you’ve been well rewarded.’

  ‘I have. I’m not complaining. Send your report to Rome. Tell the consuls this is the end of the story.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Is there anything else you think I should know?’

  ‘Don’t be friends with Jesus.’

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  A day goes by. Lazarus needs to stay alive for one more day, but his closeness to death is a glimpse of hell. Visions of hell are brought back to the living by the dying who are later spared. They remember how death feels—night pierces the bones, is inside the bones, and then the suffocation.

  Lazarus struggles to breathe. Dragons squat round his neck and squeeze. His lips are sliced off and his tongue wrenched out. Flames scorch his nose and mouth, burning down his throat and splitting his innards.

  He is stuck, always stuck, plunged so deep in a stinking pit of slime that even his clothes detest him. In a pit of slurry, of fire, in a pit of vomit or shit but always a pit because, come the end, the living look down from above. Mary and Martha look down at him, and he is below and he can’t reach up.

  We all have to go through it. Hell is life in the instant before death. It is before, not after. This is how we know in such detail the logistics, transmitted from generation to generation. Sur­vivors come back with the horror.

  Lazarus prefers to suffer than to die: hell is preferable to death. When his soul threatens to drift, Lazarus heaves it back. After a year of sickness he needs one more day. One day, is all. He breaks it up hour by hour, determined to keep breath in his body.

  His soul sometimes escapes, rising high above the specific wreckage of his body, and he knows when this is happening because his soul has perfect vision. It appraises the loose yellow-black skin of his body, but his disembodied self feels nothing, smells nothing. There is no smell in the afterlife.

  At least, no sense of smell has featured in the many documented instances of near death experience. There is a pattern. An out-of-body sensation is followed by the tunnel, and finally the bright white light. Lazarus has a soul and it rises up. His soul enters the tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel is a light.

  He had not expected it to be like this.

  Lazarus refuses the light, turns and slides down the tunnel and drops with a clout into his rotten body.

  In his hellish pinhole vision he sees individual tears on Mary’s cheeks. She is wringing her hands, as if she wants to pray but can’t find the place to start. Something new is wrong, something worse than when she was last looking down. Yanav will have reached Jesus by the river, and Mary believes Jesus can heal at a distance, like he did with the nobleman’s son. Jesus knows, and Lazarus is not improving.

  The bible has more precise information. The New Testament remains the first place to look for remembered news about Jesus, and in Bethany there is little that Mary can add:

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  For Lazarus, in the last hour before his death, there is no miracle, no seventh sign. The story as told by John abandons him, and a sequence he doesn’t understand is left, for him, unfinished: this is how death feels, and not just for Lazarus. Too soon; incomplete.

  He cries fat salt tears. They stall on his cheeks. In the lion’s den or swallowed whole by a whale. Taken up in a chariot to heaven, but not like this, not fending at death but failing to keep it at a distance.

  Death is horrible and stupid and it can’t be and it is. He curses creation to its face, because god is cruel and god does not exist.

  Lazarus lies down on his side, and he knows he is down. He curls up into the shape of his beginning, clutches his skull with his fingers and squeezes. What comes next is the end.

  Mary kneels and reaches for his hand. Martha takes the other and he clings on so rigidly they think he’s dead, but it is only panic at a vision of death. He makes one last effort, always more effort.

  ‘Is there a light?’ Mary asks. ‘Can you see a light?’

  Lazarus contorts his lips, struggles to voice a sound. He fails.

  His scarred, shaven face flattens against the mat. His reddened eyes are huge in his gleaming skull, and objects directly in front of him present themselves as if for inspection, demanding look at me now for the very last time.

  There is a dish of shelled walnuts. They had a walnut tree at the house in Nazareth—but at the end even memories vanish. Poc. Concentrate, look. The flesh of the walnut is the origin of life. Look at its little arms, its foreshortened legs and muscular thighs. It has such telling skin.

  How great and varied is the world of things. They too disappear. The bag of dried beans behind the door, poc, and the low table, poc, and the walnuts. Poc. Death is destroying all things on its way to claim him. He stares into the white heat of a flame that sends out halos in every direction.

  Poc.

  Blackness. Too soon. He releases his sisters’ hands; they hold on tight.

  His body has gone, his brain has gone, that’s all he can think, even though he knows the brain lives on if he can think like this. His eyes spring open, see nothing.

  Martha sobs bluntly.

  Lazarus gives up the fight. He rises above the pit, ignores pain’s message about the importance of staying alive. It doesn’t matter. Millions have come before him, and millions more will follow.

  Go on, then. Come on. He finds the courage to move towards the light, towards the darkness. What does it matter.

  Lazarus now is dead.

  0.

  He sold blemished lambs at the Temple. He cheated shepherds and made compulsive visits to a prostitute. He was insensitive and self-important, he was beloved and he was dead.

