Jacob Epstein's Lazarus (1947-48, New College Chapel, Oxford) is one of the most powerful works of sacred sculpture in the 20th century, and it arrives at its power through a strategy that challenges the entire tradition of triumphant resurrection imagery: it depicts Lazarus not as risen and free but as still in the process of emerging - half-bound, half-awake, between the darkness of the tomb and the light of the living.
The biblical source is John 11:1-44, one of the longest and most emotionally rich passages in the Gospels. Lazarus of Bethany, brother of Mary and Martha, dies while Jesus is away; Jesus delays his return; the sisters grieve; Jesus arrives to find Lazarus dead four days. Jesus weeps (John 11:35 - the shortest verse in the New Testament, and perhaps its most theologically significant). He goes to the tomb. He commands the stone to be removed. He calls: 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man comes out 'with his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.' Jesus says: 'Take off the grave clothes and let him go' (John 11:44).
Epstein's sculpture depicts the moment before 'take off the grave clothes.' Lazarus is upright - he has obeyed the call, he has come out, he is alive - but he is still wrapped. The heavy stone he is carved from (Portland stone, the same material that built St Paul's Cathedral) makes the wrappings not decorative but physically present: the sculpture cannot move freely because the stone material and the grave wrappings are, in this work, the same substance. The figure is rising from the material of death.
This creates a visual theology of resurrection as process rather than event, as emergence rather than appearance. The figure does not burst from the tomb in triumphant liberation - the standard mode of resurrection imagery from the Early Church onward. It struggles upward, encumbered, still carrying the wrappings of the death it has left. This is not the glorified body of 1 Corinthians 15:42-44 but the still-bound body of the moment of returning - the life that has heard the call but not yet had its grave clothes removed.
The sculpture provoked controversy in Oxford when it was installed in New College Chapel in 1948. Some found it too ambiguous - is this resurrection or horror? Others found its refusal of triumphalism theologically more honest than conventional treatments. Epstein, who was Jewish by birth and deeply engaged with Christian imagery without formal Christian commitment, brought to the subject an outsider's clarity: he saw the Lazarus story as a story about the terrifying vulnerability of a man recalled to life, not the comfortable story of a miracle neatly performed.
The chapel setting - where the sculpture stands in the ante-chapel, encountered before the worship space - places the viewer in the position of the original witnesses: facing a figure that has come back from death, still wrapped, needing them to take the grave clothes off. The command of John 11:44 is not over; it addresses every new encounter with Epstein's Lazarus.