Why we project ourselves on Lazarus

Lean into the weird around the ‘unreveal'd’.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A Vincen Van Gogh painting of Lazarus rising from his bed as his astonished sisters lean toward him.

The Raising of Lazarus (after Rembrandt).

Vincent van Gogh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tennyson's poem In Memoriam contains a section about the man Jesus famously raised from the dead, Lazarus, and in it he writes:

Behold a man raised up by Christ!

The rest remaineth unreveal'd

He told it not; or something seal'd

The lips of that Evangelist

That evangelist, St John, writes precious little about Lazarus himself. Lazarus is supposedly the main character in the story, but we see far more about his sisters Mary, and Martha, and most of all, Jesus himself. But because Lazarus is a largely anonymous figure, intriguing all sorts of people like Tennyson, we can project ourselves onto him. He emerges from the tomb with graveclothes, and it seems we don't fully see him, but we see ourselves on those graveclothes. His endless capacity to capture something of the human condition is evidenced by appearing in Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment, and Mark Twain writes about him, right through to Nick Cave and David Bowie, with a song written when he was terminally ill.

It's definitely an account that falls into the 'weird' category. Not only does Jesus raise someone from the grave, but at first his response to Lazarus' grieving sisters seems inexplicable. Regardless, Lazarus is perhaps a good match for us because of our own fears of death.

It's also why the words of comfort that Jesus offers Martha after Lazarus' death are used in Christian funerals. As a priest, as I process in with the coffin, I read:

'I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.’

Just as these words were a great comfort to Martha, these words are a huge comfort to people as they come to the funerals of their loved ones.

But just like Lazarus isn't actually the main character in this story, at someone's funeral, they are also not the main character in the story. They've died. Funerals aren't just for dead people. Funerals are for the people coming to the funeral. Because Jesus doesn't just say, 'whoever lives by believing in me will never die.' He doesn't just leave that there hanging in the air. He explicitly asks Martha the question: 'Do you believe this?' We are confronted with the same question, non-rhetorically.

Jesus is asking us to believe something quite extraordinary about the nature of life that is worth considering in the assisted dying debate: that resurrection is not pie-in-the-sky, but a quality and quantity of spiritual life that can begin today, only interrupted by physical death and the bodily resurrection. As someone who lives with disability said to me recently about the debate on assisted dying, 'I'm interested in assisted living'. We could all do with a little assistance.

Bizarrely, Jesus identifies himself as the resurrection and the life. And so even more intriguing than placing ourselves in the tomb of Lazarus, can be placing ourselves in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The anguish, desperation, exasperation of the sisters toward Jesus (helpful for us to recognise our own ability, and need, to grieve honestly) is met with not only grand declarations about Jesus' divinity, but demonstration of his humanity. Twice in this sequence we see Jesus deeply moved and troubled, most pithily and famously encapsulated in the shortest verse in the Bible: 'Jesus wept.'

His emotion here, much more raw in the Greek, is appropriate not only to Lazarus' death, but also his own death that is about to come on the cross. Amidst the compassion that drives people to different conclusions in ethical debates, it is worth us considering an even deeper compassion that drove Jesus to raise Lazarus and to go to the cross.

Although there is much in our lives and in faith which is mystery and 'unreveal'd' as Tennyson would say, our own inability to control our own lives and deaths is met by Jesus in all his humanity and divinity.

All great artists lean into - rather than avoid - the weird. They also seek to honestly address the human condition in all its suffering, mortality and hope. No wonder so many over the centuries have projected themselves and their characters onto Lazarus as his grave clothes unravel.

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Article

Assisted dying

Creed

Suffering

5 November 2024

4 min read

Assisted dying: in praise of being a burden

It's not a reason to end a life, it's the very possibility of our being human.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A younger hand holds a wrinkled older hand of someone in a bed.

