Lazarus

If you go into the Ante-Chapel of New College, you will see a sculpture by Sir Jacob Epstein. It’s a statue of Lazarus. Shrouded in winding-cloths, the figure’s face is rather contorted, as if he is looking back on his grave. It’s an unsettling image. When Nikita Khruschev, the Russian leader, visited Oxford in 1956 and saw the statue, he said that it was the sort of thing that gave him nightmares. Now it is his successor, Vladimir Putin, who gives the rest of us nightmares.

In the gospel reading we have heard today, the person who takes centre stage is Mary, the sister of Lazarus. She is not to be confused with Mary Magdalen or with the woman taken in adultery. In the West, the Christian tradition has tended to conflate these three figures although it is self-evident that they are three different people.

But today I want to begin by talking about Lazarus. The story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s gospel confronts us with a fundamental difference between John’s account of the life of Jesus and the Synoptic tradition. In the Synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – the evangelists give a range of reasons for the trial of Jesus. For Mark, it is the charge of blasphemy and the hint of insurrection which accompanies the cleansing of the temple. Trouble for the chief priests, trouble for Pontius Pilate. And so we will mark the beginning of Holy Week with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, followed by the cleansing of the temple. The scene is set for conflict between Jesus and his detractors, and this is how the passion narrative unfolds.

But in John’s gospel, there is none of that. John describes a very different sequence of events. The cleansing of the temple provides not the prelude to the passion but stands right at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. If there is a prelude to the passion, then John offers us the raising of Lazarus.

Lazarus is raised from the dead and then John says this: ‘Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what he had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the council, and said, ‘What are we to do? This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.’ But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ The evangelist then adds: ‘from that day on they planned to put him to death.’

Lazarus is raised from the dead and Caiaphas prophesies that one man must die for the people. And just to reinforce the point, a few moments later, Jesus comes to the home of Lazarus, where much to the consternation of Judas, Mary anoints Jesus with a costly perfume kept ‘for the day of (his) burial’. John skilfully weaves together these stories about Lazarus, about Mary and Martha, to provide a backdrop for the unfolding of his passion narrative. John records that ‘When the great crowd of the Jews learned that he was there, they came not only because of Jesus but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. So the chief priests planned to put Lazarus to death as well, since it was on account of him that many of the Jews were deserting and were believing in Jesus.’ 

We sometimes miss the significance of John’s account here, and yet it is an insight which is captured in the Orthodox tradition. For the Eastern Orthodox, the day before Palm Sunday is often described as Lazarus Saturday. Indeed, for the entire week before Holy Week, the Church’s Liturgy makes Lazarus the centre of attention. At Vespers on Monday, we hear ‘Today the sickness of Lazarus appears to Christ as he walks on the other side of the Jordan’. On Tuesday, ‘Yesterday and today Lazarus is sick’, on Wednesday, ‘Today the dead Lazarus is being buried and his relatives weep’, on Thursday, ‘For two days now Lazarus has been dead…’, and finally, on Friday, ‘On the morrow Christ comes…. to raise the dead brother of Martha and Mary…’ 

The Russian Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, notes that the entire week is spent in the spiritual contemplation of the forthcoming encounter between Christ and Death – first in the person of His friend, Lazarus, then in Christ’s own Death…’ That is why Mary anoints Jesus for his burial in this touching story today. 

We live in a culture which is not used to speaking of death, and which is increasingly mystified by the Church’s language about death and dying. Part of the difficulty is that death has become an abstraction. Professor Sue Black, the President of St John’s College, is a forensic anthropologist. She suggests in her recent book, All That Remains: ‘in the modern world (death) has become a hostile stranger. For all the progress humanity has made, we are little closer to deciphering the complex bonds between life and death than we were hundreds of years ago. Indeed, in some respects, we are perhaps further away than ever before from understanding her. We seem to have forgotten who death is, what her purpose is, and, where our ancestors perhaps considered her a friend, we choose to treat her as an unwelcome and devilish adversary to be avoided or bested for as long as possible’ (p2). 

She speaks of the way we frequently blunt the sharp edges of death. ‘We talk about ‘losing’ someone, whisper of their ‘passing’, and, in sombre respectful tones, we commiserate with others when a loved one has ‘gone’. She asks why we use these circumlocutions, when they only serve to accentuate our denial of death. 

But the story of Lazarus, and the story of the Passion, confront us with the reality of death and dying. We are challenged to reflect on the reality of our own mortality, our own finitude. And yet, one of the characteristics of the gospel of John is that the whole narrative is suffused with the promise of the resurrection. It is not something that is just tagged on at the end of the story three days later. Everything that John writes in his gospel points to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Alexander Shmemann, that Orthodox theologian, notes that the consequence of remembering the resurrection of Lazarus as the prelude to our observance of Holy Week is that our whole observance of Holy Week is suffused with and shaped by our faith in the resurrection. With the assurance of the declaration that Jesus gives life to the dead, we are prepared to enter Holy Week. 

Jesus says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ That is the reality at the heart of the paschal mystery. And that is the hope which will give us strength to confront the deadliness of death, to comfort those who mourn, and even in the midst of our own grief, to tear away those death shrouds which so often envelop and constrain us and to discover again that life is glorious and beautiful and magnificent.