The Disease of Death

Last week at Bible Study, the leader said something that I thought was pretty profound. In reference to Lazarus, he said that Jesus "healed him from death," as though death is really a sickness from which to be healed rather than a permanent state of affairs.

This tied into my studies in Leviticus in an interesting way. There is something pervasive about human sin: it always contaminates, but is never contaminated. It is like being unclean in the Old Testament; a clean person touching a leper never cleansed the leper, but rather become unclean himself.

Of course, there is something pervasive about the life in Jesus Christ, too. When he touches lepers, they are cleansed, and the taint of their illness cannot spread to him. So, too, with death. When it closes in on the cross, it is denied its victory by the resurrection.

All of the miracles in John demonstrate in one way or another the deity of Christ, and I think the raising of Lazarus is particularly evocative in this respect. Death is the last enemy; it is not a natural part of the universe, nor is it to be tolerated. While we welcome it as the transition from our fallen, earthy bodies to the celestial, heavenly ones, there is no sense of friendship with death given in the Scripture.

When Jesus raises Lazarus, it is almost as though his life, like his cleanness, is pervasive. When death comes in contact with Christ, it does not taint him with its stain; rather, it recoils and flees, and Lazarus lives again.

Metaphor

This past week has given me some time to think about metaphor. We studied the raising of Lazarus in John 11 this week, and I coincidentally (in the sense of simultaneously) was discussing the same in a newsgroup I occasionally read.

Some objections were raised to the idea that the miracle of raising Lazarus was typical of how God regenerates us (obviously objections from the unreformed in the group). One person in particular objected because Lazarus was already regenerated before he was resurrected. He was rightly taken to task for his complaint for reasons that I hope are obvious.¹

A metaphor is a constructed figure of speech in which two often dissimilar things are identified by sometimes surprising characteristics.

I refer to the elements compared as the base and the realization. The base is something common to experience and well understood; the realization is that which acquires the characteristics of the base by association.

For example, the well-worn phrase, "You are my sunshine" is a metaphor in which the base is the sun and the realization is the beloved. The beloved acquires the characteristics of the sun in a metaphorical way—bringing light and heat to an otherwise dreary and sad existence.

In the metaphor proposed by the original poster, Lazarus' death is like our spiritual death (and his condition like ours) and his resurrection is like our spiritual rebirth.


Metaphors often contain a locus in which the base and the realization meet. In the case of the raising of Lazarus, the locus is in the command of Jesus: "Lazarus, come forth!" His physical action is paralleled spiritually: the Jesus in the base image is the same Jesus of the metaphorical realization.

It is this commerce between the image and the realization that makes the metaphor so powerful, and it is one of the reasons that Christianity is so compelling (in my opinion). It causes us to revise our understanding of reality when we see that the locus of the metaphor exists on both sides of the equation—does spiritual birth follow the pattern of physical birth, or does physical birth follow the pattern of spiritual?

Metaphor usually implies a lessening of corporeality in the comparison, but Christianity provides a metaphor that is more real than the experiences we use to understand it.



[1] My objection is two-fold.

First, a metaphor is a constructed figure of speech, and so he is not really allowed to tell someone what goes into the construction. He can only show that the construction itself is internally inconsistent (its connections require reshaping our understanding of reality) or externally inconsistent (his conclusions do not support his theology).

Second, his requirement that the realization of the metaphor not contain elements of the base image is arbitrarily restrictive and really prevents him from using any miracle analogically. The locus of the metaphor is where the base image and the metaphorical realization intersect. Since, in his theological system, faith precedes and causes regeneration, faith cannot be an appropriate locus for the metaphor (since the one experiencing the miracle is thereby regenerated, disqualifying regeneration from being the subject of the miracle).

Uncleanness

I have just finished reading through Leviticus 14 and 15, chapters discussing leprosy and bodily discharges. These are pretty tedious chapters, and Leviticus, I confess, is not the least tedious book I've read (neither the most).

But I was struck by two things as I read.

The first is that uncleanness spreads, but cleanness doesn't. In other words, no one ever possessed pervasive cleanliness—a clean person cannot touch a leper and make the leper clean; rather, touching a leper makes one unclean. The sole exception for this rule is that immediate family members were allowed to touch the bodies of their dead relatives without suffering uncleanness; but in all other cases, touching something unclean, or touching something that touched someone unclean, sufficed to make one unclean.

The second is that the very act of procreation made the participants unclean. So, too, giving birth. While I don't want to say that this is a strong argument for original sin, it certainly does give a different overtone to Ps 51.5.

From a cultural perspective, some argue that these rules were intended to separate the Israelites from the people they were displacing, in which it was common to profane worship with deviant sexual practices.


It is interesting to me that it was forbidden for anyone who was unclean to enter the tabernacle. Those who were unclean were cut off from fellowshiping with the rest of the congregation, and in the case of the lepers, maimed, or deformed, this excommunication was permanent.

At the same time, we have to be impressed with the healing of the lepers in the gospels. It is never recorded in the Bible that a leper presented himself to a priest to verify his cleansing—until Jesus says, "I am willing; be thou clean" (Mt 8.3). In Jesus there is a pervasive cleanness. His cleanness drives away the uncleanness of the leper.

If we understand leprosy, for example, as a metaphor for sin, the application is obvious—Jesus really does cleanse us, and he does it perfectly. I don't want to over-extend this, but I think if we look at the Spirit living in us, this is a continual cleansing, too, just as the fire for the burnt offerings was to burn continually.