Lazarus is Dead

by Richard Beard

  She is over to his right again. She covers half her face with her shawl, moves, slips behind a cluster of cousins.

  Sick as Lazarus is, Lydia inflames the embers of his sixteen-year-old self. She fills him with an ache that pulses from his jaw through his heart to his testicles. She is once more on his left, but he can’t call out because he’s on show under the huppah waiting for his virgin bride.

  Lydia moves, Lydia appears, Lydia disappears. She will not give him the respite he needs. She is there, and then a procession obscures her.

  It is Saloma, heavily concealed beneath robes and veils, surrounded by many aunts. By now, for Lazarus, the ceremony is literally a blur. A matchmaker paid by the day confirms the details of the marriage contract. Instead of a money gift, Lazarus symbolically offers himself as a servant to Isaiah’s family, as a provider of sacrificial lambs. Saloma will live in Bethany and be cared for by Mary and Martha.

  Lazarus has everything he planned for.

  Yet he starts to act strangely, he can’t help himself. His head jerks left and right because even with fading eyesight he’s desperate for a glimpse of Lydia. He sees her again, now to his right, and suddenly understands what she’s doing. She is circling him seven times, and the canopy above his head is a trap with no escape. He wants to lie down. The matchmaker informs him he may now hold his betrothed by the hand.

  He is sweating, aching, about to collapse. His eyes flutter upwards in his head and he reaches out his hand, his wrong hand, the one furthest from Saloma.

  ‘Martha, take me home.’

  3.

  The next day Jesus goes looking in Jerusalem for someone who is sick.

  Despite suggestions made by the disciples, no one within the city walls matches his requirements. He therefore leaves Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate, taking the Bethany road. The disciples nod wisely. The Bethesda pool, an impeccable choice. Jesus walks past the Bethesda pool. He looks set for Bethany, like most travellers who leave the city in this direction, and he is halfway there before he stops.

  He closes his eyes, and stands quite still in the middle of the road. Time passes. A slight breeze cools his brow, and moves a strand of hair—black, brown, a dirty-blond colour—there are no consistent sources. A bead of sweat defies the breeze, appears on his forehead, rolls between his eyes, down the side of his nose, is channelled forward by his flared nostrils and hangs right at the very tip.

  Jesus thumbs the sweat away. He turns round, strides through the gap made by disciples parting, and walks briskly back towards the city. He descends the steps to Bethesda.

  He is in a hurry. At the back of the upper pool, a good distance from the water’s edge, he approaches a man he’s never seen before in his life. Jesus looks down at him, lying on his mat. The man has suffered from paralysis for thirty-eight years, and he has glassy red bedsores and his limbs are wasted through lack of use. Jesus does not weep.

  He asks the man if he wants to be well (John 5:6). It seems a strange question, but malingerers do exist. If this man prefers sickness to health then Jesus can find someone somewhere else whose need may be greater. The paralysed man replies with a complaint. He has no one to help him into the healing pool, and therefore he will never be healed. At which point Jesus loses patience.

  He tells the man to pick up his mat and walk.

  The paralysed man at the Bethesda pool has been ill for a long time, much longer than Lazarus. He is surrounded by witnesses, many of whom are equally helpless. He picks up his mat and he walks away.

  In the killing business there is rarely any sense of novelty. Everyone dies the same, the good and the bad, though the resurrected might be different. They could return from the dead with unimaginable powers.

  Baruch has seen the village of Nain curl in on itself. Windows slam and doors are barred, gates get shut and locked.

  Nain is staging a funeral, for an agricultural worker with three small children. A month earlier he had grazed his elbow on the olive press. The wound had become infected, causing a fever. The young father died from blood loss after the village potter amputated his arm.

  The funeral procession shuffles slowly towards the tombs, passing the house of the widow. The mourners look straight ahead.

  Inside the house she’s shouting at her son. She doesn’t know how she’s supposed to act towards him, and her patience has its limits. Baruch waits. Later, after dark, an hour before midnight, the bolt on the door slides back. The boy pokes his head outside. He is fifteen years old and has recently been brought back to life. He is fearless.

