I died once. Most men get only one chance. I have had two, and the second is coming soon. I am Lazarus of Bethany, Bishop of Kition. I say it because it is the only credential I have that none of the other bishops can claim, and in thirty years of church duties, it has settled more arguments than any of my logical categories. A man who has already been dead is difficult to rattle. I am also very old. My knees announce themselves every morning before the rest of me has decided to start the day. The young deacons speak to me in careful voices reserved for children and the elderly, which I find amusing. They are afraid of death, the way you are afraid of a dark stranger. I have already let him in, sat him down, and watched him leave without me. We have an understanding.
The road to Jerusalem during the Passover was thicker than usual. Quirinius had finished his census of Syria two years prior, and the disruption had not yet settled. Families who had traveled to register their households were making their pilgrimage back to wherever Rome had decided was their home. My father said the Romans could count us as often as they liked. We had been counted before, and we will be counted again.
A road outside Jerusalem, the same road Abraham’s descendants had walked for a thousand years on their way to meet God at the place He chose for His chosen people to gather. Two boys on a road that Rome patrolled, in a city sitting on thirty years of oppressive occupation. The Temple gleaming on the hill, white Herodian stone, the most magnificent building either of us had ever seen, and the most contested piece of ground in the world.
Cyprus is not Bethany. I want to say that honestly, but without too much complaint. Bethany smells like olive trees. The good, green particular smell of them in the morning before the heat comes, and my sister Martha’s honey cakes. Cyprus smells like the sea, which is fine, and the harbor, which is not always fine, and the hills here are not my hills. After many years, I still reach for a childhood landscape in my mind. The Lord sends His people where He sends them. He sent me here. I once baptized a Roman official who wandered in seeking the magistrate’s office and left a follower of Christ. That was a glorious day.
This account was not my intention to record. But I am old enough now that the mornings are long, the sea is still, and there are things I know that I have not yet disclosed. Brother John wrote that Jesus loved me. John was there and can be trusted. What John did not write was the interior between the Son of Man and me; our families were close, and we spent years together before I fell under death.
We met every Passover. I would look for him on the slope coming over the Mount of Olives, and he would already be looking for me. That is how it was between us from the beginning. His father was one of the most skilled carpenters in the area. Mine worked olives before he became sick. It left me to tend to the trees, the oil, and the alabaster jars. Between the two of us, we had everything a household could need. He used to say that. It made me laugh every time. He had a confidence that did not belong to a carpenter’s son. It belonged more to those who knew how things were made because they made them. I did not understand that about him when we were young.
He grew in wisdom the way Scripture said He would, and yet there was always something in Him that exceeded human development, as though the wisdom was not being added to Him but uncovered, the way you uncover water by digging, not by pouring. He was fully a man. I ate with Him, walked with Him, and argued with Him on the road. And He was fully something else, something that wore the man the way the Temple wore its stones. The building was real, the stones were real, but what dwelt inside was not the stone.
The teachers in the Temple once marveled at Him, but eventually began a silent hatred for Him. By the time we were grown men, the watching became paratēreō, a manner of monitoring that precedes an accusation. The Pharisees called Him dangerous. The chief priests called Him a threat. Rome had not yet written His name down. But Rome kept lists, and the men who kept lists were already watching the crowds that followed Him out of Jerusalem.
I watched it happen from Bethany, two miles away, close enough to hear everything and far enough to take care of my own business. My father Simon’s olive groves needed tending. Martha’s household needed managing. Mary sat at his feet whenever he came to us, and I told myself she was the devout one, and I was the practical one.
But the words He had spoken on the Temple steps when we were twelve years old never left me. Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. I laughed at Him then. I do not laugh anymore. The year He gave sight to the man born blind in Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin issued a decree. Anyone who confessed Him as the Christ would be put out of the synagogue. I heard this from my father, who heard it from a Pharisee who had been present at the council. My father said nothing after that. He simply went back to his olive trees, pressed his oil, and said nothing. But I saw his face that evening at the table, and I understood that the friendship between our families had become a dangerous thing to hold. I held it anyway. So did my sisters. So did my father, in his silence. Then I got sick.
I never knew what made me sick. Judas had been in our house that week, and there was something in his eyes that was not grief over money for the poor. I cannot prove what I suspect. I only know that God turns what men intend for ruin into good.
The pain came in increments, each time worse than the last, until the increments stopped being increments and became a single terrible fact. Martha managed it the way Martha managed everything. Mary sat beside me and prayed. My father stood in the doorway and looked at me with the face of a man who had already lost so much and was being asked to lose more.
We sent for Him. Lord, he whom You love is sick. A day passed. Then another. I felt the illness pulling at me the way deep water pulls at a man who has given up on swimming. I was not afraid, which surprised me. I was tired, then very tired, and then I became aware that the tiredness was becoming something I had never felt before. Martha’s voice was the last thing I heard. She was singing a beautiful prayer. Asking God to send Him in time. We had designs on Him coming at our time. He came at His own. So I fell under death. My body decided it was done. One moment I was. Then I was not.
I have no account of the four days, and I want to be careful here because people ask. What I can tell you is that it was not what you would imagine. There was no journey. There was no threshold. As Jews, we believe that the soul lingered near the body for three days, reluctant to leave. By the fourth day, it was gone. I was gone. Not sleeping, I want to correct that word before it is assumed. Sleep implies the possibility of waking on your own. This was not that. This was the absence of that. Deep, complete, unreachable, unworldly stillness that only one voice in all of creation could interrupt. That voice spoke my name.
