Lazarus faces the sealed tomb door. The soldiers are clearing away their tools.
‘Jesus,’ Lazarus says. He clears his throat and starts again. ‘Jesus, come out.’
There is a crack in his voice, which sounds timid even to him.
‘Again,’ Mary says. ‘Face the tomb as if you mean it. He’s only been buried one night.’
‘They’ve mortared the door. I saw them do it.’
Mary tilts her head to one side. ‘Lazarus, say it properly, before it’s too late.’
Lazarus searches the cloudless sky. Nothing. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I don’t believe I can call him out.’
‘You’ve got this the wrong way round,’ Cassius says. He looks from Lazarus to Mary as if settling a dispute. ‘Lazarus isn’t at fault. It’s Jesus who can’t come back.’
‘Jesus is the son of god.’ Mary prepares to turn away. ‘I shall pray for you. I’ll pray for you both.’
‘Let her go,’ Cassius says. He takes Lazarus by the elbow. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’
4.
Inside the city walls, despite the Sabbath, Lazarus attracts attention. People shout his name, which soon adds to the numbers who follow him.
Lazarus is a lodestone for the recently bereaved, and today Jerusalem aches with unexplained grief, the feeling that those we have loved should not die. Lazarus is hope—no one is more alive than he is, and recent events have encouraged this year’s Passover pilgrims to expect a messiah. Unpredictable weather patterns, disturbances at the Temple, a nervous Roman governor: this is how the final revelation will begin.
As a religious idea, Jesus has failed. He is dead. He is therefore not the son of god and will not save Israel for god’s chosen people. He needs to be replaced.
Lazarus is soon walking at the head of a substantial crowd. In the cramped streets of Jerusalem strangers reach out to touch him. He is solid flesh. He has not abandoned them, and as faithful pilgrims all they need do is follow.
The procession continues to grow, and Cassius tells Lazarus what to say.
‘I am the way,’ Lazarus repeats what he hears whispered in his ear. ‘I am the way and the life.’
The words travel back and forth in a rapid murmur.
‘And anyone who believes in Lazarus,’ he adds, ‘shall never die.’
This is the living messiah they expect.
‘What is beyond?’ someone shouts, and without any prompting Lazarus provides the answer. Why shouldn’t he? He has lived this experience. He is the only person alive who might know.
‘There is not nothing,’ he says, or how could he be here now? ‘Believe me, I have been there, and beyond this world we know there is something without end.’
The Church of Lazarus Christ shines across the future.
The people of Judaea have a talent for belief. The feeding of a crowd of thousands with two loaves of bread and five small fish. A carpenter who can walk on water, in a storm. Why not Lazarus?
Lazarus will offer himself as a leader with experience of the mysteries of existence. He will be like Jesus, but less irresponsible. He will hesitate to recommend a diet of locusts and honey, and is unlikely to require periods of fasting in the desert. He’ll get married and live in the city, the messiah of second chances, the hope of regretted lives.
Try again. Rise up and start afresh.
Believers in Lazarus Christ may shave or not shave, circumcise their children or not. Lazarus doesn’t mind. They may choose to work or seek entertainment on the Sabbath. Veils will not be required for women, who can enter the Lazaran synagogue by the front door and learn their scriptures with the men.
As long as Lazarans respect the authority of Rome they may believe whatever they like. Let the Romans take care of today, and with the right spiritual guidance, carefully administered, Palestine can become a new Gaul, full of prosperous Roman citizens living in religiously free cities.
One of which might be named after Lazarus, or after Cassius.
Lazaran Christianity will save Jerusalem from the certain doom of failing to assimilate with Rome. It concerns itself with the next world, not this one, which belongs to the wealthy and powerful and always will.
Lazarus offers peace and stability, an invitation to embrace material comforts, and evidence for thinking most positively about death.
Everyone will be happy.
Saturday’s Lazarus procession ends not at the Temple but at the Bethesda pool. At Passover, the numbers in and around the water increase with those seeking solace after exclusion from the Temple. The ill and imperfect, the diseased and disabled gather to wash themselves clean. Lazarus recognises his earlier symptoms many times over. He sees the work of Jesus left undone.
‘Go out and do good among the people,’ Cassius says.
‘There are so many of them. Where do I start?’
Lazarus is the victim of a miracle. He has no privileged explanation, nor secret indication of what to do next. Like anyone else, he wonders what to expect of himself. He looks at his hands, his forearms. He is sadly lacking in luminosity, and this confusion is one of the reasons that the era of miracles is about to end. In future, the faithful will be asked to believe without spectacular interventions, and most believers can do this: it is part of what makes them faithful.
At the Bethesda pool, Isaiah bundles his way through the sick and lethargic towards Lazarus. He has important news about Saloma.
‘Is she worse?’
‘No.That’s just it. We think she’s getting better.’
Yanav watches from the road above the Bethesda pool. His half-blind donkey chews on roadside weeds, bags and jars sagging across its back. The dog leaps on ahead.
Yanav plans to stop for a night or two in Jericho, and then turn south along the Dead Sea to Idumea. The Idumeans are great believers in the powers of peacock feathers and astronomy.
He takes a last look at the pool below him. From a distance, Cassius has the trick of blending in, but Isaiah is easy to spot with his extravagant arm gestures, pulling in his memories, throwing out his hopes.
Yanav has done what he can for Saloma. Last night he left a new concoction with her mother, thinking it might help with the spasms. One day, demons will be as easy to cast out as stones from a shoe, but not yet.
He regrets not learning more from Jesus, but envy had made him stupid and he’d missed the public healings. At least he’d been there in Bethany for the miracle of Lazarus, and he’d memorised the words of the spell: Lazarus, come out.
He tries the three words in a different order, alters the stress and intonation. These words have power, and if he can find and control it then at some stage that knowledge will come in useful elsewhere.
‘Isn’t that right?’ Yanav says, clicking his donkey back to the road. He pulls her head round and whistles to the dog.
They’ll be all right, the three of them, because Yanav’s fame goes ahead of him. He is the healer of Lazarus, the man who came back from the dead.
5.
‘We think she’s getting better,’ Isaiah says. ‘She smiled at me.’
Lazarus spreads his arms to take in the sick and poor at the Bethesda pool. ‘One among so many.’
‘Don’t stop at Saloma,’ Cassius says. ‘Of course not. You’re needed here.’
Isaiah is planning ahead. Saloma is sitting up with bright eyes and her mouth closed. She is changing almost by the hour. To be fair, Lazarus has also changed. He squandered his money making sure he didn’t die, and is no longer the catch he was.
‘You were very sick when you made certain decisions,’ Isaiah says. ‘You came to my house to apologise, and I wouldn’t begrudge you a change of mind.’
His daughter is healing, but Isaiah has already identified more to want: a messiah will never make everyone happy, as Jesus discovered. ‘Release Saloma from her betrothal. Give her some time to concentrate on getting well.’ Also, Isaiah has seen what happens to messiahs. He doesn’t want to rush into an alliance with Lazarus, not now.
> ‘They should marry,’ Cassius interrupts. ‘Set a good example.’
‘In a perfect world,’ Isaiah says, ‘I agree. But none of the priests are going to buy lambs from a dead man, not for some time to come. That’s the reality.’
‘He has the gift of healing,’ Cassius says. ‘Saloma is recovering. What more do you want?’
Isaiah wouldn’t mind knowing the future, if Cassius is asking, and also how to measure happiness. An explanation of luck and the nature of god would be useful, and a guide to what awaits us after death. Lazarus can’t even remember whether the afterlife is good or bad, which would be valuable information to have.
‘We’re very grateful,’ Isaiah says, ‘but we also have to be careful. Look at Jesus. Healing is fine, but there are limits.’
