Howling at the grave for Lazarus

It seems strange that even as increasing attention is given to mental health and even as we invest more resources into giving voice to trauma and the treatment of pain, a pattern emerges alongside these movements which tends to avoid death and pain at all costs —which seeks to redact it from the account of the Real. This pattern can be seen when Good Friday services are reduced to being mere overtures for Easter Sunday celebrations (I remember recently attending a friend’s Good Friday service whose theme that year was “But Hold-on: Easter’s Comin!”), and where funerary rituals are increasingly recast as “celebrations of life.”

I was at one such “celebration of life” –that of a friend and fellow pastor—in which one of the eulogists declared “I know you’re still alive… I know you’re not in this grave…” even as he broke-down in tears choking-out the words “I miss you so much!” I also wept, for I missed the man too, as I still miss him. And I miss him precisely because he has died and his body has been laid in the grave. The eulogist, a beloved family member of the deceased, was not wrong for the missing, he had merely acquired a poor theology of death. His remarks demonstrate the disciplinary pressure of what Byung-Chul Han calls a “burn-out society” that simultaneously receives the mandate to “be positive” even while it encounters the inarticulable weight of loss and grief.

This friction gets further compounded with a gloss of some of the more gnostic post-evangelical truisms about the afterlife. Under this regime it seems impossible to hold the Church’s teaching about The Life Everlasting while also being real when we encounter sorrow or pain. It is to believe, in some un-iterated and subconscious way, that the Resurrection somehow eschews our share in death and pain. And this is just plain wrong.

Contrary to the contemporary problems posed by the Positivity Mandate, the Resurrection actually deepens our share in the pain of the world because the Resurrection makes pain eloquent, it gives our sorrow a voice in the symphony orchestrated by the Living God. It is precisely because of –and not in spite of— the Hope of the Gospel that pain can be made to speak.

How do we make sense of this? In what ways does the Resurrection enable –not hinder—the voice of pain in the human experience?

A cue may be taken from a troubling story in the Gospel according to St. John. When Jesus hears the news of Lazarus’ illness, he responds in hope: this is a sickness, we are told, whose end is not Death, but the glory of God (11:4). For all this hope, however, when Jesus arrives at the tomb of his beloved friend, he not only weeps (11:35) he also releases a cry of rage (once in 11:33 and again at v.38). Having spoken of the resurrection does nothing to prevent Jesus from weeping and snorting in agony before the tomb. It is with a full knowledge that Lazarus will be raised from the tomb that Christ suffers the anguish and pain at his death. This is marvelous. It is made more marvelous still by the fact that this man, this Lazarus, is not still alive in 2023. He died again. His health again wanned, and thus, it seems, he was raised to perish only to perish once more. Martha, conceivably, orchestrated his funeral twice, buried her brother twice, grieved his passing twice. For all Christ’s words of being Himself the Resurrection and the Life, it is still the final resurrection, “in the last day,” for which Martha must wait to see her brother again.

Stranger by far than the “good vibes only” sign in a culture of abundant therapeutic outlet, is the Christ who weeps at the graveside of a friend. The One who not only believes in the resurrection but who claims to be the Resurrection himself weeps and roars over Lazarus’ grave –louder, it seems, than even the collected sound of the gathered mourners. And thus, we must ask again: what is it about the Resurrection that, far from abrogating pain and passion, far from having a merely palliative application, gives pain a voice it would not otherwise have?

The story of the raising of Lazarus actually begins back in chapter ten of John’s gospel. There Jesus claims that he is the “Good Shepherd” who will not lose any that the Father has given him. The question of John eleven then is “is this true?”

Jesus arrives in Bethany too late if healing was all he intended to do. If the sheer extension of biological life was the goal of Christ’s coming, it would seem that he failed. The Lazarus who is called a “sickling” (ἀσθενῶν) in verse one, a person so consumed by their ailment that the verb takes-over the noun, had died. What is there left for Jesus to do? Jesus has promised us that “this sickness will no tend in death” but would be “for the glory of God” but, it seems, it did end in death. Is life all “being towards death” as Heidegger suggested?

To confound matters further, Christ’s arrival in Bethany instigates his death. Precisely because of what happens at Lazarus’ tomb do all the religious and political leaders finally arrive at consensus: this Jesus must die. Thus, Jesus connects his own life and death with the death and life of Lazarus. Thomas had told him, after all with little uncertainty, that if he went to Bethany he would be killed (v.16). Jesus’ arrival in Bethany confronts death itself, the death of Lazarus and the death of Christ at the hands of calumniators.

Upon arriving, Martha greets Jesus with brutal language, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died…” (v.21). She was right. This is a frustrating moment in the Gospels. They had told Jesus about the illness of his beloved friend (v.3), and he had waited to come, he had withheld action, he had allowed things to run their course.