  Baruch works up some professional distaste. Nobody comes back from the dead. They have no right. He jumps from the roof and lands silently on his feet. The boy does not look round.

  Three or four boys about the same age converge at the corner of the street. They swear on their hearts they’ll follow him to Nazareth and beyond, escaping Nain to live the life of heroes. Their born-again friend nods his head in gracious acceptance of destiny. This, it seems, is what happens to the resurrected. Ordinary life loses its everyday charm.

  The leader and his followers and the Sicarii assassin leave the village. They walk in the dark for an hour, then stop in the woods at the foot of Mount Deborah. The boys make a fire beneath the trees and when the son of the widow of Nain lies down, his disciples also lie down to sleep. They do whatever he does, because they too would rather not die.

  Baruch waits until the night is calm, and then some more until the fire goes cold. The boy does not glow. There is no protective shield visible around his sleeping body. Baruch is behind a tree, in the clearing, kneeling beside the head of the son of the widow of Nain who is growing his first moustache. On his chin individual hairs are visible.

  The wind moves branches in the pines, and Baruch is alert to every nuance of the night. He senses no divine force poised to resist him, not even a providential moon to betray his light-footed presence.

  He reaches for his dagger. The night air does not prevent him. A viper slides along the track. The dagger slips in Baruch’s hand. The boy wakes. Baruch catches the dagger and kneels on his victim’s chest, his free hand clamping tight to the boy’s mouth.

  Baruch sees it in the eyes—the boy does not want to die, not again, not yet. This is a death like any other. Baruch jams the dagger in through the stomach and up beneath the ribs, his other hand blocking the boy’s airways. He leans close to ensure his voice is the last sound the boy will hear on earth.

  ‘God’s wrath is coming,’ Baruch whispers. ‘Here is god’s wrath, today.’

  The body convulses. Baruch lies over him until the spasms subside and the body is still. His disappointment is complete. Nothing ever changes.

  Baruch retrieves his knife and cleans it on the boy’s clothes. Then he scoops a pile of ash from the edge of the firepit and rinses his hands. He smears the blood-dampened ash over his forehead and cheeks, into his beard and over his ears and neck.

  The darkness and the shadows reclaim him.

  At the Bethesda pool, just outside the city walls, a paralysed man has picked up his mat and walked. Despite the number of witnesses, the city of Jerusalem continues about its business. The Temple is unruffled and Romans patrol their watches; there is no recorded impact on daily life and Jesus goes home to the Galilee.

  He has fallen short where it matters, in Jerusalem, where to make an impression he’ll need more than a simple healing.

  Cassius is satisfied, up to a point. He has kept the two friends apart, forcing Jesus to settle for a smaller event than whatever they’d originally planned. There is no evidence that the Bethesda miracle is followed by any kind of popular acclamation. The Sanhedrin are indignant because the miracle happens on the Sabbath, otherwise nothing.

  Nobody is overwhelmed. Jesus hasn’t persuaded either the Sanhedrin or the general public to back him, and Cassius is beginning to doubt his qualifications as a client messiah. He needs a messiah who can mobilise support and change attitudes, not a provincial impostor maddened by the d
esert, beguiled by daydreams and the promise of heavenly reward.

  Jesus can’t even help his friends.

  Everywhere, it seems, Jesus and his believers are in retreat. In Galilee Jairus changes his story: his daughter did not die and come back to life. She was asleep, then she woke. Her father swears that this is so.

  In Nain, the son of the widow is found stabbed to death in a wood.

  2.

  During his ministry Jesus makes one public pronouncement about Lazarus. The message is encoded, and it confounds a Roman speculatore as completely as scholars down the centuries.

  This is Roger Hahn from The Voice, an internet source of bible commentary: ‘Lazarus is the name applied to the poor beggar in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31. However, there appears to be no connection between the literary figure in the parable and the brother of Mary and Martha.’

