![]() ![]() For practical reasons-autopsy, coroner’s report-seventeen days passed between the day he died and the day I saw his body. My brother was 22, and he died not by illness but by another man’s hand. And, stupid as it may be, I have begun to cry as I write this.Īs far as I know, Lazarus’s age at his first death is never revealed. And the stench of the tomb? Martha is not protecting the others from a noxious odor she is shielding herself and her sister from sensory confirmation of their brother’s death. They believe so hard that the loss hurts worse. I feel the desperation of the women who send that guilt trip of a phrase, “he whom you love,” not “he whom we love.” Had you been here, they repeat, he would not have died, an avowal of faith that I hear in a tone of fierce reproach. I, one of six sisters of the dead man, read and reread John 11 as if it were a novel redacted by a heavy-handed censor. “Sister of the dead man,” Martha is called. Lazarus is a proof of divine identity, a link in the chain of events organized by God and carried out (unwittingly) by humans, and a dress rehearsal for the greater death and resurrection soon to come. Lazarus’s resurrection also triggers the next phase of the gospel plot: it agitates the religious establishment, who worry that Jesus will accrue more and more followers, which could lead to violent suppression by the Roman authorities. In fact, I was told, Jesus deliberately waited until Lazarus had been dead long enough for decomposition to begin, so that the miracle would be all the more glorious. Jesus did raise the dead, but the raising was a means to an end, just as he said: a demonstration of godhood through the reversal of the irreversible. In church, I learned this story as a kind of literalized metaphor. ![]() As if releasing a prisoner, Jesus commands, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Presumably, they do. ![]() He wears the trappings of death: his body is wrapped in grave clothes, his feet tied, his face covered with a cloth. Then Jesus cries, “Lazarus, come out,” and “the dead man” does, despite the adjective that strands him in paradox. As Jesus weeps, the onlookers exclaim, “See how he loved him!” Some also murmur, understandably, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” When Jesus orders the stone that seals the tomb removed, Martha objects that there will be an odor “for he has been dead four days.” (In the King James Version, this is rendered as “by this time he stinketh.”) Nonetheless, the tomb is opened. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” first Martha and then Mary say. He tarries two more days, after telling his disciples that the “illness is not unto death it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it.” When they do arrive, Lazarus is dead. When Lazarus gets sick, his sisters send for Jesus, saying, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.” Love or not, Jesus does not fly to Lazarus’s side. ![]() Lazarus of Bethany was a friend of Jesus’s and brother to Mary and Martha. The raising of Lazarus appears only in the Gospel of John, just 44 brief verses. Not a surprising turn of the mind, given the years I spent in Protestant Sunday schools where miracle stories are dispensed before the Goldfish crackers and Dixie cups of juice. A few days after my youngest brother died last August, I started to think about Lazarus all the time. ![]()
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