… And again indignant, he enters the tomb,

and said:

Roll away the stone.

This is already said there, beyond the threshold, in eternity. But still here is Martha-Mary, the mortal horror of all mortal creation:

God! he is already stinking, for he has been in the tomb for four days.

There has never been, and never will be, a more terrible word about death than this, spoken in the face of Life itself. Here, in all its irresistible, insolent force, is the law of mechanical causality, of logical identity: a + b + c = a + b + c; "If you come out of the dust, you will depart into the dust." It seems that you see how Power goes to Force, Enemy to Enemy, Life to Death; it seems that you hear how through the mouth of all creation Death says to Life itself: "His three days have passed, and this is what has happened to him; Thy three days shall pass, and what shall become of thee?"

Jesus said to her,

Martha-Mary, to all creation:

if you believe, you will see the glory of God (38-40).

All that follows is the "vision of glory." But is it only "vision", "deception of the senses", "hallucination" that does not exist? One would have to be a hundred times more of a lackey than Smerdyakov's lackey to make up his mind and be satisfied with that; not to feel that this vision is an epiphany, a breakthrough into another reality, greater than the one in which we live, so that in comparison with it everything that we consider "real" can only be a "deception of the senses", a "hallucination" – something that does not exist.

XXXIV

What Mary saw, we will never know; we can only vaguely guess at this from the word of the Lord spoken on that Sabbath, when, by healing the paralytic of Bethesda, Jesus seemed to have broken, but in fact fulfilled – "fulfilled" – the law of the Father in the freedom of the Son:

If the Son sets you free, you will be truly free. "Whoever keeps My word will never see death." (John 8:36, 51.)

We can also judge this from another word spoken on the day when the Pharisees-lawyers, not daring to execute an adulterous wife, seem to be violating, but in fact fulfilling the Father's law: