So, Lazarus, that happened.

A poem that wonders how he felt about it.

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash

It’s Lent, and I’m like that, so one of my Bible-based poems is sliding in here this week. If you now need a reason to keep reading, there’s going to be a reference to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the note that follows the poem. If you still need to dip, I get it. (But I hope you stay.)

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AT THE OPENED TOMB
The Gospel According to John, Chapter 11


Spare a thought for Lazarus,
silent at the center of this story,
while his sisters reproach and weep,
while Jesus dries his eyes and preaches a prayer,
while the disciples shift their feet and watch for trouble,
while the crowd wails and gasps and screams,

spare a thought for Lazarus,
who has no lines in this drama,
who has already given his body to the earth
and his soul to what comes next,
who has never asked so far as we are told
to live longer, or again, or forever.

As he stumbles blinded from the tomb, bound
by his own stench and his own shroud,
as raw daylight pierces his eyes
and the shrieks of the living stab his ears,
as eager hands cling and tug to free him
from graveclothes and the memory of heaven,

spare a thought for Lazarus;
ask him, or ask yourself, if he would have chosen
this noisy, naked-in-public miracle over the peace
that wrapped itself around him, where he was; ask him
which is harder, to give up your life for the ones
you love, or to give up your death for them.

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[You can listen to an audio version of this poem using the little widget above the photograph.]

I wrote this poem several years ago, after hearing a sermon that framed Jesus’ raising of Lazarus as … a strategic power-play. Jesus, we were told, had been operating for some time at a distance from Jerusalem — the political and spiritual power center in his part of the world — after he’d made enemies of those who were in charge there. Coming to the home of his friends in Bethany (just a few miles from Jerusalem), and then raising Lazarus from the dead, was a way to send a message: I’m still here. I’ll be in Jerusalem again soon. You think you can stop someone who has power over death? Come try.

Okay, I thought as I listened, but is that the way Jesus would choose to “send a message,” if that was what he wanted to do? Is Jesus power-playing with his friend’s body and soul — a friend who was in no position to give or deny consent? Or is he acting in response to the grief of the bereaved, including his own grief? Is re-entry into this life supposed to be a blessing for Lazarus? I thought of folk-tales I’d read about the beloved dead being wished back to life, and how those stories usually end. And yeah, I remembered what happened to Buffy in Season 6.¹

Then I read John 11 again, and was struck by how everybody in the story has a voice and a point of view … except for Lazarus. That, I thought, deserved to be pointed out — by a poet, if not by a theologian.

So here’s the poem, offered during this profoundly mysterious season of winter edging toward spring, of Lent edging toward Holy Week and Easter, of life edging toward death edging toward new life. Whether you’re puzzling over strange stories in Scripture or watching the new grass take hold and the bare tree branches start to swell with buds, it’s a season that repays attention … not with solutions for its mysteries, but with the company of the mysteries themselves.

1. Buffy Summers, iconic teen Slayer of vampires and other supernatural evils in the eponymous TV series, died in a heroic act of world-saving at the end of Season 5. In Season 6 her friends, believing she must be trapped in hell, managed to bring her back to life … only to learn, to their horror, that they’d pulled her out of heaven and back into the brutalities of life in Sunnydale-over-the-hellmouth. Her resulting depression led to some dark choices for Buffy and those around her. And I can’t believe this is what my first Substack footnote is about.