  There should be exceptions, Martha thinks, individuals with a god-given second chance. Death is unfair. She and Mary kneel over the corpse of their brother. It is laid out on the newest straw mat they could find, but Lazarus dead is not Lazarus. His face was never that still. Several hours later his beard is growing, like a recrimination.

  ‘Jesus brought two people back to life,’ Mary says. She is useless at helping with the body. ‘He can’t just leave us like this.’

  ‘Don’t, Mary. You’re making it worse.’

  ‘You’re making it worse. Try harder to believe.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In something, anything. Believe in Jesus.’ Mary sits back on her heels, eyes and fists squeezed shut. ‘I won’t accept he’s dead until he’s buried.’

  Through the first night, Martha watches the body. Lazarus doesn’t change. His fingers and lips are chill to the touch, and there is no exhalation of a departing soul. Lazarus her brother is grey and dead.

  More accurately, considering the events of four days from now, he has detached himself from his body. There are conflicting ideas about where he goes next.

  The Jewish tradition would have him in Sheol. According to the Book of Enoch (160 BCE), Sheol is guarded by six hundred and sixty-six angels who separate the righteous from the wicked. The wicked are drowned in lakes of fire. ‘You ha
ve put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep./ Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm with all your waves . . . ’ (Psalm 88).

  The pit. The blazing pain and suffocation. Sheol is recognisable as a version of hell, or the universal experience of the last gasp of life. Lazarus has been through Sheol. He is now somewhere else.

  Khalil Gibran (Lazarus and His Beloved) pictures him in a better place: ‘there is no weight there, and there is no measure’. Lazarus is in a ‘green pasture’, and by comparison the world we know is a desert.

  Others, like the philosopher-novelist Pär Lagerkvist, tell a different story. According to Lagerkvist, Lazarus will later say: ‘ “I have experienced nothing. I have merely been dead. And death is nothing.” ’

  Lagerkvist presses for a more satisfactory answer. ‘ “Nothing?”’

  ‘“No. What should it be?” ’

  The answer, for those we love, is green pastures and a land without weights and measures. Although ‘nothing’ is also a popular choice, a next-best bet, since second-best is what most of us recognise from life. Death is nothing (which may be better than hell), and therefore nothing to fear.

  However, it seems unlikely that Lazarus could have survived nothing. Nothing can come out of nothing, whereas his and other stories have come back about death. After death there is something, and this is where Lazarus is now. It is not the life we know but also it is not nothing.

  Which is of little immediate consolation to Martha.

  On the second day the growing smell of corpse overtakes the fading smell of sickness.

  ‘The time may not be right,’ Mary says. ‘Jesus must have a reason.’

  Martha slaps her face. Mary puts her hand to her cheek. Outside, the wailers wail.

  0.

  On the second evening is the funeral procession. Lazarus is lifted onto a litter called a dargash, and his body is carried head-high as far as the tomb. He is placed carefully in the upper chamber, and left with his sisters who will prepare him for burial.

  It is a Thursday.

  Eight days from now, the burial of Jesus will follow a similar basic procedure, and will require the same extravagance of spices: ‘a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’s body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs’ (John 19:39–40).

  Martha first washes the body. Her brother has lost his soul. He is soulless, stiffened meat and cold bones, and Martha bites her lips as she completes the ritual practices not reported in the later burial of Jesus. She binds shut her brother’s jaw, tying it closed with a strip of linen wrapped several times round his head. She binds his bloodless lips, the texture of overboiled fish.

  ‘Mary, do something useful. Mix the spices, prepare the linen, anything.’

  Mary kneels and prays. There is no money for burial clothes, so Martha is using the betrothal gown. She rips it into strips, one long tear after another. She has spent the last of their savings on the wailers and the dargash and the spices, more myrrh than aloe because myrrh is slightly cheaper.

  ‘We have a flask of nard left over,’ Mary says. ‘We could add that to the bandages.’

  ‘It’s worth three hundred shekels.’

  Mary’s lip quivers. Martha looks up from wrapping her brother’s fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hit you. I’m sorry.’

  They work together, soaking strips of linen in the spices mixed with oil. Then they pack the remaining myrrh and aloe against the body and between each new strip of cloth. Seventy-five pounds is a huge amount of spice. Lazarus’s body will not smell, except of myrrh and aloes, for a very long time.

  They arrange his arms down the sides of his body, and bind them tightly. Mary shies away from strapping his knees, his ankles: it is too final a gesture, too utterly hopeless. Besides, they’ve run out of linen.

  When they can do no more, the sisters lift the body between them. Lazarus is almost weightless, hollowed out by disease. They carry him down to the lower tomb; fetch lamps, surround their brother with light. Their fingers touch. They leave while the flames are bright.

