Or he may decide to leave Jerusalem at the suggestion of Judas Iscariot, after a discussion about the security of the upstairs room. Judas is wary of making accusations, but he suspects Mary of a loose tongue. He’d followed her to the market earlier that day, and when out buying bread she spoke with her sister Martha.
Or the reason Jesus leaves the inn is simpler still: no one can sleep through the noise of Passover celebrations rising from the room below.
There is another possibility. Jesus knows that Lazarus will set out from Bethany and make his way to the inn. Jesus always knows, and Lazarus must not become involved until the time is right. He is needed tomorrow, in the fading light, on the inevitable Hill of Skulls.
Cassius throws back the curtain covering the doorway.
‘I know he’s here.’
Absalom feels strong, less afraid of death. One week has changed everything. ‘He went back to Jerusalem.’
‘Lazarus, not Jesus. I don’t mean either of them any harm, I promise.’ Cassius holds out his arms. ‘I’m alone. I came to find Lazarus. He’s an extraordinary person who’s had an exceptional experience.’
‘You’ve got the wrong man.’
‘I don’t think I have.’
‘I think you have,’ Lazarus says. He steps into the room from the storage area where he’d tried to hide. With one foot in a wooden bucket, he’d felt absurd. Besides, Cassius was alone.
Lazarus sits down. He makes a point of looking into his bowl, pushes some bones over in search of meat.
‘Look at me sitting quietly here among friends. No thunderbolts, no lightning. Let’s not pretend. I am not the one.’
‘Humility is exactly what I’d expect. You came back from the dead.’
‘We’re glad Lazarus is with us,’ Martha says. ‘Of course we are. But we give our thanks and praise to Jesus. When you meet him, you’ll see why.’
‘I’ve met Lazarus.’
‘Yes,’ Lazarus says. ‘In the Antonia Fortress. What’s changed?’
‘I’ve changed. Your escape from the Antonia was miraculous.’
‘I’m just lucky. And you’re outnumbered. Apart from you and me everyone in this room believes in Jesus.’
‘Jesus is finished. One of the disciples betrayed him. I heard it from an informer in the Temple guards.’
He has their full attention.
‘Is that true? How can we warn him of the danger?’
‘You can’t. Not unless you know where he’s hiding.’
There is no time to lose. They leave Bethany as Jesus in Jerusalem says: ‘Take and eat; this is my body’ (Matthew 26:26).
Cassius ties up the horse. He wants to blend in, like the speculatore he is, a pedestrian like Absalom and Lydia interested only in following Martha towards Jerusalem. They’re going to save the friend of Lazarus, and Martha knows from Mary where to find him.
‘Drink from it, all of you’ (Matthew 26:27).
Lazarus keeps an eye on Cassius, and on the facts. He does seem to be acting alone but Romans can’t be trusted. Lazarus does not let Cassius out of his sight.
Martha leads them across the Kidron Stream and takes the most direct route to the inn, through the Siloam Gate. As Lazarus enters the south of the city Jesus leaves it to the east, taking the Sheep Gate for a short walk to the Garden of Gethsemane.
In the narrow alleys of the Lower City, cats fight and midnight washwater is launched from upstairs windows. Martha stops outside a popular inn, at the foot of a wooden staircase.
‘Cassius goes first,’ Lazarus says. He is learning from his mistakes—sometimes it is wiser to hang back, and to be the one who follows.
Cassius climbs the stairs, tries the handle of the door. It is locked. He puts his ear against the wood, knocks. ‘It’s Lazarus. We’ve come from Bethany. Let us in.’
A key turns in the lock. Mary opens the door.
The room itself is ‘furnished and ready’ (Mark 14:15), as famously depicted by Leonardo da Vinci in The Last Supper (1497). There are three rectangular windows in the far wall, looking out now on festive Passover lamps, and open to snatches of traditional song spilling through the night. Rectangular drapes hang from the side walls, and the ceiling is a boxed shape of beams.
