Desert
Photo by David McLenachan on Unsplash
"Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic... there is not a face that isn't on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream."
— "The Wall and the Books," Other Inquisitions, 1952, Jorge Luis Borges
Lazarus’s body began to decompose, the mourners wept, and the funeral was over. Then came the reversal. After being dead for four days, the heavenly immigration authorities ordered Lazarus released from post-human detention. Jesus, standing at the tomb's entrance, called him forth, and out he stumbled, trailing burial linens and the damp stench of interrupted mortality. It was a miracle.
The Gospels present Jesus’ miracles as moments of unrestrained joy: the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead return. Borges reminds us of a truth that lingers beneath the surface of these stories: death is the organizing principle of human life. It shapes our relationships, rituals, and expectations of the world. Postponing death not only alters the individual in question but also destabilizes the entire social fabric around them.
In the New Testament, we spot this instability in passing. The blind man's neighbors do not immediately recognize him after he is healed. The religious authorities find Lazarus’s presence as troubling as learning about a heliocentric universe. One wonders about more intimate dislocations. How did Lazarus’ sisters cope with having their grief upended? What did it mean for their mourning to be shown as premature? What about Lazarus himself, who had already crossed death’s threshold but was then pulled back into the demands of ordinary life? To resurrect a man is to change the course of every life that intersects with his.
Every society has its ways of accommodating misfortune. The blind beggar is prominent in the public imagination, and his limitations quietly define how others interact with him. The leper inspires a communal understanding of what it means to suffer and be cast out. Even with all its finality, society assigns death a script: people observe mourning periods, offer communal gestures of condolence, and gradually integrate loss into the rhythm of life. Miracles disrupt these scripts.
The blind man’s restoration of sight should be a triumph, but when he returns to the world, his neighbors react with confusion instead of celebration. Some do not recognize him at all. His blindness defines him, and when that trait disappears, the man becomes unrecognizable. The religious leaders react not with awe but with suspicion, interrogating him and his parents as if a crime has been committed. Rather than being a moment of joy, the miracle brings doubt and resentment.
The same could be true of Jesus’ most dramatic sign: the raising of the dead. Lazarus returns from the grave, but to what end? How many more years is he to live? The text does not reveal how he adjusted to this second act of life, but we can imagine it was not seamless. It would be so for no one. Did he feel the weight of expectation, the pressure to make his return “worth it”? Did he find his former relationships marked by the unsettling knowledge that somebody had already mourned him once before?
A man who has died and returned is no longer like other men. He has been to the place where all are eventually bound, only to be yanked back into the bright light of the living. Those around him must adjust to his return and the unsettling reality of his absence.
If Borges is correct that mortality gives human life its poignancy, then Jesus’ miracles present an existential paradox. They provide a glimpse of an existence freed from its natural limitations but do not eliminate them. Lazarus is resurrected but not made immortal. The healed blind man will still grow old and die. The leper restored must still reintegrate into a society that defined him by his illness.
These are not fairy-tale transformations. They are interruptions. The world continues, but not exactly as before. Life has been profoundly reshaped for those closest to the miracle, but the rest of society does not know how to accommodate this shift. The newly sighted man, the resurrected friend, the leper restored to health must navigate the quiet alienation that comes with defying the expected course of things.
In the case of Lazarus, the discomfort of his resurrection is so absolute that the religious authorities conspire to kill him. He has become an anomaly, a walking reminder that the world does not always function as it should. His continued existence is a theological offense.
Jesus seems aware of this. After performing a miracle, he instructs the recipient to tell no one. Perhaps this is an act of humility or an attempt to control the growing spectacle of his ministry. But maybe it is an acknowledgment that miracles have complicated consequences. The healed must return to lives that have not paused in their absence. The formerly blind man must convince others that he is still himself. The family that buried their brother must learn how to love him in life again, even as they struggle to forget the pain of his death.
Borges says that death’s presence makes life meaningful. In that light, Jesus's miracles take on an unexpected dimension—not just as demonstrations of divine power but as disruptions to the human condition. What happens when the rules of life are bent, even temporarily? The answer is both wonder and unease. The miracle creates, but it also displaces.
The Rev. Richard Bryant is a clergy member of the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his blog "Elevate the Discourse."