Article

Creed

Death & life

Weirdness

10 January 2025

3 min read

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

Belief

Creed

Weirdness

24 June 2024

6 min read

Revival – really?

Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion?

Abigail Frymann Rouch

Abigail is a journalist and editor specialising in religious affairs and the arts.

A cross held aloft is illumminated by a shaft of light that also reveals hands raised in priase.

Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash.

Whisper it if you will, but an increasing number of observers are wondering if we are creeping towards some kind of Christian revival. High-profile public figures such as former atheist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, novelist Paul Kingsnorth, comedian Russell Brand and storyteller Martin Shaw have converted. Articles and podcasts from secular writers and thinkers extolling Christianity’s influence on Western culture, the societal benefits of faith, or a renewed appreciation of the sacred, are becoming a more common sight than those tub-thumping for atheism.

Among these thinkers is historian Tom Holland, who has argued that Western values, including secularism, socialism, feminism and human rights have their roots in a “Christian seedbed”. Some secular female writers are finding in the sexual revolution much to regret: Mary Harrington, author of Feminism against Progress, and writer Louise Perry, who penned The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, are opposed to casual sex and in favour of marriage.

Then there’s the Canadian academic and YouTube hit Jordan Peterson, currently on a speaking tour titled, “We who wrestle with God” and offering Bible-based life lessons to his hungry, mainly male, hearers. Even the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins said in a radio interview this Easter that he considers himself a cultural Christian and “I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.”

A term has been coined for someone close to Christianity but just outside it, such as Holland: “Christian-adjacent”. The broadcaster Justin Brierley has devoted a book to this apparent renewed interest, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. In it he argues the New Atheism that fed off the horror of the religious extremism behind 9/11 is “a largely spent force” that has splintered into factions. (Sunday Assembly, the gathering for non-religious people, has seen its income plummet from £267,161 in 2016 to just £28,120 in 2022. Its leaders were approached for comment.)

What does all this amount to? Are we moving beyond the secular scepticism of religion? Does anyone want to return to the judgemental, Anglo-centric Christianity of a previous age?

I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

Iain McGilchrist

The author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says of a possible religious revival: “I feel that there is [one], and I feel that there will be. And I think it's important.” Already, he says, “It's much easier to talk about religion and one's religious beliefs … than it would have been 20 years ago [and] a lot of people say that.” Some young people who are not from a religious background have surprised him by finding their way to religion.

People he knows who have turned to Christianity in mid-life have moved “to the Catholic Church, but most of them to the Orthodox Church, because they see … genuine valid, uninterrupted tradition of the divine and the sacred, of worship of it, of the sense of wonder, the sense of relative humility, not triumphant exaltation, and the sense of a shared oneness that is encaptured in these ancient rituals.”

McGilchrist believes the route of fulfilment “is oneness with nature, with the Divine and with one another,” and that rediscovering a connection to the Sacred (he refers to the Sacred or Divine rather than religion) would address other pressing issues such as the “poisoning of the oceans”, due to “a proper understanding of our position in the cosmos, not as the exploiter, but as the caretaker.”

Of his own views, he says: “I genuinely am not sure how to understand what it means to be a Christian really, but I suspect that I am one.” He stresses that he doesn’t want anyone to be put off by their preconceptions of what that might mean. “I wish to be somebody who goes, ‘But look, come with me, see this, see that. Does that speak to you?’ The whole of my writing is to help people get away from preconceptions.”

“There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.”

Andrew Brown

Mark Vernon, a psychotherapist, author and former Church of England priest, also perceives a shift in the conversation around religion, and a new sense of enquiry that did not exist 20 years ago. He believes “a mystical Christianity” would be needed to reach the many people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”.

Author of Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps, Vernon enjoys the silence of a Buddhist meeting or being out in nature on pilgrimage to holy places, “feeling different energies, different pulses, different rhythms … Being in a place where you just feel there's a different thing going on here, that can be healing. I think a lot of mental health is due to just people being trapped in very narrow worldviews.”

Dr Vernon, whose faith journey has included atheism, follows what he calls a “commodious” Christianity – “my perspective on the universal story, which I think is ultimately beyond any one expression of it – and focuses on the “Christ [that] lives within me”, in contrast to “more socially driven” or “conversion-driven” Western Christianity.

For Abby Day, Professor of Race, Faith and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, any talk of religious revival is “wishful thinking” but like Vernon she believes that if anything were to speak to the “spiritual but not religious” it would be “within them, or maybe within nature” and “non-institutional”.

Professor Day is wary of the interest in Christianity from the populist right, as seen in the European elections and US Evangelicals’ support of Trump. They “claim Christianity, but what they're claiming is a national identity, and so we're seeing Christianity be weaponised” to deliver a conservative agenda, she says.

Day, author of Why Baby Boomers Turned from Religion, takes issue with some of Holland’s arguments, saying: “The Churches have not shown themselves to be exemplary models of equality or human rights.”

Veteran religious affairs journalist Andrew Brown, co-author of That Was The Church That Was: How the Church of England lost the English people, is less hostile. He says: “There is an intellectual revival, if you like, because the complacent secularism, which culminated in people like Richard Dawkins, is obviously broke.” But he adds: “Most of the stuff that's interesting and new is coming from people who are either Christians or Christian-adjacent.” But, he adds, “It takes a long time for the ideas of the intelligentsia to filter down … “If there is to be anything like [a revival], it has to start locally, and far below the radar of news.” So, for example, what impact has 14 years of austerity had that have led to millions of people attending food banks and warm spaces in churches? (According to 2023 data from Savanta and the National Churches Trust 5 per cent of UK adults visited a church last year to access a food bank (equivalent to around 3.4 million people) and 4 per cent (2.7 million) for a warm space.) “That has to be doing something, but I don’t know what,” he laughs, adding: “There really isn’t enough decent religion reporting because journalism is in crisis.”

That puts established religion in good company. But the Churches the Boomers rejected may have become humbler during their exile, and alternatives are available that offer different emphases. Vernon notes that the Orthodoxy that has attracted Kingsnorth and Shaw – Vernon’s “favourite convert of this revival” – is comfortable with other faiths and is more about participation through liturgy than converting to safeguard your immortal soul. And one attraction of the silence Vernon enjoys is that it doesn’t give glib answers, including to the profound questions around meaning, purpose and identity that beset nation, Church and individuals alike.

Putin’s violent ambitions could yet drive people to prayer. For now, at least, the more thinkers publicly take Christianity seriously and rediscover its wonder and mystery, the fairer hearing its stories, values, social benefits and cultural legacy will receive in the rowdy market-place of ideas, offering – at the very least – the cradle agnostic a more informed choice.