That was the name of a play written in 1925 by Nobel Literature prize winner Eugene O’Neil. It needed 100 actors to do properly, so it was never commercially successful. Here’s how one of the characters who rolled the stone away described what happened: “And then Lazarus knelt and kissed Jesus’ feet and both of them smiled and Jesus blessed him and called him “My Brother” and went away; and Lazarus, looking after Him, began to laugh softly like a man in love with God! Such a laugh I never heard! It made my ears drunk! It was like wine! And though I was half-dead with fright I found myself laughing, too!” O’Neil has Lazarus continually saying, ‘There is no death, only God’s eternal laughter.’ The play ends with Lazarus, unafraid and exultant, being executed by Caesar in Rome.
Of course, that is imaginative, but I love the idea that there is a wonderful current of godly laughter and joy that holds us all. Death, loss and all endings are painful and distressing. There is a wrongness about death. That wrongness comes from human sin, and the God of life saying that we can’t live that way for ever. Our sinful, self-centered self has to die. Not because God is mean or vengeful, but simply because that is not a good way or the right way to live. So death came into the picture in Genesis 3, and has been there every since.
Jesus, the Son of Man, stepped into the world to defeat death, and to take away its power to poison our whole attitude to life. The raising of Lazarus was the great sign, and that was so powerful and so confronting to the religious leaders, that it led to Jesus being put to death.
Like Martha and Mary, we understand on one level that Jesus is stronger than death. Like Martha and Mary, we fail to believe that it will make a difference in the distressing situation that I might be in right now.
‘There is no death, only God’s eternal laughter,’ says Lazarus in the play. ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ says Jesus in our sacred scriptures. We are all learning to live, trusting that God’s love for us in Christ is more powerful than any dying we or our loved ones must pass through.