‘Help us to organise a gathering,’ Cassius says. ‘Lazarus, what do you think?’
He thinks it is never too late to start again and he should try to do some good. Lazarus knows he didn’t heal Saloma. He didn’t even touch her, but so much depends on belief.
‘We should so something here, at the pool,’ Lazarus says. ‘I know what it means to be sick, and people will come.’
‘Excellent idea,’ Cassius says. ‘Remind people you’re alive. Unlike some others.’
‘I wish I could help,’ Isaiah says, ‘but I can’t. Not on the Sabbath.’
‘Then we’ll do it tomorrow, Sunday morning. We’ll make this a Sunday Jerusalem never forgets.’
‘Can you show me the way?’
A man with an eye infection is trying to find the edge of the pool. His trachoma is so advanced that his eyelids have swollen and turned inward, the eyelashes scratching the cornea.
‘I can tomorrow,’ Lazarus says.
‘Will you tell me when the angels pass by?’
‘Tomorrow morning. We’ll bring good news, something for everyone.’
Isaiah is impatient to get home. He wants to monitor Saloma’s recovery.
‘Lazarus has the support of Rome,’ Cassius reminds him. ‘We will look favourably on any assistance you can offer.’
‘I’ll send out Arab messengers. They’re not constrained by the Sabbath, and they’ll let everyone know.’
This is enough, and Lazarus and Cassius watch Isaiah leave. They have until tomorrow to organise a memorable event.
‘I think Jesus would have wanted this.’ Lazarus says. ‘Every time he looked up, when he was dying, his eyes searched for mine. Every time.’
Cassius nods, even though Lazarus exaggerates. Every time Jesus raised his head his eyes searched for Cassius. It was distinctly unnerving.
‘Yes. He knew you were the one. He was making you accountable, handing on the role.’
They exchange some ideas, feeling for the shape of the future.
‘It will have to be spectacular,’ Cassius says. ‘Did you ever feel you could do what he did?’
‘He was the follower, not me. We’re different, but in Nazareth I was never second-best. We need something exceptional, completely convincing.’
The Romans control the water supply to the city, and have done since they built the high-level aqueduct. By opening sluice gates elsewhere in the watercourse they control the levels in the Bethesda pool.
‘You control the water in and out?’
‘Of course we do. Jerusalem wouldn’t have clean water if it weren’t for us.’
‘So you can make the surface of the water tremble?’
‘Whenever we like, just by regulating the system.’
Lazarus laughs. He now understands why the water moves, but the precise moment can still be ordained by god, and angels may still pass by. ‘You’ve given me an idea for tomorrow,’ Lazarus says. ‘Let’s plan the biggest miracle since the day I walked from my tomb.’
They agree on the timing and the general principle. Cassius will arrange the details while Lazarus stays out of sight. The effect will be more dramatic if everyone wonders where he’s gone, and whether he’s coming back.
Cassius puts his hand on Lazarus’s arm. ‘Don’t worry about the betrothal. We can change Isaiah’s mind.’
In most fictional accounts biblical prostitutes are unhappy. They are women who have made wrong choices, or against whom circumstances have conspired. In Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) his scoundrel Christ pays for sex with a woman who has an ulcerating cancer of the breast. Christ fails to heal her.
After listening to Jesus preach, Lydia knows that life doesn’t have to be like this. There are other possibilities. It is Saturday and Jesus is dead, but from her own experience she is not appalled or especially surprised by an unhappy ending. His teachings still apply, and life will improve for those who live it well.
In Bethany, Lydia borrows the loom that belonged to Absalom’s mother. She assembles it in the empty upstairs room of the abandoned Lazarus house, and hums to herself as she slides the yarn back and forth, finishing a blanket that Mary once promised to Absalom. Mary stays in Jerusalem, because the city is where she feels she should be.
Lydia waits in Bethany.
When Lazarus was dying—and Lydia heard this from Martha, so it must be true—Lazarus had asked for her. He has a second chance, and he wouldn’t come back to life to make the same mistakes.
At some stage, and this is equally true for the historical Jesus, we must avoid a preoccupation with attempts to establish factual propositions.
The evidence about Lazarus is fragmentary, and may have been misinterpreted in the two thousand years between then and now. Textual and pictorial records can be transmitted inaccurately, or contain errors inserted by copyists.
At best, the Synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) can be regarded as conveying an oral tradition both embroidered and embellished. John, as I’ve already mentioned, is demonstrably creative in his structuring of events. So where else is there to look? How can we ever be sure?
A point of stagnation has been reached in scholarly and theological studies. A new approach is needed, and imaginative representations are an undervalued source of data. Evidence can be extrapolated through careful research, making a significant contribution to the sum of our knowledge.
With Lazarus, but also in many other fields, innovative discoveries can be made by trusting the historical human imagination. Admittedly, reconstructions have to be revised as new imaginative records become available, but biographers should stay faithful to the patterns that consistently emerge.
Jesus will soon be resurrected. Lazarus will stop smiling for the foreseeable future. These improbabilities have been documented at length, and cannot now be ignored.
It is Saturday night. Lydia is naked.
Lazarus looks ahead, feels for the shape of his destiny because any life he can imagine may be the life that comes true.
‘Will you marry me?’
Lydia detaches the half-finished blanket from the loom and lays it on the floor in the upstairs room. They have a sack of flour as a pillow. Lazarus too undresses, lies beside her, and from the darkness outside crickets provide a pulse to the warm-blooded night.
‘This house,’ Lazarus says, ‘is as empty as death.’
‘And that’s not all bad, is it?’
The information that Lazarus has struggled to communicate is now familiar, but at the time, when Lazarus brought back his lack of knowledge, it was radical and new: god is everywhere and nowhere, before and after, real and fictional, in any given case a concept that words will never capture.
‘Not the scriptures?’
‘Not even the Jewish scriptures.’
Lydia brushes the back of her hand over his growing beard, dark with specks of grey on the chin. She is close to him but distant, and T. S. Eliot salvages her attitude in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917): ‘Would it have been worthwhile’, he asks, ‘To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” – / If one settling a pillow by her head, / Should say: “That is not what
I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” ’
They stare at each other, justifying to themselves the decisions of past lives. Lazarus reaches out and they hold each other close.
A messiah should marry, Lazarus thinks, for no better reason than the greed of human love. He wants Lydia near him, all the time. ‘We’ll announce the betrothal tomorrow, at Bethesda. I’ll walk around you seven times in front of a thousand witnesses. Our lives can change.’
‘Yes,’ Lydia says, ‘they can. But you shouldn’t look too far ahead.’
She presses against him, her belly against his hip, flesh against bone. He presses back, flesh against flesh. With Lydia he is a man not a god—a consolation to them both.
‘This is not the last time,’ Lazarus says. ‘I promise.’
‘That’s all I wanted to hear.’
‘We’ll start again. Wait until tomorrow. You won’t believe your eyes.’
6.
On Sunday morning, reality asserts itself. Jesus is resurrected, and nothing is the same again.
As always, Jesus has learned from Lazarus: three days is the ideal period to stay buried. No one mentions the smell or speculates about the colour of his head, and three days fits with the prophecies in the Jewish scriptures. Jesus precludes as much doubt as he possibly can.
He also preserves his dignity. No one sees him leave the tomb, clumsy and stumbling in grave clothes. That would undermine the impact of the event. There is one further modification from the earlier resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus disappears immediately.
‘He has risen! He is not here’ (Mark 16:6). Matthew agrees, ‘He is not here; he has risen’ (28:6), while in Luke, ‘they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus’ (24:2–3). In John, Jesus tidies up and then vanishes: ‘[Peter] arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’s head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen’ (John 20:6–7).
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