It’s like a scene out of H.G. Wells. An army long reduced to dust is reconstituted at the mere utterance of a prophet. From ashes they rise; bone fuses to bone, sinew follows atop, until the former fleshly figure is restored. At the command of a deity, winds rush through them, and again they are animate.
Our wonder redoubles: this is not science fiction, but the vision of a prophet. It is not a vision of what could be if the laws of nature could be subdued or suspended; this is a real look at what God can do, in any here and now.
What Ezekiel speaks of is not possible; it strains credulity. That belief in the word of God alone could reverse the effects of death seems a stretch to us, in a world so used to the horrors of death that news of it becomes almost banal. God raises the dead? Fine. Then where is the hand of the Divine upon communities in Haiti, in Japan, in Libya?
Did God not make promises through Ezekiel that God’s yet to make good on? Did Ezekiel not channel the Divine’s words: “‘and you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,’ says the LORD”? We wait to see it; we are impatient.
But perhaps we look forward to the wrong miracle. In Ezekiel, the vision is of the world’s graves opening at once, and of all humankind marching forth animate once more, revitalized by God. And that would be a sight, indeed. Yet the miracle foreseen is not of the many called forth; the miracle anticipated is God’s undoing of what we thought to be final, and irreversible. The unspoken awe in Ezekiel is of a God who can, out of the bleakest conditions, draw forth perfect life.
“You’ll know that I am God,” the Divine says in Ezekiel. Not when whole armies of our forbearers literally march forward into Israel, but when death, which still strikes us as the most final and irreversible of human conditions, is, despite expectations, reversed.
In John, this death is literal: Jesus raises Lazarus from the grave. Lazarus shakes of his shroud and returns to his daily activities. The ground doesn’t shake beneath the footfalls of all Israel’s deceased. Only one man is brought forth. One. Neither is he crowned in glory or given a place of prominence; he simply returns to the life he lived before.
Yet for his family, and for those who witness the miracle, this is all that is needed. Jesus reverses their despair; he fills their hearts with hope. God can repair anything; God can transform what is dire into what is grand, and instantaneously.
We want a sign; we want to know God’s greatness as Lazarus did, as Ezekiel expected to. Perhaps we yearn for the restitution of those cut bitterly down: we pray for God to take away the realities of war, and of natural disasters. Or maybe we want the gospel’s miracle: we want to keep our one, want just one interjection of God’s hand in our affairs to show us that our prayers are heard.
Who are the Lazarus’s of our world? Before our vision flit innumerable figures who seem caught up in the flow of fate, and on whose behalf we hope for interjection. Who is raised from the world’s worst ‘deaths’? Whose situations are transformed?
My own prayer this week is that Iman al-Obeidi will receive a little Lazarus treatment. Her story already defies what is standard. She’s cried out in Libya, naming and denouncing unspeakable violence visited upon her by a few who manipulated power. Her voice demands morality, and righteousness, and justice, out of an environment which otherwise seems to be, currently, an ethical vacuum.
Her story, amid the turmoil in Libya, might have been quickly hushed up, or led to her own punishment or shaming. Yet she has not been hustled away; she continues to cry out, she continues to fight against her own dehumanization, and she pushes for freedom.
Iman al-Obeidi is in a tug-of-war, caught between distressed and unforgiving social mores, and the dignity and resuscitation she knows she is inherently owed. So far, impossibly, her humanity is winning out: she has not slipped from the world’s sight into darkness, but continues to loudly and visibly appeal on her own behalf.
She has already survived the unspeakable; she persists despite continual indignities visited upon her by public officials. We can extend our empathy in human solidarity: her last days have been a nightmare, and we know that what she’s been through cuts many people off from who they used to be. Such things form gulfs that seem irreparable. Iman has, so far, resisted such ends.
She fights for life. She struggles to regain herself—the Iman she knew before, a home and family from which she is temporarily kept apart, the basic, the everyday. She is warring for the right to be. And I join so many others in praying that she wins.
It looks as though she might. And if she succeeds—if she finds her way home, if she escapes social reduction—we can see God in that. We may count it as an answered prayer. Flesh back on bones, or normalcy back to those who’s boundaries have been trespassed; our prayers ask for the actualization of seeming impossibilities.
Our readings tell us that prayers are heard; they assure us that God can do anything. But they also reveal the confounding nature of miracles, in that what is miraculous is usually unexpected. We cannot dictate how God works in the world. We can only know that God does work in it, and that when the Divine moves, the results are guaranteed to astound.
Heaven has always managed to put Wells, and the best of his colleagues, to shame. We await the next installment of the saga; our breath is baited, our eyes strain to see.
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