Mystery XVIII: Lazarus and the Mystery of Transformation

(Pat suggested putting the class on YouTube. Kiran said he could do it. We might consider just recording Don’s preamble.)

Jay: It has been suggested that the transformation promised in Revelation will be our return to the Oneness with god we had before the Fall. We’ve discussed the delayed timing of the Lazarus incident suggesting it was a strategic decision, in contrast to other miracles that take effect immediately.

The story has failed to enlighten some of our group. The Lazarus Life by Stephen W. Smith might help, because it focuses on the life of Lazarus rather than on Jesus’s performance of the miracle. The following is from the book’s Introduction:

I am Lazarus. And I believe you are too. His story is our story. I’d like to invite you to come with me into this story, a story that I trust you’ll come to see as your own, as I’ve come to see it as mine. It is the ongoing story of someone who is experiencing transformation. Someone who needs a miracle to be whole.

The Lazarus Life is the story of our longing for deep and lasting change. But it is more than that—much more than that. The story is an invitation to live, but this invitation will prove to be like none you’ve ever received before.

As we accept this invitation, we’ll see Lazarus getting weaker and more desperate for healing, asking us to evaluate our own spiritual condition. When all the efforts of friends and relatives fail to persuade Jesus to show up and fix the situation, we’ll be invited to explore the hidden resentments held in our own hearts about a Jesus who doesn’t always show up on time—and about our own community of well-intentioned family and friends who often fail us. When Lazarus dies and is placed in a tomb, an invitation will surface to peer into the dark places in our own lives, the dark places that keep us buried when we long for new life. When Lazarus hears a voice—not just any voice, but the voice of Jesus—we, too, can learn how to listen for that same voice today when it calls us to move forward. As Lazarus gets “unraveled” from his situation, we can become unstuck from our own, even if it’s a messy process. When Lazarus emerges from the tomb trapped in graveclothes, we’ll examine the “graveclothes” of our lives—such as self-rejection, fear, sin, guilt, blame and shame, and disappointment—that hold us back from renewed spiritual vigor. And when Lazarus steps into his new, resurrected life, we will see a hint of the life that Jesus invites us to today—the dangerous, rewarding, radical, powerful life of transformation.

The story of Lazarus is about longings and breakthroughs. It is about unmet expectations and disillusionment with God. It is about overcoming obstacles. It is about facing our disappointments so that we can move forward. It is about freedom and life. Yes—life! The life that Jesus described when He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). Maybe we’re burned out in ministry, work, family, or all of the above. Maybe we’re tired of waiting for the circumstances of our lives to change. Maybe we find ourselves buried in a tomb, overwhelmed with both past and future, yet God is calling us forth to something that “may be”—to a better life than we ever dreamed.

Looking at what Lazarus got out of the miracle of his resurrection might help us understand what the story has got for us in our own lives today. It was essentially Jesus’s last major public miracle. (There were a couple of miracles, but they were more impromptu than staged.)

Kiran: As a friend of Mary and Martha, Jesus might have been expected to rush to the side of Lazarus. As a Christian who believes that god is with me, I expect that he will be there when I need him, but I know it is not always the case. It may be that god does not see my needs as I see them; does not regard as evil what I regard as evil. God’s view of mortal death is not the same as ours. In the end, what matters is what god thinks is good for me, not what I think.

Jay: Yes, we reached that same conclusion when we discussed the Mystery of Evil.

David: To a Christian who accepts that mortal death is the essential precursor to spiritual rebirth, to be dragged back to mortality at the point of rebirth must (literally) be mortifying! Lazarus should have been furious: His spiritual rebirth was postponed and he faced the unpleasant prospect of dying a second mortal death. As he lay dying, he may well have been weak enough in his mortal state to wish to continue to live. Since the essence of Jesus’s ministry was to preach the kingdom of god, why did he not simply explain to Martha and Mary (who, after all, had faith in him) that Lazarus was better off dead than alive? Instead, he gave in to his and their emotions, and granted their wish. That’s why he was “troubled” (angry, with himself), I suspect. That serves to make me like him more—it shows his humanity rather than his divinity.