  There are many observers, even within the Church, who prefer to deny the reach of Lazarus, and his unique ability to discomfort Jesus. They don’t want Lazarus to be fully alive before he dies, because this can distract from what others see as the more important resurrection. Look. It’s obvious.

  ‘At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores’ (Luke 16:20–21).

  Jesus rarely names the characters in his parables. Here he makes an exception, and chooses the name of his only identified friend. This Lazarus, too, the one in the parable, is sick and dying. Coincidence? Remember that a parable is fiction, and Jesus can determine every element in the story.

  ‘Lazarus’ is not a name picked at random, the first that enters his head. It is chosen for a reason. Think it through, analyse the coincidence as Cassius does. He is paid to find connections: that’s how he understands the world, and how Rome keeps control of an empire.

  In Bethany, at precisely the moment the paralysed man picks up his mat and walks, the smallpox enters its second phase.

  There is nothing Lazarus can do. The Variola virus in his mouth and throat spreads to small blood vessels inside the skin. A low-level papular rash moves upwards to his forehead, where each pap grows into a raised blister, round, firm to the touch, but also deeply embedded. The blisters move to his upper arms, his upper legs, and proliferate across his trunk, front and back. The pustules begin to leak.

  Lazarus is tired, and he swallows a plug of vomit. He plucks at his clothes to ease the itching.

  ‘You should be angry,’ Yanav says. ‘Furious. Let bad luck fill you with rage. Rage can help.’

  No sense of injustice can stall the emerging smallpox, nor the consumptive cough nor the floods of nausea. Lazarus aims at defiance, but is unsettled by sweats and aches and insomnia, and several times comes close to a malarial coma. Yanav pulls him back with large draughts of water, a treatment he’d learned in Babylon.

  During the day Lazarus sits slumped inside the house, out of sight of the village, occasionally helped to the latrine. His urine is pink with blood, and he feels as if insects are breeding in his eyes.

  When he does sleep, for however short a time, his eyes glue closed.

  1.

  ‘The time came when the beggar died.’

  In the parable, angels carry poor, diseased Lazarus to heaven, while the rich man named Dives dies and goes to hell. The prophet Abraham appears to Dives and explains the balance of the afterlife: ‘Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.’

  While Jesus is telling this parable, Lazarus is in daily agony in Bethany, for reasons no one understands. Jesus is both warning and consoling him: you will suffer and you will die but everything, I promise you, will turn out fine. Trust me. Believe in me.

  Jesus in his turn has to trust that his words will reach Lazarus by the same channels as his miracles, by hearsay and messenger. He can’t contact Lazarus directly because the seventh miracle, the raising of Lazarus, has to have maximum impact. Only then will all eyes turn on Jesus when he enters Jerusalem for the final time. To achieve the necessary element of surprise, there can be no suggestion of advance collusion between the two former friends.

  Jesus breaks the spirit of this agreement. He can’t resist reaching out to reassure his friend, for in the parable the rich man begs Abraham to send the dead Lazarus to his living brothers, as ultimate proof that divine power is real.

  ‘Abraham replied: “They have Moses and the prophets, let them listen to them.”

  ‘ “No, father Abraham,” he said, “but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.”

  ‘He said to him, “If they do not listen to Moses the Prophet, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead”’ (Luke 16:29–31).

  Jesus is questioning the Lazarus project. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. He feels the horror of making Lazarus, his friend, suffer. Especially as he knows in advance that resurrection has a limited effect—he wouldn’t be divine if he didn’t. Are miracles worth it?

  This is the question the parable asks. Presumably they are, if the aim is to create stories that last.

  4.

  4.

  Isaiah brings the news to Bethany in person, not the parable of Lazarus, but something stranger still. It sounds absurd, and Isaiah doesn’t expect anyone to believe it, but in Galilee Jesus has supposedly fed five thousand people with some bread and a couple of fish.

  By now, for Lazarus, the pattern is established. Jesus performs a miracle, Lazarus moves closer to death.

