Joseph grinned. “Breathe the air. Clean. No smoke. No stench from the rivers. And one cannot see the city from here. Peace.” He sighed. “No noise, no distractions. Do you wonder that Jesus preferred staying here whenever he came to Jerusalem?”

With an assist from the declining terrain, our pace quickened as we neared the village. To my right I could see a solid limestone cliff rising twenty feet or so and extending along the base of a small hill for more than a hundred yards.

“The tomb where Lazarus was raised is there,” Joseph said casually, nodding toward the miniature gray range streaked with rusty veins of iron.

I stopped in my tracks and stared. How many times had I agonized over that famous resurrection scene? How often had I read and reread each sentence in that eleventh chapter from John that reported, in powerful and unequivocal terms, how Jesus had brought a dead man back to life? How long did I search for a clue among those simple words—some whisper that only I might hear that would help me to relate that resurrection story to the one that followed a few months later?

“Matthias, are you coming?”

I hurried to catch up. “No need to try to see the tomb site from here,” Joseph assured me. “If we have time, after you have finished with Martha and Mary, I’m certain they would have no objection if we visited it up close.”

If we had time? I had to see that tomb up close—very close! “Joseph, whatever happened to Lazarus? All I’ve been able to locate on him are some old traditions concerning his visits to the south of Gaul.”

“Lazarus has not rested since Jesus was crucified. Always he travels and always alone, from Hebron to Antioch, preaching in the synagogues and the streets and telling the people how Jesus raised him from the dead. Of course he is his own best witness.” Joseph laughed. “He tells them, ‘Look at me, feel me, touch my skin. Once I was dead and now I live through the grace and power of Jesus and his Father who is in heaven.’ Ah,” Joseph exclaimed, “at last we have arrived.”

The home of Martha and Mary was larger than most of their neighbors’ although constructed in the same boxlike shape and of the same rough stone that was so abundant in the meadows and hills. Two small latticed windows flanked a solid wooden door, and nailed to the doorpost was a thin brass mezuzah. Before he knocked, Joseph said, “This was the house of Simon, a man of considerable wealth, to whom Martha was wed. Simon contracted leprosy of the worst kind and died before the two were ever blessed with child. Martha’s brother and sister, Lazarus and Mary, came here to live soon after Simon’s passing.”