‘They didn’t tell me where,’ Mary says. ‘But it’s late. I don’t expect they’ll be long.’
Mary has witnessed the covenant of the bread and wine, and it hasn’t surprised her to open the door to Martha and Lazarus. Their lives have been determined by Jesus since the day Lazarus first had a headache.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘We’ve eaten.’
Lazarus studies the long trestle table covered in a white cloth. He sticks breadcrumbs to the pads of his fingers, brushes them off and picks up a cup from the centre of the table. He peers inside. It is empty, apart from an intact fly wing in a dreg of wine. He puts the cup back down. He could be happy, if he knew what he was hoping to find.
‘What now?’ Lydia asks.
‘We wait,’ Lazarus says. ‘We have to trust, if he’s the man you think he is, that our warning will reach him in time.’
They sit down at the table, and unusually all of them are on the same side. No one feels comfortable. They stand up. Cassius hopes Lazarus is taking in the banality of the surroundings. Nothing special. Martha stacks plates.
Some time later Lazarus is sitting on the floor, his back against the wall between two of the hanging drapes. Lydia is beside him, sitting close because the space is narrow. He assumes he knows what she wants.
‘There is something,’ he says, is the most he feels he can offer. ‘There is not nothing.’
The outside of her thigh touches his.
Lazarus starts again. ‘If I could explain it, I would. It’s like you can see everything, but it isn’t seeing. Everything that has happened and everything that will happen is utterly there, but there’s no there or then and nothing is happening. I think it’s shapeless and colourless, because no shapes or colours fit what I remember about death. Although death isn’t the right word. If I try to define it I end up describing here.’
He gestures around the upstairs room at the inn. ‘It’s not like here at all.’
Dying is easy. Anyone can do it. Living is the problem—Lazarus has been brought back to life and he can’t explain himself. Luigi Pirandello (Lazarus, 1927) therefore concludes that he has nothing to say:
Dead! . . . And he doesn’t know a thing about it! Where’s he been? He ought to know . . . And he doesn’t! If he doesn’t know he’s been dead, that’s a sure sign that when we die, there’s nothing on the other side . . . Nothing at all.
Khalil Gibran reaches a different conclusion. True nothing, by its very nature, would annihilate everything inside it. He admits that Lazarus is ‘silent, silent as if the seal of death is yet upon his lips’, but the man has been dead and is now alive and Gibran can only suppose, in all honesty, ‘there is something else’. Or as Eugene O’Neill exults in Lazarus Laughed: ‘there is no death’.
What else can Lazarus say, after dying and coming back? This is what he knows as a certainty: ‘There is something beyond.’
Lydia looks at him blankly. ‘That’s not what I was going to ask.’
5.
Lazarus falls asleep, despite the imminence of significant theological events. He is not alone. That same night, the apostle John has slept at the table in The Last Supper (1447) by Andrea del Castagno, whose image predates that of da Vinci. In Gethsemane, the disciples Peter and James will fall asleep three times while Jesus is ‘deeply grieved, even to death’ (Matthew 26:38).
Sleep is a gift offered to anyone involved with Jesus at this time. Lazarus and the disciples sleep while they can, because the season of miracles is about to end.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence of a single person dying in Jerusalem between the resurrection of Lazarus and the death of Jesus. For one week the city holds its breath, and the gateway between this world and the next goes unfrequented.
By the early hours of Friday morning, however, the influence of the raising of Lazarus is fading. The gateway is about to open again, and the signal for this to happen is a betrayal in Gethsemane by a disciple for money. There will be a kiss, an ear sliced off in anger, an arrest. An unjust trial, a death. Life on earth resumes.
Lazarus startles awake. He senses a change, but Jesus is not back and he settles beside Lydia and sleeps again, dreaming of escapes across the desert. Sleep is gifted most powerfully to Lazarus; he is a friend and he has suffered and he still has much to do.
We have to imagine, given the context, an immense organisational project. Everything is connected.
