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 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 that he made a journey into death and back into life – only to die again at a riper age. He has inspired numerous works of literature and art - 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, “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, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. 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 bestselling titles. But we have no record of what Lazarus experienced being revived after so long, what it would be like to undergo a reversal of decay, movement in limbs long set in rigor. 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 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. Yet we are more often stuck in the place of those onlookers who said, “Could not Jesus have kept this man from dying?” As we, as a global community, go through the extreme dislocation, disease and death wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, those words echo all the more. I need to return again and again to what I have learned about the mysterious ways of God: that God seems rarely to be in the business of prevention. God is always in the business of resurrection. This is what Jesus demonstrated that day, what the four-day wait was about.
“Unbind him and let him go” might be said of us. May we be unbound from worldly expectations and set free to trust in this God whom we cannot see, but whose power and love we have experienced. I heard in prayer today, “Trust me – and don’t take a step without me in this time.” Somehow I believe God will help us navigate this crisis and be God’s agents in redemption, in the face of unimaginable loss and suffering and fear. That is our calling as people of faith.
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. The more open we are to the impossible, the more possible it becomes every day. Choose life.
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