Now as he greets the mourning family, he proclaims the Resurrection: “Your brother will rise again” (v.23). Martha dissembles with the apposite orthodox response, “I know my brother will rise again in the last day.” That is true, but Jesus seems discontent with this recitation of mere orthodoxies. He demands to see the tomb and there, like a new and better Moses, declares in language very similar to the early parts of Exodus that the Grave, like Pharaoh before it, release the one under its thrall: “Lazarus come out!” The inert body of the dead man obeys –like all of Creation obeys the speech of the Lord at Creation in Genesis.

This is no mere show of power, a display that only Life should be given voice at the table of existential value. It is, in fact, an incorporation of the experience of death and pain into the voice of redemption. It is precisely from this place of pain, and into this place of pain, that Jesus comes to give a voice. “The Christian narrative gives pain a language” as Byung-Chul Han argues, making pain eloquent and navigable. Precisely because the Gospel narrates pain before the Living God, precisely because the Father “always listens” (Jn. 11.42), pain becomes incorporated into our story and is made to sing. The groans of Jesus at the sepulcher of his beloved friend ascend to the Father like the groanings of God’s people in Egypt rose before him, a clangorous music and smoking incense.

Jesus arrives in Bethany not merely to raise Lazarus, but to weep with Lazarus’ sisters, who will one day weep again over Lazarus when he again dies and then, terribly, does not rise. Christ’s weeping, his howling rage at the barred ossuary, simultaneously gathers the sorrow over death and pain before the Living God while also proclaiming that death and pain are not the end. That “this illness does not end in death” means that it does not find its fulfillment in death. Heidegger, in this aspect at least, was not just wrong, but, in some great sense, dead wrong.

Liberated from having to be the loadstone and end-all of human experience, death and pain are now given a renewed meaning. Christ appears after his Resurrection bearing the scars of his humiliation and torture, and martyrs have long been likewise depicted emblazoned with the grotesque emblems of their suffering. Following this heuristic, Jean-Baptiste-Elie Avrillon suggested that the Gospel renders every wound a set of lips to sing a descant in the song of our life. The hope of the Resurrection, of which Lazarus’ raising was a foretaste, doesn’t mute pain and death, it sets them to music.

J.R.R. Tolkien knew this well, for when the minstrel sings of the wounds and sorrows of Frodo and Sam at the close of The Return of the King, the assembled panoply of captains and soldiers both laugh and weep, and “their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.” Pain has not been abrogated by joy, it has, rather, been conjugally yoked with it. It is in giving eloquence to suffering that it becomes the wellspring of a joyful effusiveness.

The emergent patterns of avoidance-of-death noted earlier, evidenced in the Pollyanna-styled Good Fridays and un-funerary burials, do not fully bring death and pain into the species of thing that can be given a voice. Instead, whether by palliation or manifold forms of “venting”, death and pain are rendered mute and inscrutable. The nomos of “good vibes only” leaves little room for the vast array of negative experience, by which I mean broadly those things which lay a cost upon us, things which negate something. Only the “positive” is allowed to sing. Thus, everything must be rendered as “positive” or else abandoned to the midden and merde-heap of human existence.

Often, what is called “venting” can be largely characterized as what happens when the levy of positivity breaks, unable to bear the load of the unsung negativity, and all that was not narrated, all that was not allowed to die and rise again, floods us. Jesus said that the secrets of the heart would be shouted from the rooftops (Matt. 10:27), and we are often surprised to find that the voice that does that shouting is our own.

The Resurrection, of which Lazarus’ transitory rising was a glad symptom, does not inaugurate a system of total positivity. We are not a people who never die or never encounter loss and pain. We are a people who die-and-rise-again. And like Lazarus, this dying and rising happens throughout our lives: changes in person, relation, family, vocation, etc., are all kinds of dyings. As Peter Leithart explains, “I have died many times. So have you, for life is a series of such deaths.”

The Resurrection does not merely give a theological framework for the logic of human experience, of our dyings-and-risings, it places them within a narrative that makes sense of the “dyings” according to the ultimate end: Life with God, now and forever. For, to quote Leithart again, “[t]o speak of resurrection is to say that death never has the last word, that a rising is promised for every dying… [t]o trust in Jesus the Risen One is to trust that God will call us to new life after each death.”

The Pauline teaching that we have died with Christ and that we will therefore rise with Him (Rom. 6:4) can be applied to all of our dyings and all of our pain. Christ arrives at the tomb of a man he knows will “live again” and weeps, joining those he loves in the dying just as he will join them in the joy of the rising again. So also are all of our dyings and risings “in Christ.” We can give voice to the depths of our pain because Christ sings with us, and he deepens our share in it, having out-deeped death itself.

Good Vibes alone cannot purchase the ebullience which fruits from a life whose dying-and-rising-again are set to the music of Him Who Is the Resurrection and the Life.