In the desert, many years earlier as Joseph’s cart creaked uneasily towards Egypt, the future was written. The return from Egypt, the childhood in Nazareth, the death of Amos, the break with Jesus, the resettlement with his sisters in Bethany.
At a nothing wedding in Cana, Jesus turns water into wine. Half a lifetime away, Lazarus develops a headache.
The son of god has to learn his mortality. This is the purpose of Jesus’s childhood, which introduces him through Lazarus to risk and ambition. Jesus unravels from perfection as Lazarus his friend teaches him everything he needs to know. Lazarus leads the retreat from omniscience, always going first, demonstrating the ignorance of the human condition.
Eliakim the father of Lazarus falls from the roof of the theatre in Sephoris. Lazarus doesn’t learn. He climbs an even higher building, in the rain.
Lazarus teaches Jesus how to grieve, when Amos dies. Lazarus weeps and hacks away his hair and shaves, while Jesus learns from him fear and unhappiness, vanity and denial, anger and self-pity and every mortal folly.
From Lazarus Jesus learns how to weep, and at the tomb of Lazarus he weeps.
If Lazarus doubts the existence of god, it is because someone has to show Jesus how. Jesus tries it too, during his forty days alone in the desert, and finds doubt to be a horribly authentic human experience. He doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way—it is the doubt that he has been sent to eradicate.
Jesus brings Lazarus back to life and people see and should now believe and thus the end of the story. But not even Lazarus believes, not completely. With hindsight a resurrection is so obviously not the end, just as Jesus foretells in the parable of ‘Lazarus’ and the rich man refused his entry into heaven.
Not that the experience of Lazarus is ever wasted—he has taught his friend how to die.
Human death involves resistance. Jesus must suffer. He must want not to perish.
Jesus is arrested by Temple guards and taken to the house of Caiaphas, where he is tried by the Sanhedrin priests for blasphemy, and found guilty. He is bound and transferred to the Praetorium, in the former palace of Herod the Great. This is life on earth reactivating after the miracle of Lazarus, as Jesus wishes to experience it.
In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), his face is already bleeding when he stands accused before Caiaphas. He has a deep cut on his cheek in the shape of a fingernail, and his right eye is swollen and closed from a welt administered somewhere along the path from Gethsemane. A thick lower lip smudges his voice as he speaks through mouthfuls of blood.
Priests knock him down. He gets back up. They spit between his eyes, into his nose. Temple guards beat him with short sticks, taking slices out of his forehead, and they hang him from a roof-beam by chains.
Then they hand him over to the Romans, who punish him for alleged sedition. In an outside courtyard, Jesus is chained to the base of a column. Two soldiers select canes with the correct amount of bend, as they would for anyone who threatened a popular uprising. They each in turn take a two-step run-up and lash Jesus forehand, backhand, forehand. They start with his back and buttocks, then move on to the backs of his thighs. Then his face. They open up wounds and then cane the open wounds.
The flagellum. In The Passion of the Christ the strands of leather have scraps of iron tied to the ends. The iron clutches into the muscle, and at each lash the whip has to be ripped clear of the body, pulling with it a scatter of flesh. The soldiers strike crossways and lengthways. They exhaust themselves and flail at his head.
Jesus collapses at the base of the pillar, and slides in his own fresh blood. This is no place for the son of god, or for not the son of god.
The soldiers reach down for him. He is below them, in the pit of a personal hell. Jesus has started to die.
‘Lazarus, wake up!’
Mary is shaking him by the shoulder. Friday morning has dawned and he shades his eyes with his hand.
‘What? What is it?’
Mary tells him everything she knows. The trial in the house of Caiaphas, the transfer to the Praetorium, the Romans, the death sentence.
‘No,’ Cassius says. He too is blinking sleep from his eyes. ‘This is wrong. I did not recommend this.’
‘We came here to save him,’ Lazarus says. He recognises instantly that his task of great importance has arrived.
‘Wait,’ Martha says. ‘Stay here. We don’t have all the facts.’