A lot has been said already about assisted dying. In the raging bonfire of public discourse, there has been a lot of heat, but not a lot of light. But amid all the noise surrounding Parliament’s upcoming discussion around assisted dying, a recent conversation hosted by Prospect between Brenda Hale (former President of the Supreme Court) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) served as a reminder that we are, despite everything, still capable of having meaningful and fruitful discussion about even the most divisive of issues.

The conversation is earnest and hard-won throughout; both Hale and Williams each push and probe the other for more detail, more nuance, more outworking of implications. And yet their tenor remains respectful. There is no cheap point scoring, no trite comments or easy aphorisms. These are two people working to understand the other, in full recognition of the gravity of the topic.

One particular moment, however, was frankly spine-chilling. As the conversation progresses, Hale is asked the following: “How do you deal with the pressure questions – pressure from family or financial pressures? What safeguards can you build in?” Her response – in full, for context – is as follows:

“Well, you can build in the safeguards that the decision must be made without undue influence, coercion, duress or fraud. But in the end, it’s a matter of evidence, isn’t it? One of the things I find most difficult is that I don’t think it’s necessarily irrational for somebody to take into account the suffering their suffering is causing to the people dear to them, or the burden that looking after them is placing upon the whole community.

I wouldn’t call that “undue influence”, but it’s one of the questions I find most difficult about all of this. You know, obviously there’s duress, there’s financial abuse, there are all of those sorts of things that have got to be checked against, and there ought to be objective evidence of absence of that. But when it comes down to somebody thinking, “I don’t want to be a cause of others suffering,” that seems to me to be a reasonable thing for somebody to take into account.”

The idea that my dependency or burdensomeness might factor into decisions about whether I continue to live, seems to me to be contrary to the very notion of the Christian message. Let me explain why.

We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

We are, whether we like it or not, now rapidly approaching Christmas. At this time of year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus; the divine Son of God made flesh and born of a virgin. As the divine Son of God, Jesus lived the perfect human life of joy, grace, and faithfulness; the kind of life I can only aspire to.

Because of this, as a Christian, I look to Jesus’ perfect life of faithfulness as a model for what a truly healthy human life looks like. And I am often surprised by what I find there. For example, it turns out true human flourishing does not involve getting married, having sex, or having children; Jesus’ perfect life of flourishing featured none of these things.

But crucially, Jesus’ perfect life often involved depending upon others; upon being a burden to those around him. As an itinerant travelling teacher, Jesus relied on the financial support of his followers to make his ministry possible. He relied on being made and given food to eat, and a roof to sleep under. He was far from self-sufficient. Rather, he gladly made himself a burden to others in service of his ministry.

But more than this, we often overlook the radical significance of the Christian claim that, at Christmas, we celebrate God’s becoming a baby. For the first years of his perfect life, Jesus was entirely – entirely – dependent upon his parents for all his needs. Here we see God, in the person of Jesus, depending upon Mary and Joseph to feed him, to clothe him, to cuddle him, to clean up his sick and his excrement. This is what human flourishing looks like.

This is mirrored at his glorious death, too. Prior to his arrest, Jesus asked his friends for support; to stay awake while he prays for comfort. The Gospels go on to tell us that, having been mercilessly tortured, beaten, stripped, and interrogated, Jesus had his cross carried by a man named Simon of Cyrene. After his death, having no tomb of his own, Jesus was buried in the family tomb of his follower Joseph of Arimathea. And this, too, is what human flourishing looks like.

Throughout his entire life Jesus lived the perfect life of human joy and faithfulness. And this often involved depending upon others and being a burden to them in every way conceivable. We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

To think, then, with Baroness Hale, that my dependency and burdensomeness upon others might somehow serve to underwrite a decision to end my life, is fraught with difficulty for me as a Christian. I simply cannot reconcile her words with the life I see Jesus living in the Bible: a life of joyful, difficult burdensomeness.

There may be many other reasons why people decide they want their lives to end. But a sense of burdening others ought not to be one of them. Being a burden is not a reason to bring one’s life to an end, because it is the very possibility of our being human in the first place. To need others, to place ourselves into their care, does not make us less human, it makes us more human. And therein lies its glory.