Chris: It does seem that Mary and Martha were trying to manipulate and control Jesus by appealing to his human emotions. When we try to put god inside our box, we limit him. We never seem to remember that his ways are not our ways. In trying to control distressing situations, we end up trying to control the actions of god. Perhaps in refusing to do their bidding right away, he was teaching them that lesson—that his ways were not their ways, that they could not control him.

Pat: What was Lazarus’ life like after his resurrection? One would think that having had such an experience one would consciously re-examine one’s life to determine what needed to be changed. I have been very blessed in having experienced a number of Lazarus-like events, including suffering from stomach and breast cancers and standing between the two terrorist bombs that exploded at the Boston Marathon in 2013. They gave me a renewed sense of appreciation for [indistinct] bible and an overwhelming sense of responsibility to be better than I am. I think Lazarus must have sensed something like that, and learning how he handled it might help me handle it going forward.

Jay: After going into exile for a while, to escape death at the hands of the Jewish chief priests following his resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus returned to stay with Mary (who anointed him) and Martha and Lazarus himself. The priests also wanted to kill Lazarus. So the immediate aftermath of his resurrection was not exactly a bed of roses.

Sylvester: Among the things god put in us is the desire to live. So we want life to last forever and are saddened by the prospect of its end. It is interesting that some people lead much longer lives, and/or face much gentler deaths, than others. One wonders what was running through Lazarus’ mind. I get the sense that he was relatively young, though his age is not given. I wish god were not so elusive, especially when it comes to death. We are not conscious of being born but we are (usually) conscious of dying.

Robin: The Centurion who asked Jesus to heal a sick servant had supreme faith that Jesus could do it, even from a distance; but it seems that Martha lacked that certainty in her faith. When confronted by Jesus, she said she believed in him; but immediately afterward she ran in secret to her sister Mary and lied to her that Jesus was calling for her.

David: To me, this is a major problem with scripture: When you analyze it in depth, all sorts of confusion and doubt arises to cloud what I think is essentially a simple and beautiful message. Why would he instantly heal the Centurion’s servant upon request, but not heal Lazarus upon request? People can and do—perfectly reasonably, it seems to me—read into the Centurion story that if you have enough faith in Jesus and request a miracle of him, he will of course do it! This is (again, in my view) such a false and dangerous spiritual message, and yet it is right there, in the bible! (I seem to recall that we concluded that god is not Father Christmas at the end of our long discussion about prayer.) I think all evidence throughout history shows that god simply does not perform miracles on demand. Whenever s/he appears to do so, then I am certain it is pure coincidence.

Jay: Praying for physical resurrection has dangerous spiritual implications, but I think this is not about that. I think it is about spiritual death and resurrection on the day of judgment, when the trumpet shall sound and there shall be a transformation. To many of us, death is the result of sin—of the Fall. There was no death in the Garden, but there is now; however, that will change (1 Corinthians 15:52-54):

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

The Lazarus story can be interpreted in several ways, but it may be not about physical death and separation from the earth and subsequent physical resurrection; rather, it may be about spiritual death and separation from god and spiritual resurrection. Perhaps the guiding principle in this story might be found in the resurrected life of Lazarus rather than in Jesus’s words and deeds.

Sylvester: Physical death can occur as a result of illness, accident, or malice on the part of another, or many other reasons. But spiritual death is invariably self-inflicted, and resurrection from it is only through god.

Pat: I have always thought that spiritual and physical death are unrelated to one another. One can be physically alive and spiritually dead. I believe one can be physically dead but spiritually alive. It has to do with our relationship with god. It is possible, when facing physical death, to say “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know that god loves me and it is going to be OK.”

