The Gospels tell us almost nothing about Lazarus, and yet he is the centerpiece of Jesus’ most powerful and unsettling miracle. We’re told he lived in Bethany outside Jerusalem, that he and his sisters were beloved in Jesus’ inner circle. We hear he was felled by an illness and died somewhat unexpectedly, from which we might surmise that he was not old. And he made a four-day journey into death and back into life – only to die again at a riper age. He has inspired numerous works of literature and art - and yet the only scene in which he appears, he enters bound in grave cloths, four days dead:
“Jesus said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’ Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus.. cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”
We are endlessly fascinated with tales of those who have physically died and somehow been revived. Proof of Heaven, Heaven is for Real, 90 Minutes in Heaven are only a few recent bestsellers. But we have no record of Lazarus’ experience being awakened after so long, what it would be like to undergo a reversal of decay, movement in limbs long still. In that silence, Lazarus can become a universal symbol for all victims as Jesus’ command, “Unbind him, and let him go!” reverberates through the centuries, a powerful metaphor for release and new life.
Few of us have experienced being physically revived, but I suspect we have all seen life returning to people bound in one way or another, whether by poverty, addiction, crime, illness, abuse, self-destructive patterns. Tonight I saw parts of a documentary in progress, Our Little Roses, about an extraordinary orphanage for girls – the only one - in the desperately poor, crime and murder-ridden city of San Pedro Sula in Honduras. Spencer Reece, a poet and Episcopal priest, spent a year there teaching poetry and helping the girls to write. The film (which is being scored by Dar Williams, who also came to the program and played a few songs..) tells that story, and he is writing a book to accompany it. He read some excerpts. He said he’d witnessed resurrection in these girls, abandoned, sick, starving – and brought back to wholeness and strength in the community of love in the home. He experienced a profound spiritual renewal himself, coming to know Jesus in that place in a way he’d never experienced him.
Have you had a death-into-life experience? When? What was it about? Have you observed life returning to a person or thing or place? Take note of it, so you can become more aware when it’s happening to you or around you.
You know who I think had the most faith of anyone in this scene? The guys who rolled away that stone, and Lazarus, who came out when Jesus called him. Few people are so open to the impossible they are willing to go with it when it comes their way. I think the more open we are to the impossible, the more possible it becomes every day.
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