  Malarial sporozoites take advantage of the feeding of the five thousand, the fourth sign as recorded in the Gospel of John. They unclench from their long wait and invade the liver, where they breed into merozoites that rupture their host cells and escape to cause havoc in the bloodstream. Lazarus has a recurrent fever, and each wave of nausea corresponds to a new cycle of parasites breaking free.

  The smallpox pustules, after bursting, deflate and dry up, forming a crust of scabs. Lazarus develops complications. The smallpox becomes haemorrhagic, and in places the internal bleeding makes his skin look charred, as if he’s been struck by lightning. This is the black pox. Meanwhile, the scabies mites continue to burrow and reproduce and move. They feel like worms beneath the skin, as if he’s already underground.

  From the moment of the fourth sign, when the Jesus miracles become spectacular, Lazarus is visibly destined for death. The evidence can be extrapolated from salvaged memories and insights. Thomas Hardy rhymes Lazarus with cadaverous, and the Swedish Nobel prizewinner Pär Lagerkvist, in Barabbas (1950), conveys an accurate impression of how Lazarus must have appeared to contemporary observers. His face “was sallow and seemed as hard as bone. The skin was com­pletely parched. Barabbas had never thought a face could look like that and he had never seen anything so desolate. It was like a desert.”

  Lazarus sometimes asks his sisters how he looks.

  ‘Like our brother,’ they reply. ‘Really, not so bad. Maybe a little better today.’

  Isaiah hasn’t seen Lazarus since he almost ruined the betrothal, and now the man disgusts him. He pulls out a silk handkerchief and holds it across his nose. He glances at Martha. ‘You knew I was coming. You might have cleaned him up.’

  ‘We did.’

  Martha keeps a close eye on her brother, taking what she can of him while he’s still here, overalert for any new signs of decline.

  There are many new signs of decline.

  Isaiah almost sits down, then changes his mind. He hitches up his clothes so they don’t touch the floor.

  ‘Of course, this latest miracle never happened,’ he says.

  He repositions the leather phylactery strapped to his upper arm (‘His kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end’ Daniel 6:26).

  ‘There are five thousand people who believe it did,’ Mary interrupts.

  ‘And thousands who weren’t there who don’t.’

  Isaiah hastily replaces h
is handkerchief. If Jesus intended to convince the masses, he had missed his opportunity in Jerusalem. In Galilee he could do what he liked, because up in the sticks it hardly mattered.

  ‘I notice Lazarus has stopped sending us sacrifices. Maybe you should start again. For the sake of his health.’

  ‘Money,’ Lazarus says, and Isaiah flinches. The fiend can speak. ‘Can’t afford it.’

  ‘At the Temple we could make you a loan,’ Isaiah suggests. He speaks through the forgiving silk of his handkerchief. ‘In return you might have a word with Jesus. We’re getting tired of his stories. He sets us and the Romans on edge.’

  ‘Jesus means well,’ Mary says. She will not cover her nose while Isaiah is in the house, but the smell makes it hard to breathe. ‘He has done nothing to hurt you.’

  ‘We are the keepers of the vineyard,’ Isaiah reminds her, ‘and god doesn’t like miracles. Never has. I’m surprised Jesus doesn’t know that.’

  Miracles are disruptive. When the dust settles there is always damage done—not all the hungry are fed, and not all the sick are healed. Not all the dead can rise, but Jesus doesn’t learn. He will know about the killing at Mount Deborah, but still he dupes a large crowd into believing he can change the world.

  On behalf of the Sanhedrin, Isaiah has worked out an explanation for this latest miracle, a version of the incident that has circulated ever since. If it is credible now, it would have occurred to the sceptical at the time: the people of Galilee are selfish, which accounts for this recent episode. The Judaeans and Samaritans can agree that the selfish Galileans wouldn’t have wanted to share their food. They’d have kept hidden reserves until Jesus gave out the bread and fish he’d been saving for himself and the disciples.