The Resurrected Brother of Mary and Martha: A Human Who Resurrected God!

“Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Here a dinner was given in Jesus’ honor. Martha served, while Lazarus was among those reclining at the table with him. Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, ‘Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.’ … ‘Leave her alone,’ Jesus replied. ‘It was intended that she should save this perfume for the day of my burial’” (John 12:1–7). Hearing this, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, who knew that when “some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, we want to see a sign from you,’” Jesus answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:39–40), must have thought that Jesus would be buried alive1 (and then lifted up to heaven three days and nights later: hadn’t Jesus said, “… when I am lifted up from the earth” [John 12:32]?), muttering, “Our Lord Jesus Christ will fall asleep dreamlessly, and then I’ll go to his tomb to wake him up.” Soon after, an acquaintance of his sent word to him, “The one you love has been sentenced to be crucified.” When he heard this, he promptly headed to Golgotha. In front of the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, the disciple whom Jesus loved,2 soothed Jesus’ mother thus: “This crucifixion will not end in death.” But no sooner had he finished saying these words than he was confounded, for “when Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’” (John 19:26–27).3 What is impossible for Jesus Christ as one of the hypostases of the Holy Trinity? Is it to “cleanse those who have leprosy” and “drive out demons” (Matthew 10:8)? Is it to come down from the cross and save himself (“Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!’” [Matthew 27:39–41])? No. What is impossible for Jesus Christ as the life? Is it to “heal the sick” and “raise the dead” (Matthew 10:8)? No, such actions are possible for a God who is the life; therefore they are not miracles for him. What is impossible for Jesus Christ, the life, is to die, so either, as the Qur’ân asserts (“They slew him [the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, Allâh’s messenger] not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them …” [4:157]), he did not die on the cross, and the one who died on the cross was a simulacrum of him,4 or he could and did die on the cross only miraculously, by a miracle he performed and not as a result of the action of his ostensible executioners. The same way that, according to Rilke, “however much the farmer toils and sows, / never will he reach the transformation / of the seed into summer. Earth bestows,”5 however much the executioners of the life may torture him and however long they may crucify him, never will they reach the transformation of the life into death;6 it is the Christ who miraculously accomplishes and offers his death. Only a madman would have cried, “Whither is God? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I,”7 in relation to the crucifixion of a God who was “the life.” What most fits life is to resurrect the dead: Jesus Christ’s resurrection of Lazarus (and two [or three?] others); and what is impossible for it, therefore what it can accomplish only miraculously, is to die: Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. In relation to life and death, Jesus Christ, as the life, did what is possible for him in resurrecting Lazarus, and did, miraculously, what is impossible for him in dying (on the cross)—the latter was, strictly speaking, his one miracle. “About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ (which means ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’).… And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit” (Matthew 27:46–50; cf. Mark 15:34–37).8 Deeply moved in spirit and troubled, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha exclaimed: “The Christ died, truly he died!” The brother of Mary and Martha underwent both nights of the world, the Hegelian one and the Nietzschean one. He underwent the Hegelian one insofar as he was a mortal before his resurrection by Jesus Christ, the life, that is, insofar as he was dead even while still physically alive, and, more unreservedly, when he died physically the first time, as an undead: “The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity—a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here—pure Self—[and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out towards us9”10; and he, like all those living then, underwent, whether aware of this or unawares, the Nietzschean one, which was foreshadowed by the unnatural night in the world that occurred while Jesus Christ was still alive on the cross (“From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land” [Matthew 27:45]) and that made some of those present then wonder, “Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?” and which held sway between (the Son of) God’s (miraculous) death on the cross and his resurrection. Jesus Christ’s two cries in quick succession mark, respectively, the points when he first intuited and then when it became quite clear to him, who was then on the verge of dying miraculously, that if he were to be resurrected, it would not be through the direct action of God the Father. It is on hearing the words of Jesus’ first cry on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha first had an uneasy inkling of his incredible task. Between (the Son of) God’s (miraculous) death on the cross and his resurrection, his fate depended in an essential manner on a human, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha. That was the incredible stake that was being played: the death of God in the figure of Jesus Christ could have proved to be irreparable, freeing humans from (one of the hypostases of) God,11 or ushering in the night of the world (in a Nietzschean, if not a Hegelian sense: “Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? … God is dead! God remains dead!”12) in case they failed to become themselves gods (Nietzsche: “What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives … Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”13). God, who had incarnated to teach man (about) the miraculous, made the life of his Son depend on whether man would accomplish the miraculous, more specifically the resurrection of Him who made miracles possible and through whom miracles are possible, God. The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha did not at all consider burying the dead Jesus Christ—instead, he returned with Mary to his home in Bethany. Given that Jesus had instructed his followers to “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22), Jesus’ burial had to be left to one who, as a mortal, was dead (while physically still alive). And so it was: Joseph of Arimathea (according to the Synoptic Gospels), assisted by Nicodemus (according to the Gospel of John), laid Jesus’ body in a tomb.14 Thomas said to the ten other remaining, ostensible disciples, “Let us … die with him.” I assume that by this he meant: let us, recognizing that with the death of the life we too have willy-nilly already died (symbolically), formalize this death instead of persisting in an ersatz life that is no more than a delay in the registration of our implied (symbolic) death. But the other, ostensible disciples, who had denied and/or abandoned Jesus when the latter was apprehended and crucified, dismissed his recommendation and dissuaded him from his undertaking. Thomas (also known as Didymus), who had an affinity to repetition and duplication since “Thomas (Aramaic) and Didymus (Greek) both mean twin,”15 had already said the same words on a previous occasion, as Jesus was on the point of heading to Lazarus’ tomb (John 11:16). Moreover, these repeated words had on that previous occasion a double meaning depending on who was referred to by “him.” If Thomas considered that Jesus Christ could be killed by humans, then, given that Jesus maintained his intention to return to Judea to resurrect his beloved disciple Lazarus “for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it” (John 11:4) notwithstanding his ostensible disciples’ perplexed warning, “But Rabbi, a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you, and yet you are going back?” (John 11:8), Thomas’ words would have had the aforementioned meaning: let us, recognizing that were the life to die we too would willy-nilly be dead (symbolically), not persist in an ersatz life that is no more than a delay in the registration of our imminent implied (symbolic) death. If Thomas thought that the life could not be killed by humans, then his words would have rather meant: let us die, then perhaps Jesus Christ, the life and the resurrection, who appears intent on resurrecting Lazarus, would resurrect us too and thus we would no longer be mortals, dead while alive, to become solely alive (given that Jesus’ other ostensible disciples did not follow his recommendation, indeed dissuaded him from doing so, could it be that Thomas was the only one of the Twelve who already understood that Jesus intended to resurrect the dead Lazarus? Or was it the case that the others did understand that Jesus intended to resurrect the dead Lazarus but did not care to be raised “with him” from death by the Christ?). Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews who knew that Jesus had not only “loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5) but also resurrected the latter came to comfort not only Jesus’ mother but also the aforementioned three siblings in their loss. Three days and three nights after Jesus’ burial, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha told his two sisters and Mary that he was going to visit Jesus’ tomb. Once in Jerusalem, he asked Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, “Where have you laid him?” “Come and see,” they replied, supposing he was going to the tomb to mourn there. The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha came to the tomb, which was in a garden. A stone was laid across the entrance to the tomb. There was a bad odor, for Jesus had been in the tomb for three days and three nights. The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha wept. Then he was reminded of the words that his sister Martha told him Jesus had said to her at Lazarus’ own tomb, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” Now, to the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, “if you believe …” no longer meant, “if you believe in God …” for God—in the hypostasis of the Son—was dead, but, “if you, who as a resurrected man exemplify a miracle, believe in the miraculous …” The stone was too heavy for one man to displace. Given that Jesus had asserted, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” [Matthew 17:20]), could the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, who had faith, have moved it? Yes, he could have. But he intuited that he should not even try to do so, for the miracle he had to do was a different one, a far greater one (one no angel could accomplish). He wondered, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” Then he saw two angels in white. “Take away the stone,” he said. So they rolled away the stone. The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha remembered Jesus Christ’s words: “Truly I tell you, if you have faith … nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20) and “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these …. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:12–14). Then, for the first time, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, who had until then, like his two sisters, always addressed Jesus as “Lord” (“‘Take away the stone,’ he [Jesus] said. ‘But, Lord,’ said Martha, the sister of the dead man, ‘by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days’” [John 11:39] …16), called him (in a loud voice) by his name: “Jesus, come out!” The one who was dead came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.17 The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha had called upon his name and given glory to the Lord.18 The two angels were astonished. The first Christian miracle by someone other than Jesus Christ was the resurrection of the dead Jesus Christ by the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha (Peter’s walk on water was not a miracle, but a momentary walk in the redeemed world).19 Notwithstanding their repeated descriptions of themselves as witnesses of Jesus Christ’s resurrection (“Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: … ‘God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it’” [Acts 2:14–32]; Peter, “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this” [Acts 3:15]),20 neither Peter nor any of the other ten ostensible disciples witnessed the resurrection itself, the act of the resurrection of Jesus Christ; only the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha did since he performed it. Lazarus’ death was for “God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it” (John 11:4) not only because it would provide Jesus with the occasion to perform a resurrection (in the process confirming his assertion that Lazarus’ “sickness will not end in death”), otherwise Jesus would have said the same thing about his resurrections of the young man from the town of Nain (Luke 7:11–16) and the only daughter of Jairus, a synagogue leader, a girl of about twelve (Luke 8:41–56); but also because the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha would resurrect the dead Jesus, who would thus have been “raised in glory” (1 Corinthians 15:43). How curious and anomalous it is for “Saint” Paul, who placed resurrection at the very core of Christianity (“And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” [1 Corinthians 15:14]), never to have mentioned Lazarus. And yet, when he wrote, “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either” (1 Corinthians 15:16), “Saint” Paul might have let slip something he intuited or knew but preferred not to declare, since it is one of those raised dead, the brother of Mary and Martha, who raised the Christ from death. The resurrected brother of Mary and Martha could feel that power had gone out from him and was exhausted as no human had ever been, incredibly exhausted (Jesus Christ, someone infinitely greater than him, felt that “power had gone out from him” when a woman was healed on touching his cloak [“A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.… she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak …. Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him” (Mark 5:24–30; cf. Matthew 9:20–21)], an infinitely lesser miracle than the one that the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha had just accomplished). Did he fall unconscious from his incredible exhaustion? At this point, after resurrecting (the Son of) God, he again very much needed the assistance of the two angels. They could and did intervene then and provide him with the requisite energy. Then the resurrected Jesus Christ ordered him “not to tell anyone what had happened” (the same injunction he gave the parents of the girl of about twelve just after resurrecting her [Luke 8:56]). And so he told neither the eleven ostensible disciples, nor Mary, Jesus’ (and now his) mother, nor his own two sisters. Like “many other signs,” the resurrection of Jesus Christ by the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha is “not recorded in this book” (John 20:30). “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’ So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb” (John 20:1–3). While it seems obvious why Peter would start for the tomb, why did the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, also do so? Once he was surrounded by those who were human, all too human, that event, about which the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha did not tell them anything, seemed incredible to him; indeed he could no longer believe that he could accomplish such a miracle, in a way the greatest miracle, so he, who had come to doubt that he could have resurrected someone, let alone (the Son of) God, ran to the tomb to check that what he remembered as an actual event was not some sort of hallucination. “Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in”—for he was then sure, again, that he had actually resurrected Jesus Christ … recently. “Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head” (John 20:4–7). When shortly after his resurrection, Jesus Christ appeared to his ostensible disciples, Thomas did not happen to be among them. When they reported this appearance to him, Thomas doubted their report. Why did Thomas (also known as Didymus [which means “twin” in Greek]) doubt that the one they witnessed is the resurrected Jesus Christ? Is it because while the one who performed the resurrection, the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, was solely alive he was nonetheless not the life (in whose case alone one can be sure that the resurrected one is the one who died), with the consequence that one could not be sure that the one he resurrected was (the Son of) God, the Christ, and not some double of him, if not the Antichrist? Did he also reason that were the one that the other ten ostensible disciples beheld the Christ who, past his resurrection by the resurrected brother of Mary and Martha, was glorified by God the Father, they would have been destroyed by such witnessing, since to the resurrected Christ in his glory applied what applied to God (the Father) (“Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’ And the LORD said, ‘… you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ Then the LORD said, ‘… When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen’” (Exodus 33:18–23); cf. Qur’ân 7:143, “And when Moses came to Our appointed tryst and his Lord had spoken unto him, he said: My Lord! Show me (Thy Self), that I may gaze upon Thee. He said: Thou wilt not see Me, but gaze upon the mountain! If it stand still in its place, then thou wilt see Me. And when his Lord revealed (His) glory to the mountain He sent it crashing down” (trans. Pickthall), and Qur’ân 2:55–56, “And when ye said: O Moses! We will not believe in thee till we see Allâh plainly; and even while ye gazed the lightning seized you”)?