The Gospels tell us almost nothing about Lazarus. Yet he is the centerpiece of Jesus’ most powerful and unsettling miracle. We’re told he lived near 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 innumerable works of literature and art – but in the only Gospel scene in which he appears, he enters bound in grave cloths, four days dead:
Jesus said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said, ‘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 titles. But no one tells us what Lazarus experienced being awakened after so long, what it would be like to undergo a reversal of decay, movement in limbs long still. Yet Jesus’ command, “Unbind him, and let him go!” reverberates through the centuries, a powerful metaphor for release and new life.
Few of us have experience such a physical revival, 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. A few years ago I saw parts of a documentary 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. 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.
I've seen women in prison respond to ministry like plants receiving their first water in weeks - I could almost see their spirits unfurling and growing stronger as they were told and shown their belovedness over a couple of days at Kairos.
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. Yet the more open we are to the impossible, the more possible it becomes every day.
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