On Palm Sunday a sceptical crowd reassembles in Bethany hoping for a glimpse of Lazarus. Lazarus, tell us if you can, what is beyond?
And how bad is it for sinners?
Around the edges of the Bethany square, Baruch the assassin slips between shadows. He watches, he waits. The crowd grows with waverers sent by the disciples from Jerusalem — if you don’t believe in Jesus then go and see for yourselves.
Resurrection is the best of miracles. Every single person in Bethany that day can think of someone dead they sincerely wish were alive. Life after death is everything, but of all the dead, they want to ask, why Lazarus? What about us, and our dead?
Baruch remembers the strangers he has killed. What would they say if they came back now? He shakes the thought from his head, and replaces it with practical calculations about when and where. Overnight, Lazarus has become as famous as Jesus. Unless he makes an elementary mistake, he will rarely be alone and vulnerable.
The Sanhedrin Council send Lazarus, escorted by guards, under orders back to his house. The priests are now free to argue amongst themselves.
‘Other than his sisters,’ Caiaphas repeats. ‘Is there anyone credible who can vouch that he died?’
‘The healer left before the end.’
‘There is nothing for us to discuss,’ someone says, in the tone of knowing best. ’Messiahs do not come from the Galilee. And Lazarus can’t have done what they say.’
‘Why should he be different from anyone else?’
Caiaphas tilts his head one way, holds it a second, then tilts it the other. He wants them to appreciate that he has considered this problem from every side, and although judgements other than his are possible, and he respects disparate views, his own opinion, on balance, is probably correct.
‘Yesterday, the Roman governor arrived in Jerusalem from Caesar Maritima. This level of excitement is not what he was hoping to find. However, we can’t dispose of both Jesus and Lazarus. That would be too much.’
‘You’re getting ahead of yourself,’ Nicodemus says. ‘We don’t have power over life and death. Only Rome has that.’
‘I know,’ Caiaphas says. ‘But apparently Lazarus has already died. This is what is being said.’
The Jewish god promises salvation through proper conduct and respect for the priesthood. After thousands of years god is unlikely to change his mind and offer salvation through a man.
‘So which one?’ he asks. With great care he pulls from inside his clothing a large silk handkerchief. ‘The raiser or the raised?’
Caiaphas looks left and right. Nicodemus knows his law. The Sanhedrin can’t sentence anyone to death, but the priests seem slow in understanding his suggestion about Lazarus. Killing a dead man is hardly a crime. He shakes out his handkerchief, and places it elaborately over his nose. He holds it in place, moving only his eyes.
Slowly at first, as if at any moment they might change their minds, the Sanhedrin priests begin to cover their noses. Not all of them, but nearly enough. Caiaphas looks at Isaiah, who returns his gaze. Caiaphas does not look away until, with obvious reluctance, Isaiah gathers up the front of his tunic, and presses it over his nose.
‘Kill him?’ someone asks.
The priests with covered noses nod their heads.
‘Kill him.’
‘Kill Lazarus.’
4
The Bethany tombs blacken the afternoon brightness like broken teeth. Every stone door has been rolled back or smashed, leaving dark arched gaps the length of the sunny escarpment.
Resurrection is a wonderful idea. Everyone agrees on that, but only Lazarus has risen up. The stench of rotting bodies settles beneath the breeze from the desert. No wonder so many people in Bethany are covering their noses.
Lazarus flattens his back against a rock. Caiaphas had explained that the Temple guards were a precaution, for his own protection. They are stationed outside his door, so they missed his escape when he jumped from the roof. He is now alone, but feels someone is watching. Lizards skit like quick beige sticks. He should turn back. He can run to the village whenever he wants.
He jogs over to his tomb, hesitates at the open entrance, peers inside.
The rear wall is dark. A hand reaches out and Lazarus leaps backwards. A beggar with no teeth hustles towards him on one knee, smiling the red of his gums, but stops at Lazarus’s footprints. He wipes up the dust and sucks his fingers.
‘Get out! Go away!’
The man bows low. He touches his forehead to the ground. Lazarus is confused, but then it comes, the edge of euphoria he’d been expecting earlier. This man is a beggar, but he knows. Lazarus is the one.
Lazarus waves his arms and shouts out loud. He aims a kick that makes the beggar scuttle out of range. He picks up a stone and throws it, because he can.
‘And don’t come back!’
Then he plunges into the coolness of the tomb, where he listens to his living heart. Even here, where no one can see him, he feels he is being watched.
The tomb is part of the Bethany tour.
Follow the signs from the bus stop, walk past the gift shops and the house that is most likely not The Home of Lazarus Martha and Mary. Keep going. Further up the hill, in the lower half of a wall on the left-hand side of the road, is the narrow entrance to the tomb. There is no wheelchair access.
In Lazarus’s time, this would have been a natural escarpment, but efforts over the centuries to keep his story alive have contributed the road and the al-Uzair mosque, built directly over the tomb. On either side of the mosque stand two churches, one Roman Catholic and the other Greek Orthodox. These additions are not relevant to the central experience.
The tomb remains a cave cut into the rock, a man-made underground space. It is one of the better tombs, with two levels, and when Mark Twain visited in 1869 he said, ‘I had rather live in it than in any house of the town.’
Lazarus paid for an upper and a lower chamber. Seven steps descend steeply to the lower section, which is grey-black with the limited light that filters down. Lazarus steadies himself with a hand against the rough-cut wall. There is a strong smell of spices, of excess aloe and myrrh.
He waits for his eyes to adjust, tries to remember the events enacted in this place. He is searching for clues. Where did he go? How did he get back?
It is the smell that tugs at his heart. He closes his eyes to capture a memory as faint as the memory of a dream, but thinking doesn’t feel as if it’s going to work. Logic isn’t the mechanism to grasp the truth of whatever happened here.
He sits on the lowest step, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his fingertips. No. Nothing.
He pinches some dirt from the floor, granulates it between his fingers. A noise. Someone has entered the upper chamber.
‘Go away! I told you not to come back!’
Lazarus fixes his eyes on the entrance above. A shadow on the step, then the shape of a man. It dips at the waist and dives straight at him.
In Bethany, the tourist trade was founded in 33 CE, on the day visitors arrived in search of Lazarus.
Yanav organises the daytrippers into an eager bustle of customers. ‘Don’t push at the back!’
This explains why Lazarus is alone and vulnerable at the tombs. Visitors to Bethany already have secondary attractions in the square, like the thrill of bartering for Lazarus’s blood.
‘Drink it as it is!’ Yanav suggests. He makes his pitch while holding a clear vial of blood to the light. ‘Or make a compress to wrap an injury. Drip it onto salt or sugar and feed it to your children! I promise you, the blood of Lazarus will keep them safe.’
Or if they can’t be tempted by blood, Yanav has a stock of recent fingernails. He can vouch that he was personally responsible for cutting a supply of hair from the head of Lazarus himself.