when does the world have a meaning?
when you have the secret power
to count your disillusions
with joy
when you had been dead
and you rose again,
when you no longer look for
comfort
anywhere
The Raising of Lazarus -- Edward Knippers
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According to the Gospel of John, Elʿāzār ("God is my help"), also known as St. Lazarus of Bethany, or Lazarus of the Four Days) died before Jesus could offer him assistance, though his sisters Marta and Maryam (who in many accounts is regarded as the same person as Mary Magdalene, another prominent follower of Jesus who is sometimes identified as a prostitute) had informed Jesus of his illness. Jesus intentionally delayed his journey for two days. When he arrived in Bethanya (modern al-Eizariya) four days after Lazarus had died, he told Marta, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Then he had the stone removed from Lazarus' tomb, prayed, and asked Lazarus to come out. The resurrection of Lazarus converted many witnesses to belief in Jesus' claims, but others reported the event to the religious authorities in Jerusalem. (In popular tradition, unnerved by the sight of the unredeemed souls of the dead, he only smiled once again in his life, when he saw someone stealing a pot and remarked "the clay steals the clay." As the 15th-century poet Georges Chastellain wrote, he "had naught but misery and painful thoughts, fearing what he should have to pass"). Not long after, six days before Jesus was crucified, he returned to Bethanya to dine with Lazarus and his sisters, provoking the chief priests to demand the death of Lazarus because of the effect the alleged miracle had on public opinion. At the meal, Maryam poured expensive nard on Jesus' feet and wiped them with her hair, and the disciples' treasurer Judas Iscariot objected to the waste of the expensive perfume, but Jesus reprimanded him, saying, "You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me.” According to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the two sisters were among the women who took myrrh to his tomb to anoint his body and were thus the first to learn of his resurrection. After the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the family fled Judea because of plots against their lives; St. Paul and Barnabus named him the first bishop of Kition (Larnakaand, Cyprus), and Jesus' mother wove his bishop's omophorion and presented it to him herself. He served in that capacity for three decades. In the western tradition, Lazarus and his sisters were put adrift in a boat without sails, oars, or helm. They landed at the Saintes-Maries in southern France and separated to preach in different parts of Gaul. Lazarus became the fist bishop of Massalia (Marseilles). Late in the 1st century, in the reign of Titus Flavius Caesar Domitianus Augustus, he was imprisoned and beheaded in a cave beneath the prison Saint-Lazare. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus related a parable about another Lazarus, a beggar, and the two figures are often conflated; for example, in Santería, the two men are combined and depicted as the Yoruba deity Babalu Aye.
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