‘You control the water in and out?’
‘Of course we do. Jerusalem wouldn’t have clean water if it weren’t for us.’
‘So you can make the surface of the water tremble?’
‘Whenever we like, just by regulating the system.’
Lazarus laughs. He now understands why the water moves, but the precise moment can still be ordained by god, and angels may still pass by. ‘You’ve given me an idea for tomorrow,’ Lazarus says. ‘Let’s plan the biggest miracle since the day I walked from my tomb.’
They agree on the timing and the general principle. Cassius will arrange the details while Lazarus stays out of sight. The effect will be more dramatic if everyone wonders where he’s gone, and whether he’s coming back.
Cassius puts his hand on Lazarus’s arm. ‘Don’t worry about the betrothal. We can change Isaiah’s mind.’
*
In most fictional accounts biblical prostitutes are unhappy. They are women who have made wrong choices, or against whom circumstances have conspired. In Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (2010) his scoundrel Christ pays for sex with a woman who has an ulcerating cancer of the breast. Christ fails to heal her.
After listening to Jesus preach, Lydia knows that life doesn’t have to be like this. There are other possibilities. It is Saturday and Jesus is dead, but from her own experience she is not appalled or especially surprised by an unhappy ending. His teachings still apply, and life will improve for those who live it well.
In Bethany, Lydia borrows the loom that belonged to Absalom’s mother. She assembles it in the empty upstairs room of the abandoned Lazarus house, and hums to herself as she slides the yarn back and forth, finishing a blanket that Mary once promised to Absalom. Mary stays in Jerusalem, because the city is where she feels she should be.
Lydia waits in Bethany.
When Lazarus was dying — and Lydia heard this from Martha, so it must be true — Lazarus had asked for her. He has a second chance, and he wouldn’t come back to life to make the same mistakes.
At some stage, and this is equally true for the historical Jesus, we must avoid a preoccupation with attempts to establish factual propositions.
The evidence about Lazarus is fragmentary, and may have been misinterpreted in the two thousand years between then and now. Textual and pictorial records can be transmitted inaccurately, or contain errors inserted by copyists.
At best, the Synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) can be regarded as conveying an oral tradition both embroidered and embellished. John, as I’ve already mentioned, is demonstrably creative in his structuring of events. So where else is there to look? How can we ever be sure?
A point of stagnation has been reached in scholarly and theological studies. A new approach is needed, and imaginative representations are an undervalued source of data. Evidence can be extrapolated through careful research, making a significant contribution to the sum of our knowledge.
With Lazarus, but also in many other fields, innovative discoveries can be made by trusting the historical human imagination. Admittedly, reconstructions have to be revised as new imaginative records become available, but biographers should stay faithful to the patterns that consistently emerge.
Jesus will soon be resurrected. Lazarus will stop smiling for the foreseeable future. These improbabilities have been documented at length, and cannot now be ignored.
It is Saturday night. Lydia is naked.
Lazarus looks ahead, feels for the shape of his destiny because any life he can imagine may be the life that comes true.
‘Will you marry me?’
Lydia detaches the half-finished blanket from the loom and lays it on the floor in the upstairs room. They have a sack of flour as a pillow. Lazarus too undresses, lies beside her, and from the darkness outside crickets provide a pulse to the warm-blooded night.
‘This house,’ Lazarus says, ‘is as empty as death.’
‘And that’s not all bad, is it?’
The information that Lazarus has struggled to communicate is now familiar, but at the time, when Lazarus brought back his lack of knowledge, it was radical and new: god is everywhere and nowhere, before and after, real and fictional, in any given case a concept that words will never capture.
‘Not the scriptures?’
‘Not even the Jewish scriptures.’
Lydia brushes the back of her hand over his growing beard, dark with specks of grey on the chin. She is close to him but distant, and T. S. Eliot salvages her attitude in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917): ‘Would it have been worthwhile’, he asks, ‘To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” — / If one settling a pillow by her head,/Should say: “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.”’
They stare at each other, justifying to themselves the decisions of past lives. Lazarus reaches out and they hold each other close.
A messiah should marry, Lazarus thinks, for no better reason than the greed of human love. He wants Lydia near him, all the time. ‘We’ll announce the betrothal tomorrow, at Bethesda. I’ll walk around you seven times in front of a thousand witnesses. Our lives can change.’
‘Yes,’ Lydia says, ‘they can. But you shouldn’t look too far ahead.’
She presses against him, her belly against his hip, flesh against bone. He presses back, flesh against flesh. With Lydia he is a man not a god — a consolation to them both.
‘This is not the last time,’ Lazarus says. ‘I promise.’
‘That’s all I wanted to hear.’
‘We’ll start again. Wait until tomorrow. You won’t believe your eyes.’
6
On Sunday morning, reality asserts itself. Jesus is resurrected, and nothing is the same again.
As always, Jesus has learned from Lazarus: three days is the ideal period to stay buried. No one mentions the smell or speculates about the colour of his head, and three days fits with the prophecies in the Jewish scriptures. Jesus precludes as much doubt as he possibly can.
He also preserves his dignity. No one sees him leave the tomb, clumsy and stumbling in grave clothes. That would undermine the impact of the event. There is one further modification from the earlier resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus disappears immediately.
‘He has risen! He is not here’ (Mark 16: 6). Matthew agrees, ‘He is not here; he has risen’ (28: 6), while in Luke, ‘they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus’ (24: 2–3). In John, Jesus tidies up and then vanishes: ‘[Peter] arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’s head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen’ (John 20: 6–7).
In Nazareth, as a boy, Lazarus taught Jesus everything he needed to know. During his last week in Jerusalem, Jesus is still learning: life can be awkward the second time around. He exits the tomb and disappears.
In forty days from now, Jesus will ascend into heaven, his afterlife consistent with the pattern of his friendship with Lazarus. Jesus lets Lazarus go first. He pays attention. Then he does what Lazarus did, only better.
Cassius summons the soldiers charged with guarding the tomb. His lips are thin with rage but he lets them speak. Not one of them can give a reliable account of what has taken place.
In Mark, there is ‘a young man dressed in a white robe’ (Mark 16: 5) who somehow infiltrates the tomb. Cassius has the soldiers flogged. They add an angel — ‘His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow’ (Matthew 28: 3).