This noisy, naked-in-public miracle

Another Lenten(-ish) poem about a weird Bible story

Photo by Michael Parulava on Unsplash

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This poem first appeared here around this time last spring — part of the whole Lent-going-on-Easter stream of thought that I can’t help dipping in to now and then. The poem is based on a pre-Easter story, and I’m still trying to decide whether I think that story is miraculous or really dark.

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AT THE OPENED TOMB                                                      2018
11th Chapter of the Gospel According to John 


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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Someone dear to me, who’s explored several spiritual paths over time, began coming to my friendly, happy, inclusive church a few years ago. They like the people there, they like the liturgy … until we get to the Easter season, when they tend to step out for a while. Don’t care for stories about someone rising from the dead, they told me. Too weird, too Stephen King, too transgressive of nature’s laws and of our human brains that were built to conform to those laws as well.

I get that. I get it especially when it comes to a story like the raising of Lazarus, when a dead person’s life is returned to the body they had before they died. That is transgressive, and scary as hell, and stories like that usually end in tears; hundreds of fireside folk tales and multiple episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer¹ tell us so.

What’s a story like that doing in John’s Gospel? I could go off on a long tangent here about that particular Gospel, the boundaries between truth and historicity that it constantly pushes, the point that the Lazarus story — historical or not — might be trying to make in the Gospel’s narrative … but I’d be so far out over my skis if I tried that, so I will set the question down and quietly step away. Wiser souls than I am have surely prayed and written about it already.

Here’s a question I can answer: why does that story creep me out, and the Easter story doesn’t? Because in the Easter story Jesus has moved forward, not back, into a different kind of body. The new body still looks like he used to look — sometimes, anyhow; it still remembers the ways he was wounded, and the kind of fish he likes to eat. But this new body also lives in a different relationship to time and space than his old one did. And can be here, sort of, sometimes, for a while, but really belongs in … some other Where.

And that’s weird. And, yes, scary. But for me, anyway, it’s the opposite of dark.

And you came here for a poem, not for whatever this is! What a generous soul you are to have read this far, if you did. If you didn’t read this far, well, I don’t blame you, and I hope you come back next week. I’ll probably have found something silly to write about by then.

1. Recapping my first and still best-ever Substack footnote: 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.