The Lazarus story: Covering up Jesus’ mistake?

Yesterday’s Gospel reading was the familiar tale from John 11 about the raising of Lazarus. The tale contains some big credibility holes.

We all know the story: Jesus’ good friend Lazarus gets sick. Lazarus’ sisters send word for Jesus to come. Jesus declines, saying “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.”

Jesus stays where he is for two more days, then leads his followers to Bethany. He tells them that Lazarus has already died and that he, Jesus, was going to “wake him up” (NIV). 

By the time Jesus gets to Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Lazarus’ sister Martha gently chastises Jesus for not having been there. Jesus assures her that Lazarus will be raised, and asks whether she believes in him, Jesus, which she says she does because he is the Christ, the Son of God.

But then, Jesus gets upset when he sees the grief of Lazarus’ friends and of his sister Mary. Jesus himself weeps. Some of Lazarus’ Jewish friends start to ask, why couldn’t he “who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” (NRSV).

Jesus, “the anger again welling up within him” (The Message), goes to Lazarus’ tomb. He orders the stone at the entrance to be removed. Lazarus’ sister Martha questions this, saying, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”  Jesus calls for Lazarus to come out anyway, which he does.

This account raises several questions about how much of the Lazarus story is the product of embellishment and after-the-fact story mutation. 

Jesus didn’t act like he was expecting the happy ending
he had supposedly predicted

Suppose that Jesus really did initially tell his followers he was going to stay away, so that he could later raise Lazarus for the glory of God. If Jesus actually had this kind of confidence concerning what was about to happen, there’d have been little or no reason for him later to be anguished, even angry, about Lazarus’ death.

Some might claim that Jesus’ anger was provoked by a lack of faith, first on the part of Lazarus’ sister Martha, then his sister Mary. But they had plenty of faith in Jesus, which they proclaimed in their reproach to him:  If you had just come when we asked, Lord, then our brother and your friend would still be alive.

It’s not clear Lazarus was actually dead

Was Lazarus actually dead? It’s not unheard of for seemingly-dead people to turn out to be alive after all, especially in the days long before modern medicine. Martha’s phrasing, “by this time there is a bad odor,” sounds as though she had not yet been back to the tomb but was predicting what they would encounter when they got there. (The NASB translation renders this passage “by this time there will be a stench ….”) 

It’s quite plausible that a comatose Lazarus was mistakenly buried alive; that he revived in the tomb; and that he was fortunate enough to have Jesus order the stone to be removed, allowing him to stagger out just as, coincidentally, Jesus called for him to do so.

Sadly, we’ll never know what really happened.

Another possible story line

Here’s another possible story line that seems to fit the (scant) available evidence at least as well as the conventional account.

When Jesus first heard Lazarus was ill, he misjudged the situation: He put off visiting his sick friend, mistakenly thinking he would have a couple of days in which to continue doing whatever it was he had been doing.

In hindsight, that turned out to have been an all-too-human screw-up: Lazarus died (or so everyone thought) before Jesus got to his bedside.

Jesus became angry — at himself — for having not been there for his friend. This would been a very human reaction: We’ve all known or read of adults who, after losing a parent or a friend, berated themselves for not having been there when they were needed.

The distraught Jesus, wanting to see his friend one last time, ordered the stone to be removed from the entrance of the tomb. That’s also a familiar reaction: loved ones often want a casket to be opened. 

It turned out Lazarus wasn’t dead after all.  Not unreasonably (for that era), people jumped to conclusions, believing that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead.

And over time, the story got embellished, as though Jesus had intended it to unfold that way from the start.

Lazarus was mysteriously absent from the early church

Another inconsistency in the Lazarus story is one about which I’ve written before, and from which writing I’ll steal here.

If the Gospel story about the raising of Lazarus is factual, it’s strange that we never hear of him again in the New Testament.  You’d think Lazarus would have been among the most devoted of Jesus’ followers. We’d expect Lazarus —

• to have worked with Jesus, at least in the final days of Jesus’ ministry;
• to have shared in the Last Supper;
• to have been there for his friend and savior during the agony in the Garden. 

It’s even more strange that Lazarus apparently played no role in the early life of the church that the reconstituted Twelve went on to found, even if that role were just to provide financial support. (Remember that Lazarus evidently was rich: his sister Mary poured perfume, worth a year’s wages, on Jesus’s feet; see Jn 11.2, 12.2-5; cf. also Mark 14.3.)

Maybe Lazarus did all these things.  Maybe he was right in there with the Twelve at the end of Jesus’s ministry and in the early days of the church. 

But if so, the New Testament is inexplicably silent about it.