We have to imagine, given the context, an immense organisational project. Everything is connected.
In the desert, many years earlier as Joseph’s cart creaked uneasily towards Egypt, the future was written. The return from Egypt, the childhood in Nazareth, the death of Amos, the break with Jesus, the resettlement with his sisters in Bethany.
At a nothing wedding in Cana, Jesus turns water into wine. Half a lifetime away, Lazarus develops a headache.
The son of god has to learn his mortality. This is the purpose of Jesus’s childhood, which introduces him through Lazarus to risk and ambition. Jesus unravels from perfection as Lazarus his friend teaches him everything he needs to know. Lazarus leads the retreat from omniscience, always going first, demonstrating the ignorance of the human condition.
Eliakim the father of Lazarus falls from the roof of the theatre in Sephoris. Lazarus doesn’t learn. He climbs an even higher building, in the rain.
Lazarus teaches Jesus how to grieve, when Amos dies. Lazarus weeps and hacks away his hair and shaves, while Jesus learns from him fear and unhappiness, vanity and denial, anger and self-pity and every mortal folly.
From Lazarus Jesus learns how to weep, and at the tomb of Lazarus he weeps.
If Lazarus doubts the existence of god, it is because someone has to show Jesus how. Jesus tries it too, during his forty days alone in the desert, and finds doubt to be a horribly authentic human experience. He doesn’t want anyone else to feel that way — it is the doubt that he has been sent to eradicate.
Jesus brings Lazarus back to life and people see and should now believe and thus the end of the story. But not even Lazarus believes, not completely. With hindsight a resurrection is so obviously not the end, just as Jesus foretells in the parable of ‘Lazarus’ and the rich man refused his entry into heaven.
Not that the experience of Lazarus is ever wasted — he has taught his friend how to die.
Human death involves resistance. Jesus must suffer. He must want not to perish.
*
Jesus is arrested by Temple guards and taken to the house of Caiaphas, where he is tried by the Sanhedrin priests for blasphemy, and found guilty. He is bound and transferred to the Praetorium, in the former palace of Herod the Great. This is life on earth reactivating after the miracle of Lazarus, as Jesus wishes to experience it.
In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), his face is already bleeding when he stands accused before Caiaphas. He has a deep cut on his cheek in the shape of a fingernail, and his right eye is swollen and closed from a welt administered somewhere along the path from Gethsemane. A thick lower lip smudges his voice as he speaks through mouthfuls of blood.
Priests knock him down. He gets back up. They spit between his eyes, into his nose. Temple guards beat him with short sticks, taking slices out of his forehead, and they hang him from a roof-beam by chains.
Then they hand him over to the Romans, who punish him for alleged sedition. In an outside courtyard, Jesus is chained to the base of a column. Two soldiers select canes with the correct amount of bend, as they would for anyone who threatened a popular uprising. They each in turn take a two-step run-up and lash Jesus forehand, backhand, forehand. They start with his back and buttocks, then move on to the backs of his thighs. Then his face. They open up wounds and then cane the open wounds.
The flagellum. In The Passion of the Christ the strands of leather have scraps of iron tied to the ends. The iron clutches into the muscle, and at each lash the whip has to be ripped clear of the body, pulling with it a scatter of flesh. The soldiers strike crossways and lengthways. They exhaust themselves and flail at his head.
Jesus collapses at the base of the pillar, and slides in his own fresh blood. This is no place for the son of god, or for not the son of god.
The soldiers reach down for him. He is below them, in the pit of a personal hell. Jesus has started to die.
‘Lazarus, wake up!’
Mary is shaking him by the shoulder. Friday morning has dawned and he shades his eyes with his hand.
‘What? What is it?’
Mary tells him everything she knows. The trial in the house of Caiaphas, the transfer to the Praetorium, the Romans, the death sentence.
‘No,’ Cassius says. He too is blinking sleep from his eyes. ‘This is wrong. I did not recommend this.’
‘We came here to save him,’ Lazarus says. He recognises instantly that his task of great importance has arrived.
‘Wait,’ Martha says. ‘Stay here. We don’t have all the facts.’
For Martha there is always danger, and Lazarus has heard and ignored her from his earliest childhood. Everything is dangerous because of death. If it weren’t for death, nothing would be frightening, or not unbearably so. Don’t go there, because you might die there. Don’t do that because you might die doing it. As if he can stay where he is and do nothing and never die.
‘You’re too late,’ Cassius says. ‘Resurrection was a step too far. Bread and loaves, yes. Walking on water, maybe. When he brought you back to life that was the blasphemy. Nobody wants to believe it, not your priests, not my superiors.’
‘So we’ll deny the resurrection,’ Lazarus says. ‘We’ll buy him some time.’
Lazarus will swear on his mother’s life they’d been planning it together for years, a plot between friends with each of them fully prepared. But that isn’t true. Poc. The truth flickers and threatens to light up. He came back to life. Jesus has divine powers.
‘There is another way,’ Cassius says. ‘Announce that you’re the messiah. You, not him. Then they might set him free.’
‘Because I came back to life? You said resurrection was unbelievable.’
‘Not necessarily. Not if you’re sensitive to the authorities. You have to trust me. That’s the only way you’re going to save him.’
‘Jesus is the messiah,’ Mary says. ‘Anything else is a lie.’
‘Where are you going? Come back,’ Cassius says. ‘Are you going to follow my plan?’
‘I’m going to save the saviour.’
The Irish poet W. B. Yeats, in his short play Calvary (1920), has Lazarus confront Jesus on the route to his execution at Golgotha. Yeats decides that this moment, of all moments, is when Lazarus should call Jesus to account.
The likelihood of this possibility depends on how close Lazarus can get to his friend. In Jerusalem, the crucifixion is Friday’s major event, a blunt demonstration of life’s talent for letting Judaea down. Miracles are followed by death. Healings and the resurrection of Lazarus and the hope of the life to come are all ended by death.
Jerusalem is livid with disappointment. People shout ‘King of the Jews’ and ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lazarus’. They mock every mistake that Jesus has made.
‘A death for a death! Jesus for Lazarus!’
To restore the order of the universe, one of the two has to die. Lazarus has understood the nature of the exchange, but his impact on what happens next will depend on his position in the crowd.
Look again at the pictures. There he is in the lower left corner of a Tintoretto, or a triptych of the Delft school. The truth survives in these records of inspiration, with a poorly shaven man conspicuous amongst the witnesses. He is trapped four or five deep in the mob, unable to approach any closer.
But Yeats is essentially correct, despite his poetic embellishment. Lazarus is involved. With a surge of self-importance, he believes that he, Lazarus of Nazareth, can justify his friendship with Jesus by saving him from crucifixion.