Brother John wrote that He wept. I have turned those tears over in my mind for thirty years. They were not for me. I was in the hands of the Father, which is the only place any of us are ever truly safe. He wept because He knew what raising me was going to cost Him. Three weeks. That is all He had left. The Sanhedrin had already decided. Caiaphas had declared: It is better for one man to die for the people. My resurrection was the act that made the cross inevitable, and He knew the ripping of His skin was coming. He walked toward that tomb knowing exactly what it would bring forward, and He wept, I think, not from weakness but from the full weight of what love and obedience require. I had to come out so He could go in.
I was the rehearsal. He was the event. I came out of the tomb and walked back into life and died again years later on this island. He went into death three weeks after He called my name, and the Father raised Him into something no one had ever seen, not a return to ordinary life but a transformation into a new order of existence entirely, a body that death could not hold. Nothing that exists was made without Him, and death itself was made by Him and for Him, and at His word it had to release what it held.
I was not one of the twelve. I’m saying this because it matters to what comes next. I was not like Peter, who walked on water until he looked down instead of up. I was not John, who ran fastest to the empty tomb. I was the man who lived two miles from Jerusalem, tended his father’s olive trees, and told himself that practical life was the faithful life. I was the odd one out in my own house. Martha managed the household with her worldly worries, Mary dreamed of eternity while she sat at His feet, and I kept working to provide for them. I kept my head down, focused on temporal matters. I steered my ship as best I could across waters I could only sink into, not walk upon. That was who I was before the tomb. I walked out of that grave no longer knowing Him as the boy from Nazareth who shared my bread and made me laugh when He called His own flesh, bread, on the road to Jerusalem.
Mary knew before any of us. She took her expensive perfume, which she was saving for something that happens only once, and anointed His feet a week before the Passover. The disciples accused her of being wasteful. He called it preparation for His burial. Mary understood. She had sat at His feet for years while Martha and I managed the household and told ourselves we were the sensible ones. Jesus had said it to Martha once, in our own house: “Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” Martha managed. I managed. Mary listened and understood. She had been choosing the one necessary thing her whole life, and so when the moment came, she did not hesitate. She broke the jar. She anointed His feet. She already knew what He was worth and what was coming, and she spent everything she had to say it.
We did not leave Bethany the way I had imagined leaving it, which is to say I had never imagined leaving it at all. The olive trees were still bearing fruit. Martha had bread in the oven. Mary was at prayer. And then the word came before dawn, carried by someone who will not give his name and will not sit down. They were coming for me. Not eventually. Soon. Caiaphas had already spoken at the council: on account of me, many of the Jews believed in the God-man. I was the evidence they could not bury. They tried once. God declared Him King. They were not going to make the same mistake twice.
Martha packed the way Martha did everything, efficiently, without sentiment, without a single unnecessary word. She left the bread in the oven. I asked her later if she regretted it, and she said she regretted nothing except not having packed more olive oil. That was Martha. Mary wept quietly in the doorway, and then she took a deep breath and walked out without looking back. That was Mary.
We traveled at night along roads that believers had already begun to use. After the stoning of Stephen, those who had been scattered went as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus. We were not the only ones running. The Lord had arranged the road before we found it.
The sea was cold the morning we left. I stood at the water’s edge and looked back toward Bethany, toward the hills that were my hills, toward the olive trees and the tomb I had walked out of, toward the house where He had sat at our table and eaten our food and called me His friend. Martha put her hand on my arm. We got on the boat.
Cyprus was not what I expected. Nothing about this life has been what I expected. But the Lord sends His people where He sends them, and He sent us here, and here is where I have remained. Martha is buried on this island. Mary is buried on this island. I will be buried here too, for the second and final time, and the voice that called me out of the dark will call me out again, and this time there will be no grave clothes to unwrap and no confused limbs to remember how to work. Again, I will recognize the voice. John knew, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.”
They ask me about it still. Young believers, new converts, the ones who have heard the story and want the part I have not told yet. They lean forward the way the Temple teachers once leaned toward a twelve-year-old boy from Nazareth, and they ask me: What was heaven like? I tell them the same thing every time. Why does it matter what I saw in heaven? I saw God in the flesh in heaven on earth. What do you think heaven is? What I have is this: the voice that called me out of the nothing is the same voice that spoke the world into existence, and wherever that voice is, that is heaven. Not a place. Not a destination. A presence. Heaven is Jesus Christ. Wherever He is, there is heaven. I was in death. He reached into it and called my name. I came. And in that moment, I was already in heaven because He was standing at the entrance of the tomb.
I walked out of that grave no longer knowing Him as the boy from Nazareth who shared my bread and made me laugh on the road to Jerusalem. I walked out knowing Him as what He had always been. The One through whom all things were made, the Ruler of creation, the Lord of the living and the dead; He made everything from nothing. He made me. I should not have been surprised that He could find me in nothing and bring me back out of it. But I was. I stood there blinking in the light, my hands still wrapped, trying to remember how my limbs worked, and He smiled, the way He always did when He already knew how things were going to go. Which, I have come to understand, was always. The familiarity did not disappear. It was swallowed by something so much larger that the boyhood friendship became what a candle is to the sun. I loved Him before the tomb; I worshipped Him after. There is no other response available to a man who has heard his name called out of four days of nothing by the voice that spoke the world into existence.
This is what I have not yet disclosed. This is why I am writing it down. I died once. Not by accident. But to give honor to the One whom God was motivated to create a world as His stage. To showcase the beauty of the Son and the obedience to the Father. John wrote it for us: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son.” The world held the greatest telos, the most significant purpose, designed for the One through whom all things were made, the One for whom all things exist, including the grave, including me, including the four days of nothing from which He pulled me like a man reaching into dark water and finding exactly what He came for. His eternal glory.
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