For Martha there is always danger, and Lazarus has heard and ignored her from his earliest childhood. Everything is dangerous because of death. If it weren’t for death, nothing would be frightening, or not unbearably so. Don’t go there, because you might die there. Don’t do that because you might die doing it. As if he can stay where he is and do nothing and never die.
‘You’re too late,’ Cassius says. ‘Resurrection was a step too far. Bread and loaves, yes. Walking on water, maybe. When he brought you back to life that was the blasphemy. Nobody wants to believe it, not your priests, not my superiors.’
‘So we’ll deny the resurrection,’ Lazarus says. ‘We’ll buy him some time.’
Lazarus will swear on his mother’s life they’d been planning it together for years, a plot between friends with each of them fully prepared. But that isn’t true. Poc. The truth flickers and threatens to light up. He came back to life. Jesus has divine powers.
‘There is another way,’ Cassius says. ‘Announce that you’re the messiah. You, not him. Then they might set him free.’
‘Because I came back to life? You said resurrection was unbelievable.’
‘Not necessarily. Not if you’re sensitive to the authorities. You have to trust me. That’s the only way you’re going to save him.’
‘Jesus is the messiah,’ Mary says. ‘Anything else is a lie.’
‘Where are you going? Come back,’ Cassius says. ‘Are you going to follow my plan?’
‘I’m going to save the saviour.’
The Irish poet W. B. Yeats, in his short play Calvary (1920), has Lazarus confront Jesus on the route to his execution at Golgotha. Yeats decides that this moment, of all moments, is when Lazarus should call Jesus to account.
The likelihood of this possibility depends on how close Lazarus can get to his friend. In Jerusalem, the crucifixion is Friday’s major event, a blunt demonstration of life’s talent for letting Judaea down. Miracles are followed by death. Healings and the resurrection of Lazarus and the hope of the life to come are all ended by death.
Jerusalem is livid with disappointment. People shout ‘King of the Jews’ and ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lazarus’. They mock every mistake that Jesus has made.
‘A death for a death! Jesus for Lazarus!’
To restore the order of the universe, one of the two has to die. Lazarus has understood the nature of the exchange, but his impact on what happens next will depend on his position in the crowd.
Look again at the pictures. There he is in the lower left corner of a Tintoretto, or a triptych of the Delft school. The truth survives in these records of inspiration, with a poorly shaven man conspicuous amongst the witnesses. He is trapped four or five deep in the mob, unable to approach any closer.
But Yeats is essentially correct, despite his poetic embellishment. Lazarus is involved. With a surge of self-importance, he believes that he, Lazarus of Nazareth, can jus
tify his friendship with Jesus by saving him from crucifixion.
6.
The execution of Jesus, which takes place in Jerusalem at some point between 30 and 33 CE, is an accepted historical fact. It is described by Josephus (37–100 CE) in his Jewish Antiquities (18:63–4), and confirmed by the Roman writer Tacitus (56–117 CE) in the Annals (15:44). The crucifixion is mentioned by Lucian of Samosata (125–180 CE) and by the Syrian philosopher Mara Bar-Serapion (dates unknown).
It also features as a key event in the gospels of the New Testament (65–100 CE) and in every record of early Christianity. Despite this extensive coverage, however, none of the sources provides a fixed procedure for Roman crucifixions in Jerusalem. There is no precision about the exact manner in which Jesus was attached to the cross, or the shape of the cross, or whether ropes were used in addition to nails.
Archaeologically, only one relevant artefact has been recovered from crucifixions in early Palestine. In 1968 the physical anthropologist Nicu Haas recovered the remains of a crucified man from a first-century burial cave in north Jerusalem. If these remains are representative, then the evidence worth noting is a right heel bone split by a four-and-a-half inch iron spike. Nothing comparable has been found before or since.
The spike, or nail, remains in the bone because no one could pull it out. The practice at the time, or so it is widely believed, was to reuse nails, but this one has twisted at the point into a fishhook barb. The spike has gone through the bone and blunted itself against a knot in the vertical piece of wood used for the crucifixion.
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