Chris: The divine and the human views of death are different. In Lazarus, Mary and Martha take the human approach. They regard death as a preventable finality. When Jesus told Martha that Lazarus would rise again, she acknowledged that this was true in terms of the divine approach (John 11:23-24):

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha said to him, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”

Jesus was trying to get her to look at it from just this point of view, yet despite her protestation to the contrary, she then persisted in taking the human view. From the divine point of view, physical death is not final. From the human point of view, death is The End. Jesus is trying to explain this.

Robin: Jesus does seem to be trying to draw them away from the human and toward the divine perspective. They are stuck in their human grief over the physical body. In John 11:39-40, when Jesus ordered that the stone covering the opening to Lazarus’ tomb be opened, she again showed her fixation on the physical by saying to him, “Lord, by now there will be a stench; he has been dead for four days.” In his reply (verse 40), Jesus was just as adamant in maintaining the divine view: “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”

Jesus followed up by thanking god for hearing him, because it would help them to believe in him (verses 41-2):

So they took away the stone. And Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me; but because of the crowd here I have said this, that they may believe that you sent me.”

He was trying to get them to understand that he could heal the spirit, not just the flesh.

David: I’m afraid I just do not see this in the scripture. It seems pretty clear to me that he was showing them that he had the power to resurrect a dead human body physically—a miraculous, godly act indeed; one that must surely lead the onlookers to believe that god had sent him. His message to them was “I can bring people back from physical death, even after the corpse has begun to rot.” It was not: “See? I brought Lazarus back to life spiritually.” We can wishfully think into scripture all the implied spiritual messages we like, but implied messages are in our heads, not in scripture, in my opinion. The raw, intellectually unadulterated message of Lazarus is that Jesus had the power to restore mortal life to a decomposing corpse. Isn’t that powerful enough?

It was clear from our discussion last week that there are many different perspectives on the Lazarus story, and they are all interesting to me—from an intellectual perspective. Perhaps that’s the lesson for people like me: That the bible is not one-size-fits-all, but is intensely, intimately personal. I don’t know. But I do know that it is in my nature to take things at their face value. The Beatitudes are words of crystal clarity which, taken at their face value, are intuitively Pure and True, needing no intellectual contortion to make them seem so. In contrast, parables and stories like Lazarus are much murkier and more obfuscatory, therefore much more demanding of intellectual (and therefore fallible) interpretation. For that reason, they are much less valuable, spiritually, to me.

Sylvester: There is no miracle that would convince every person in the world—not even a resurrection. The Pharisees remained skeptical even after Lazarus. Even Lazarus himself must have needed some faith to believe in his own resurrection. He might have wondered if he wasn’t actually in a coma.

Robin: In verse 25-26…

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die….”

So it seems contradictory… “even if he dies” yet “will never die”… which is it?! The apparent contradiction tells me that he is speaking of two different deaths. It would be nice if this were spelled out clearly, but god seems to prefer that we study and think and pray about these things rather than just have them handed to us on a plate.

David: But in that case, we should all be clones of Robin, so that we all reach exactly the same conclusions after thinking and studying and praying. But the fact is we are not clones and we do not all draw the same conclusions from the same words in scripture. That’s the problem!

Pat: But that is a really good thing! If any one of us really understood all of god, completely, it would be terrifying. But I love the fact that the bible puts everything out, the ugly along with the beautiful. David’s multitude of sins are recorded in it. To me, the fact that truth comes in stories that are evocative rather than intellectual is extremely important spiritually. And not only do we all react differently to the stories, but we individually react differently at different times in our lives. This makes the bible a very powerful tool for living, and it is in our gathering together, our sharing of our different perspectives, our rubbing up against each other, and in all the mental and emotional machinations we go through… it is in these things that we find the Spirit.

David: That was beautifully said and I cannot disagree with it. My concern is that we can get too easily hung up on minutiae—we may miss the spiritual forest by too closely examining the physical trees at least in part because of the way the forest is presented.

Jay: Next week, we will talk about the transformation predicted by Paul in Corinthians, and its connection to Lazarus, and in particular to the stench of the corpse, the moving of the stone from the entrance to the tomb, and the unwrapping of the shroud.

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