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.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Creed

Death & life

19 November 2024

5 min read

“Shortening death” sidesteps the real battle

We need to do more than protest bad deaths, we need to protest death itself, it's more than biological.

Tom Dove

Tom is a physician and completing a theology doctorate.

A hand drapes over the side of an object out of shot.

Michael Schaffler on Unsplash.

What is “death”? It’s surprising the term has received little attention in the assisted dying discussion so far, because more hangs on the answer than one might expect. At a press briefing, Kim Leadbeater MP stated that the assisted dying bill she is proposing is about “shortening death, not ending life.”

But what meaning does “death” have here?

The current bill defines neither “death” nor “dying.” Granted, it implies a biological definition. The bill speaks of administering approved substances to “cause that person’s death” and of capacity and decision-making around “ending life.” These fit the understanding of death with which the medical profession operates—death is the point in time when the combined functions required for human life cease. It is a one-time event, the end of physiology, and so is recognised by a combination of physical signs.

Death, then, is a diagnosis.

So, too, “dying”—though here the waters are murkier. Setting aside sudden deaths, medical talk of dying takes us out of binary territory. Dying speaks of a process, of the “terminal phase.” Within medicine a diagnosis of dying heralds the expectation that a person’s death will occur within hours or days. And so, the focus shifts. The task of care is no longer the coordinated work of investigation, preserving life, and treating symptoms. Now attention is on bringing relief to the process of dying.

The bill seems wise to much of this. Though definitions of death and dying are absent, the bill does define terminal illness—“an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and from which the event of death “can reasonably be expected within 6 months.” And so, it clearly distinguishes terminal illness from biological death and, implicitly, from dying.

Of course, terminal illness and biological death are related. Terminal illness is irreversible, and where terminal illness leads is death. Or, you might say, it leads to the end of life. Apart from the timescale of six months, the same may be said of ageing: ageing is irreversible, and where ageing leads is death. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment was puzzling to me. I suspect what she really meant was “shortening terminal illness.” If so, this is confusing because, within the framework of the bill, “shortening terminal illness” and “ending life” are identical. It seems she was getting at something else.

“It seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.”

Stanley Hauerwas

I suspect Kim Leadbeater was echoing a conviction at home in the Christian faith. That is, try as we might to keep death at a distance and restrict it to a faraway frontier, the life of human beings involves death. I don’t simply mean the biological death we witness—the deaths of friends, relatives, or even strangers. I mean death intrudes upon the way we experience life. Death is more than simply biological.

The fear of death belongs in this category. For some, the impending loss of relationships and joys casts a shadow over life, giving birth to apprehension. Death is not simply a factual matter but something that exerts power and influence. Or take disease and illness. Built into the notion of terminal illness is the idea that the sickness borne by a human body will ultimately bring about that body’s death. That body already speaks of its death. Death is making itself felt in advance.

And so, death is more than a biological event. Even living things can bear the marks of death.

This is no novel claim. The creation account recorded in the Bible says that in the beginning, there was good. But an intruder appears. In the wake of humanity’s choice to go its own way rather than the way of its Maker, death arrives on the scene. And death is an imposter—not simply a physiological fact at the end of the road, but a destructive and alien presence in God’s good world.

Understood in this way, death is not something that God intends humans simply submit to. Death is something to protest. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment gets at something important: this kind of death should be protested. The marks of death should not be accommodated, because they do not belong to the goodness of what God has made.

At the heart of the Christian faith is God’s own ultimate protest against the force of death. Christians celebrate that God himself came in the man Jesus to “destroy death.” This is plainly more than biological. Jesus came to free humanity from the entirety of death’s grip. Hence why, when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” he means more than endless biological existence. He means liberation from all the havoc that death brings to bear within God’s world. To the Christian imagination, the power of death must be protested because God protested it first.

The question is how to protest death. Within the framework of the bill, shortening death or terminal illness is identical with ending life. This is the only form protesting death can take.

But the Christian faith makes a far more radical claim: God alone overcame death by dying. This is the point: Jesus was the one—the only one—who emerged resurrected victor in the contest with the power of death. In seeing his death and resurrection, an unshakeable hope emerges. Death is not the victor. And this hope stands above our present experience of death—in whatever form—and, at the same time, calls us to join the protest.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: “it seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.” I have deliberately avoided discussing suffering, not least because it would take me too far afield. Yet Hauerwas has put his finger on what I’m getting at. Protesting death—in the big sense—belongs to the Christian faith. Protesting suffering and pain, economic and racial injustice, fractured relationships and broken societies, are all part of this protest. But can eliminating those who live within the shadow of death be part of this protest? I think not. The Christian faith believes there is only one who can overcome death in this way, and that is God himself—who has already done it.