Indulging in a Bit of Speculation

One of the things noted by New Testament commenters since The Beginning is that gospel writers are not as obsessed with exact chronology as modern historical writers are. Papias sums things up when he tells us that “Mark became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered, not, indeed, in order, of the things said and done by the Lord.”

This seems to be the case with all the gospel writers, more or less. It’s not that the gospels are an ahistorical jumble. When chronology really matters to them, they can be pretty careful at times. But when you are summarizing Jesus’ basic stump speeches (as, for instance, in the Sermon on the Mount) which he gave a zillion times and not just once, or publishing The Collected Parables of Jesus of Nazareth, or gathering up Memoirs of Startling Things We Witnessed in our Travels with the Messiah, that stuff doesn’t necessarily tend to get remembered by jotting it in a datebook and tends to get spilled out willy nilly and connected with other stuff in the service of the Overall Story. John only picks seven signs out of Jesus’ career to focus on and he is fond of tying them to Jewish feasts and festivals to help anchor their meaning in Jewish tradition before moving on to showing how it all flowers into deeper meaning in light of the Resurrection the the life of the Church. He himself makes clear that “there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:25).

Other gospel writers recount stuff that Mark tells us (along with another collection of sayings commonly called Q. And Luke and Matthew also have their own sources independent of each other and Mark/Q. They put it together in roughly chronological order, but since the sayings of Jesus are often things he doubtless said many times, it often doesn’t matter where in the story of his career it goes.

Of course, some material (most notably the Passion/Resurrection narrative) records things that, by definition, only happened once. What is striking about that material is how similar it is. The Synoptics (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are clearly preserving variations of a common memory in the account of the Last Supper (John is writing under the assumption you know those traditions and is aiming to do something else). Same goes for the Passion narratives. You get trivial differences like the words of the Institution of the Eucharist, but what sticks out is how obviously similar they are.

I mention all that because of the curiosities of the gospels is that, with one remarkable exception, no character in Jesus’ parables is ever named. That exception is the story, preserved only in Luke, of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).

Why “Lazarus”? And why name him at all?

My own opinion? Because the parable was told, I think, at the dinner celebrating the raising of Lazarus that is recorded in John 12. Set in that context, it is even richer and more pointed in its irony.

The parable is thrown into a bunch of other sayings by Luke (who has his own purposes for placing it where he does in his narrative) and given no particular time context. John, meanwhile, mentions the dinner being held six days before Passover. He also, interestingly, has already introduced Mary of Bethany as the one “who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair” (Jn 11:2). Why does that matter? Because John has not yet told the story of Mary anointing Jesus. But that is the thing Mary is famous for in the early Christian community. Jesus himself had long ago marked her for that distinction:

And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it over his head. But there were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment thus wasted? For this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and given to the poor.” And they reproached her. But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” (Mk 14:3–9)

The point is, there were not throngs of women chasing Jesus around and anointing him. There was just one woman who did this, and Jesus was so struck by her gesture that he singled out her and her alone to be remembered for it for all time. Moreover, it appears to have been an open secret in the Christian community as to who she was. Curiously, the synoptics never give her name, but by the time John writes, she is safely dead and so can be named. But because it is an open secret, she is already known in the tight-lipped and cautious early Church that does not blab its secrets to outsiders when those secrets could result in persecution or sacrilege. So Mary’s name is withheld from writing till she is dead. But Mary is so well known inside the community that John can identify her by her gesture in John 11 before telling her story in John 12,

So John says the anointing of Jesus is her response of gratitude to the raising of her brother Lazarus. And the Parable’s poignant ending (in which the Rich Man asks to be sent back to warn his brother and is rebuked with the words, “‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.’” (Lk 16:31)) is a very sharp commentary on the fact that, even with Lazarus sitting right there eating and drinking, both the people scheming to kill Lazarus and his own disciple Judas Iscariot were too hard hearted to get what was going on–a lesson clearly applicable far beyond that little circle.

Indeed, the paradox of the raising of Lazarus is that it 1) solidified the decision of the Sanhedrin to have him killed (since it was better for one man to die that that the whole nation should perish at the hands of the Romans worried about messianic claimants), 2) provided the occasion for Judas to betray Jesus (because the rebuke about the anointing was the last straw for Judas), and 3) foreshadowed his coming burial–and Resurrection.

Some take offense at Jesus’ remark “The poor you have with you, but you will not always have me” and charge him with callousness to the poor. I think that is pretty hard-assed toward him given what he knows is coming for him in a couple of days. If you cannot even have some empathy for him when he says, “She has done this for my burial” I question whether you, any more than Judas, really care all that much about the poor. I also think that given the clear teaching of Jesus in the parable itself (not to mention that it was his habit, despite having no money himself, to keep something on hand to give to the poor) the notion that the takeaway is “Jesus doesn’t care about the poor” is pretty dumb.

Anyway, try reading John 11-12 and then reading Luke 16:19-31 and imagine yourself at that party with Jesus telling that parable with Lazarus right at his side and people milling in and out to gawk at Lazarus, whisper about what a fraud it is, marvel at what a miracle it is, and gossip about what the Authorities are saying, all while Judas stews in his own juices at the uppity woman who frittered away the money he wanted, all while Jesus persists in teaching from Current Events even as he feels his time rapidly running out and the walls closing in. I think it’s a deeply poignant meditation all cast in the shadow of the cross and the blinding light of the coming Resurrection.