Lazarus dies and he doesn’t die. He doesn’t die and he dies.
I want to keep him alive, even at the very end, because with the Lazarus story no ending can be stated with certainty. On the frontier between life and death, in his case, all normal rules are suspended.
In his novel Behold the Man (1969), Michael Moorcock explains the resurrection of Jesus by giving him the capacity to time travel. This accounts for his adeptness at prophecy, and also for his sudden disappearance from first-century Jerusalem.
If time travel can apply to Jesus, then it may also help with Lazarus. Lazarus and Jesus are time travellers, and their portals are inside the tombs. Lazarus goes first, a detail that never changes, but one of the two friends, tragically, will not return alive.
I can be convinced by this. If there is ever time travel there will always have been time travel, and Cicero will turn out to be right: what cannot happen does not happen. Lazarus and Jesus are pioneering time-travel friends, in the early days of the science. They are far too conspicuous when they arrive in first-century Palestine, not believable as inhabitants of that particular time and place.
Their trip is a fiasco, Lazarus returning to the future with the crucified body of Jesus in his arms. Regulations are put in place to avoid repeat catastrophes of this kind, and since then those regulations have been studiously observed. Time travellers are much more discreet. Though that could always change, from one day to the next.
We need to open our eyes. Life is full of possibility.
Lazarus may never have died.
Everyone owes nature a death, and Lazarus has paid his debt. In five hundred and sixty years from now, in the year 2570 CE, Lazarus will be identified trudging across a desolate, beast-filled desert in the ruined state of Utah. This is how we find him in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). He is still wandering sixty years later (2630 CE), and rejecting the adoption of the symbol of the cross—he throws rocks at Catholic novices engaged in their Lenten fasts.
With Lazarus anything is possible, but if he were alive today we would know that as a fact. I think.
He colludes in his own second death. He accepts that he has to die twice, an anomaly that his friend Jesus learns to avoid. Lazarus trials the problem so that Jesus can know. In this sense, as in so many others, Lazarus is the teacher.
Lazarus lays down his life twice for his friend. No one else can do this but Lazarus, and genuinely there is no greater love. He is the only named friend of Jesus.
I think he lives at least another thirty years, as Church tradition indicates. He reaches a good age and he comes to know happiness, to the extent that several testimonies insist on him smiling.
And even though Jesus requires his friend to die a second death, Lazarus knows that death is not the end. There is something beyond. The second time, so as not to distract from the story of Jesus, Lazarus will die without drawing attention to himself, far from Jerusalem and Rome. He dies in Cyprus or Marseilles, generously moving aside.
Angels may carry him to heaven, where the prophet Abraham may await. He will be reunited with Eliakim and his mother Sarah and with Amos. He had not remembered that it would be like this.
He returns to what is beyond. Jesus walks forward from the shore.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Beard is the author of four novels, including The Cartoonist (Bloomsbury, 2000) and Dry Bones (Secker & Warburg, 2004), and three works of nonfiction. He is the Director of the National Academy of Writing in London. Lazarus Is Dead is his North American debut.
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