The Raising of Lazarus
by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom
Feast of the 100 Martyrs of Persia; Holy Monday in WestAnno Domini 2020, April 6
WE ARE AT
the threshold of Holy Week, but on this threshold, we are filled with a great and joyful hope by the raising of Lazarus. The Lord is stronger than death, the Lord has overcome it; not only in the obvious sense in which it is manifested in the bodily raising of Lazarus, but in another sense which concerns us from day to day even more directly. God created man as a friend for Himself, and this friendship is made closer and deeper by our baptism. Each one of us is a friend of God, as Lazarus was called, and in each one of us this friend of God once lived; lived by his friendship with God, lived by the hope that this friendship would become deeper, stronger, brighter. Sometimes this was in our early childhood, sometimes later, in our youth, but in each of us this friend of Christ lived. And then in the process of living, as a flower fades, as the forces of life, hope, joy, purity dwindle, so the strength of the Lord’s friend dwindles, and many a time we feel as though he is lying as in a coffin somewhere inside us. We cannot even say that he is resting, we have to say that the friend of the Lord is lying four days dead, stricken by a horrible death, whose coffin his sisters are afraid to approach because his body is already decomposing. Often our soul grieves over this friend, often Martha and Mary grieve over him; that side of the soul which by its vocation, in strength and abilities is, like Mary, capable of contemplation, of sitting in silence at the feet of the Lord, listening to every life-giving word and becoming alive and tremulous; and the other side, which could be like Martha capable of doing God’s work with inspiration, in truth and purity, could be, not a worried servant — but capable of transforming the most ordinary things by her love and care into the Kingdom of God, the manifestation of human and divine love. And so these two elements in us, the Mary and the Martha, the contemplative and the creative powers grieve over the death of Lazarus, the friend of the Lord.
At certain moments the Lord comes near to us, and when we see Him we are ready to exclaim with Martha, “Lord, why were You not here when the struggle between life and death was being resolved, the moment when Lazarus was still alive though mortally wounded and could have been retained in this life. If you had been here he would not have died.” But the Lord was here, He was here all the time when our soul was dying, and we heard his words, “Do you believe that he will rise again?” With Martha we are ready to answer: “Yes, Lord, on the last day.” But Martha spoke with such hope. She said: “I always have believed, that you are the Lord and I believe that he will rise again on the Last Day.” Whereas we gloomily agree that on the Last Day he will rise again — but only when, as the Great Canon puts it, the Feast of Life is over and it will be too late to achieve anything on earth, too late to live in faith and hope and the joy of ever-increasing love. But the Lord gives the same answer to our hopelessness as He did to her perfect hope: “I am the Resurrection and the Life, He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
There is a further point. Martha did not know at that time that a few days previously Christ had told His disciples that Lazarus was sick unto death, did not know that He allowed him to die in order that he might rise again enriched with such experience so filled with the victory of God that nothing could ever shake him and so the Lord came and commanded Lazarus to rise from the dead.
Here is the image for us: in each of us Lazarus is lying dead, vanquished surrounded by our often hopeless grieving. But the Gospel reading just before the days of the Passion has this message: “Do not fear, I am the Resurrection and the Life. The Lord’s friend that is in you whom you consider irrevocably dead can rise again at a single word of mine, and indeed will rise again.” So let us enter the days of the Passion with the hope, with the certainty that we are going towards the transition from the temporary to the eternal, from death to life, from our defeat to the victory of God. Let us enter these days of the Passion with trepidation at the knowledge of how much the Lord loves us and at what cost He gives us life. Let us enter with hope and light in our hearts, and joy in the coming resurrection.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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