Learning from Lazarus in Passiontide

Sid Waddell, the late great darts’ commentator, would often remark that a return to form by a player who had been performing badly was ‘the greatest comeback since Lazarus’.

It is an indicator of the significant place enjoyed by Lazarus in the cultural imagination. Jesus’ restoring him to life is one of the key moments in St John’s gospel, equalled in popular knowledge only by Christ’s own resurrection, his walking on water, and the turning of water into wine at Cana of Galilee. Yet despite one’s relief that any of the Bible should be known beyond the immediate confines of the Church, there is nonetheless some small sense of irritation (in me, at least) that these scenes have assumed a somewhat comic quality in the public imagination, as if these most powerful signs of the glory of God succeed only in revealing the entire Christian landscape as a sorry spectacle, no more than a tale told by an idiot, and believed in by fools.

Christ ‘comes unto his own, and his own receive him not’, St John tells us at the beginning of his gospel. Or at least some receive him not. Certainly many in the rich, technological West are unable to see beyond the verifiable details of their daily lives into the tremendous and fascinating mystery of God. God’s power to bring form out of chaos and life out of death is one many ignore, preferring to rush headlong past the epicentre of reality to the excitement of the shops.

It is this unimaginable power of God that we see operating in the story of Lazarus; a power available to us also, whenever we dare to start excavating our often unimpressive dullness, and seek out glints and glimpses of the glory of God.

This is the glory of which Jesus claims to be a channel and gateway: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ It is a claim that Martha and Mary accept absolutely, not just as a bit of religious showing-off, or a baiting of the priests. Jesus is, in fact, sign-posting his own future suffering and death, and his resurrection from the dead which will reveal to the world the power of God, and God’s vindication of all that Jesus has ever said and done.

The loud voice with which he commands Lazarus to emerge from the tomb (contrasting with the silence in which his miracles are usually performed) is the same loud voice in which he cries out from the Cross in his final agonising breaths. For the life he gives back to Lazarus, and the life he longs to share with us all is the life he wins from the strong grasp of destruction, only by his own willing embrace of death.

This of course takes a courageous wrestling, between daring to do the Father’s will, and desiring that the cup of suffering should pass him by. St John’s readers are not surprised to see that Jesus shows some powerful emotions at this stage of the action: in part, fear, perhaps; undoubtedly sorrow at the death of his friend, and the grief it has caused. But the Greek of the original suggests also a touch of anger; but anger at what? At the mess made of things by a human race that was handed paradise on a plate and only had to live peaceably with God and each other to preserve it? Anger at the inescapability of death? Frustration that so many deprive themselves of eternal life simply through a stubborn refusal to ‘come in under the shadow’ of ‘the red rock’ on which the Church is built?

Well, perhaps. And perhaps the key to it all is in the story’s last two commands. Jesus tells Lazarus to ‘come out’ of the tomb, and instructs the attendants to ‘unbind’ Lazarus, to remove his burial-cloths and restore him to his family. I also hear in this a strong command to death itself, to release him from its grip.

For us as readers, we may experience these orders as challenges directed at ourselves. For we are those who must emerge from whatever dark tomb shelters us, stepping out courageously into the bright light of Christ, for renewal and transformation. We are those who must not only be loosed and liberated from whatever slows our growth in Christ. We are also summoned to be agents of Christ in the unbinding of others, so that we and they and all the earth may come to enjoy the abundant and eternal life Christ offers us; and to experience what will be, for us all, the greatest comeback since Lazarus.