  Outside, in the flat shock of daylight, they turn and shield their eyes for the end. Absalom and Faruq seal the tomb, rolling a huge fitted rock across the entrance.

  Lazarus is buried.

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  He could be trapped inside his body. In the search for Lazarus there are those who follow him into the earth, attentive for signs of life.

  For Norman Mailer in The Gospel According to the Son (1997), death is a place where maggots speak: ‘ “Oh Yeshua,” said Lazarus, “small creatures speak to me, and they say, ‘You are not our master, Lazarus, but our wiping-cloth.’ Thus speak the maggots.” ’

  The authors of the medieval mystery plays seize on this same information. They too have Lazarus buried alive, and he is eloquent about his ordeal when he returns: ‘Wormes shall in you brede / As bees do in the byke, / And ees out of youre hede / Thusgate shall paddokys pyke.’

  Martha catches a sob in her throat, grabs her skirts and hurries back to the house. Something of Lazarus the man will always remain with the body.

  At the house she throws the blanket and the new straw mat outside, and burns them both. She puts the rugs and low brass tables back into position, but then can’t leave the room without making tiny adjustments. The tables aren’t quite right; nor are the rugs. She can never get the room precisely as she wants it.

  That night she sleeps a little in the darkest hours, but is woken for the third morning in a row by wailers who aren’t that good at wailing. Not enough feeling. Not even close.

  Mary does what she can. She boils water and makes dough for bread, but forgets she has to cover it. Their father is dead and their mother is dead and now both their brothers are dead. Experience counts for nothing—her heart is unhardened to grief.

  The sisters spend the day after the burial blaming themselves.

  Mary should have prayed harder, believed more sincerely.

  Martha should have called for the healer as soon as Lazarus fell ill. They should have tried Bethesda while he could still reach the water.

  During the third night, in the silence, Martha accepts that she’ll have to cope. Her desolation is complete.

  In the morning, Mary is beside herself with excitement. ‘Martha, wake up! Jesus is coming! They say he’s on the road. He’s almost here in Bethany.’

  Martha dresses quickly. She ties her apron and runs to the gate, her hands clenched into fists by her sides. ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died’ (John 11:21). Mary comes out of the house. She runs and falls down. ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died’ (John 11:32).

  Lazarus is dead and this is the truth in Bethany: Jesus has forsaken his friend.

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  Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” ’ (John 11:35–6).

  Jesus is weeping when he finds the tomb, weeps at the stone across the entrance.

  ‘Take away the stone’ (John 11:39).

  Which is when Martha, out of confusion or spite, mentions the smell: ‘by this time there is a bad odour, for he has been there four days’. She knows this is nonsense—she prepared the body herself—but she can’t allow Jesus to go unchallenged. He has arrived too late, and there is nothing he can usefully do.

  Jesus wept.

  Is that all?

  Martha wants more, and in this episode the Gospel of John has lost shape in the move between languages. Translation scrapes off an edge of intensity, until modern English texts have Jesus ‘deeply moved in spirit and troubled’ (John 11:33, New International Version).

  In the Greek original he is embrimomenos, he is angry. He weeps, yes, but Martha is right: weeping is not enough. He is utterly furious:

  All the blood went to his [Jesus’s] head, his eyes rolled and disappeared, only the whites remained. He bro
ught forth such a bellow you’d have thought there was a bull inside him, and we all got scared. Then suddenly while he stood there, trembling all over, he uttered a wild cry, a strange cry, something from another world. The archangels must shout in the same way when they’re angry . . . ‘Lazarus!’ he cried. ‘Come out!’

  (Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation, p. 427)

  The Greek tradition, as represented by the novelist Kazantza­­kis, preserves the emotional truth of the scene. Jesus had learned this tearful anger many years earlier from Lazarus, on the shore of the lake in Galilee. Lazarus, too, had been enraged by the harshness of the hand of god.

  At the tomb of Lazarus, Jesus weeps for his friend as his friend had wept for his brother Amos, with anger as well as pity. Jesus weeps for then and for now, for himself and for Lazarus, and for the worst which is yet to come.

  2.

  Most of the surviving evidence about Lazarus originates in this instant. The paintings and etchings, poems and plays, sculptures, operas and symphonies all unfailingly centre on the raising of Lazarus from his tomb. Unfortunately, these varied testimonies lack consistency in the detail.

  The squabbling starts with his physical condition.

  The stone slides back and Lazarus emerges into the light. His linen grave clothes are stained with aloe juice, and fluids the body releases in death. He can barely move. He falls flat on his bandaged face.

  Martha and Mary rush to unwrap him, their hands trembling against joints and muscles miraculously warm and intact. They roll him over to see his face, and Lazarus stares at the sun, his mouth unbound and agape.