My favorite detail in the Lazarus story is the one nobody puts on a sympathy card. Jesus calls a man out of a tomb after four days, and the chief priests respond by planning to kill Lazarus too (John 12:10). The guy is barely unwrapped. He probably still smells like the cave. And the committee’s first agenda item is scheduling a second funeral.
I laugh every time I read that. Then it stops being funny, because that’s exactly what fear does with good evidence. It tries to bury it again.
This week’s Bible Lesson is called “Probation After Death,” which sounds like a parole hearing for ghosts. It’s one of the most practical ideas Mary Baker Eddy ever put on paper. Her headline, from Science and Health: “Death will not make us harmonious and immortal as a recompense for ignorance.”
Read that twice. Death is no graduation ceremony. Nobody hands you a halo and a personality upgrade at the door. Whatever you believe about yourself on a random Tuesday, the grave doesn’t edit it.
Sounds grim for about four seconds. Then you notice the other side of it: if dying can’t change us, then the change we actually want never needed a funeral to begin with. It’s available now. Eddy says Life is “gained by walking in the pathway of Truth both before and after that which is called death.” Before. As in this week.
Which brings me back to Lazarus, and to Martha, who I adore. Jesus says take away the stone, and Martha, ever the realist, points out that her brother has been dead four days and there will be a smell. She’s doing the math everyone else is doing. Eddy’s take on the scene is wild: Jesus raised Lazarus “by the understanding that Lazarus had never died.” He refused to stand where the mourners were standing. He saw something truer than the four-day timeline, and the timeline lost.
Then comes my favorite line in the whole Bible Lesson. Lazarus walks out bound hand and foot, face wrapped in cloth, and Jesus turns to the crowd: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
He tells the crowd. The people standing around get a job.
Plenty of us are walking around alive and still wrapped. An old diagnosis we keep rehearsing. A verdict someone handed us at fourteen that we’ve treated as settled law ever since. Probation, as Eddy uses the word, is the unwrapping, and it keeps going until it’s done. And we were never meant to do it alone. That’s what a spiritual community is for. Somebody has to help with the cloth.
The Bible Lesson also drops David and Bathsheba right into the middle of all this, and it doesn’t soften a thing. A king takes another man’s wife and arranges the husband’s death in a letter that the husband himself carries to the front. Brutal. When the prophet Nathan finally confronts him, David doesn’t spin it. He says, “I have sinned against the Lord,” and out of that comes Psalm 51: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”
David didn’t wait to die to ask for a new heart. He asked while the mess was still warm. Eddy says the longing to be better, “expressed in daily watchfulness,” will “mould and fashion us anew.” Daily. Unglamorous. Real.
So what happens after we die? Honestly, I think the more useful question is what’s happening right now, in the space between who we’ve believed we are and who God has always known us to be. Spirit doesn’t schedule that conversation for later. It’s open today, and the stone is already rolled back.
What are you still wrapped in that someone could help you take off?
