Old Lazarus was “dead as a door-nail,” as Charles Dickens would say. “There is no doubt whatever about that.”
“This must be distinctly understood,” we could continue, further quoting the Shakespeare in prose, “or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.”
That Lazarus’ “illness [was] not to end in death, but [was] for the glory of God,” may be so, as Christ himself rightly points out at the start of this week’s Gospel. (John 11:4) But our Lord himself, along with the sacred author, establish in no uncertain terms that, “Our friend Lazarus [was] asleep,” and that “while they thought that he meant ordinary sleep,” “Jesus was talking about his death.” (John 11: 11, 13) He “had already been in the tomb for four days when Jesus arrived.” (John 11:17) And so, to sum it up, one could say, quite simply, that “Lazarus has died.” (John 11:14)
He was dead as a doornail. This inspires Martha to begin professing her firm belief that “he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day,” a faith held by many Jews at that time. (See Daniel 12:2-3 and 2 Maccabees 7.) But such a resurrection does not really seem to interest Jesus very much in this scene. That kind of resurrection will be made known by the seventh of Jesus’ signs in the Gospel of John: his own Resurrection from the dead. (John 19–20) The current, sixth sign of raising Lazarus from the dead, recounted in John 11, seems intended to proclaim something else.
As Christ orders the tombstone to be raised up, and raises up his eyes, it is quite clear that Lazarus is not raised to the kind of glorified, perfected mode of living, free from physical corruption that Jesus will be raised to at his Resurrection. No, Lazarus is raised back up to mortal life, still “tied hand and foot with burial bands, and his face … wrapped in a cloth.” (John 11:44) He will eventually die again, hopefully to be raised to eternal life in the Risen Christ.
So why this dying and rising? Christ himself proclaims to Martha that, “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11:26) And yet he quite clearly allows his good friend Lazarus, who surely believed in him, to die. “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?” (John 11:37)
To the contrary, Christ not only lets him die, but he lets him die and then raises him from the dead in a way that precipitates Christ’s own death, according to John’s account. (See John 12 and following.) And this came as no surprise. Before it all unfolded, his disciples were asking Jesus, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?” (John 11:8)
For all its talk of resurrection, the scene, in fact, seems quite surrounded by death. And perhaps that is the point. There is for each of us a death (perhaps many deaths) that Christ knowingly and lovingly invites us to undergo in the very midst of this mortal existence of ours, before we ever even draw close to our definitive death and resurrection in him on the last day. Before that, Christ is “the one who is coming into the world,” to invite us to die in myriad ways, so that he can proclaim to us, as he did to Lazarus, “Untie him and let him go,” to the greater glory of God.
As we enter this fifth week of Lent, it is well worth asking ourselves: Where is it that we are still bound? Perhaps even tied hand and foot? How is it that Christ is actually asking us to die, not because he does not have the power to do something about it, but precisely because he does? Precisely because dying in and through the help of his grace is better than living apart from him? Precisely because where you are “dead because of sin … the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you”? (Romans 8:10-11)
Jesus is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), so “Let us also go to die with him” (John 11:16), that he might “open [our] graves and have [us] rise from them.” (Ezekiel 37:12) For he promises, “Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and have you rise from them, O my people!” (Ezekiel 37:13)
