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 Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, 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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Column

Belief

Creed

6 January 2025

4 min read

Let 2025 be a year of cultural Christianity - celebs and all

New epiphanies challenge traditional authority.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A man in a suit stands in front of a orchestra, by a lectern, gesturing while talking.

Tom Holland.

x.com/TheRestHistory.

Monday is the Feast of the Epiphany, marking the end of the 12 days of Christmas. It’s rather good when Christmas falls on a Wednesday, so that Epiphany is on a Monday – the start of a new working week. No need to have returned from holiday during this previous week, for me at least, the only “work” I’m doing before Epiphany being the writing of this column.

Epiphany celebrated the nativity and/or baptism of the Christ historically, but in the western Church we’ve moved those festivals, not least to mark the birth of the Christ child at Christmas. The Greek root of Epiphany means “manifestation” and in popular, polytheistic religions nature is of full of local manifestations of the gods.

A deity might manifest in a divine human, a monarchical figure or a miracle worker. In ancient Greek philosophy, epiphany-religion is the foundation of a natural theology discerning these manifestations of the divine in all things, which we might call pantheism.

We’re more reticent about direct epiphanies of God in our biblical religion, but they do occur, notably for Moses in his witness of the burning bush (and thereafter in his regular audiences with the Godhead as he leads his people from Egypt).

Such manifestations invariably come by way of a promise, supremely in Christianity in the incarnation at Christmas. Our theology might hold that not until the epiphany of the Christ at the end of history can we speak of the Feast of the Epiphany in any fulfilled sense.

But there is another, more immediate side to the Epiphany. The coming of the magi – or sages – from the East to pay homage to the Christ child has long been interpreted as the manifestation of God to the Gentiles in the poverty of a Judean stable.

There is nothing actually in the scriptural story to indicate that these grandees are not Jews of the Diaspora, journeying back to their homeland to witness the Christ. But, importantly, this has come to represent the gift of a new covenant to the world, rather than the Mosaic covenant exclusive to the Jews.

And it’s with that idea that I suggest our Epiphany has very current cultural implications. The point of Epiphany is that it’s not ours, it’s everyone’s. It’s not owned here, it’s out there. It’s not multicultural, it’s transcultural, even supercultural.

So the Christian faith defies ownership, as the magi demonstrate. That’s a vital notion at a time when the phrase “cultural Christianity” has gained fresh traction. It’s customary at this point to list who most famously identifies as culturally Christian. So, briefly, here goes.

The professional atheist (he has earned a living from it) Richard Dawkins claims such status; former Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has moved from Islam to atheism to Christian faith, claiming it as a bulwark against cultures that threaten us and the historian Tom Holland has expended a substantial proportion of his scholarship demonstrating that western civilisation is built on Christian foundations. Elon Musk has chimed in as a cultural Christian. So has rocker Nick Cave. There are many more.

The response from what might be called pro-am Christians isn’t always edifying. At best, it’s condescending – these starlets really don’t get it and need to study and qualify properly as card-carrying Christians. At worst, it’s belligerent – these charlatans want the fruit from our tree, but attack its roots.

It’s fair to observe that Christianity has always been cultural, not just through its initial and expedient spread through the trade routes of the Mediterranean until its adoption under Roman emperor Constantine, but in its very genesis in Jerusalem. The insurgent Nazarene movement showed far more interest in the lived experience of the new faith than in establishing an alternative Temple authority with it.

It’s a saying misattributed to St Francis of Assisi that evangelists are to go out into the world and spread the gospel and, if we have to, to use words. It’s about actions in the Christian life, not words of intent. In that, the former US president Jimmy Carter, who has just died aged 100, is a worthy exemplar.

By contrast, we have the modern versions of the corrupt and self-serving Temple of Jerusalem in our Christian Churches. Elites who believe in a primacy of status, marching around with sticks, bear as much fruit as the withered fig tree of the gospel. More than arguably, it must be worth turning away from them and towards the cultural Christians mentioned above.

For I’m finding that I may have more in common with them than with archbishops and priests, endlessly debating how to improve their woeful their Church. This is my epiphany.