"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?'" — John 11:25–26
A Name Is Never Merely a Name
In the tradition of the Church, the name given at baptism is not a label. It is not a convenient identifier attached to a person the way a number is attached to a file. It is a vocation — a calling, a declaration of identity, a placing of the newly baptised within the great company of the saints who bore that name before them, a prayer for the person being named that they will come to resemble what the name means and the saint it honours.
Peter — the rock. Paul — the small one who became large. Mary — the beloved one, the exalted one. Every baptismal name carries a history and a hope: the history of the saint who bore it, the hope that the newly baptised will walk in that saint's way.
When Fr. Buttari poured the water over Neelakandan's head on 14 May 1745 and spoke the baptismal words, the name he gave was Devasahayam.
Tamil. Two words compounded into one. Deva — God, the divine. Sahayam — help, assistance, the aid of one who comes alongside. Devasahayam: God has helped. Or, in the fuller rendering: God is my help.
It is the Tamil form of a Hebrew name — one of the oldest names in the entire biblical tradition, a name so old that it appears already in the genealogies of the Priestly tradition of the Pentateuch: El-azar. El — God. Azar — to help, to come to the aid of. El-azar: God has helped. The Greek rendering is Lazaros. The Latin, Lazarus. The Tamil, Devasahayam.
Neelakandan became Devasahayam — Lazarus — at the font. And the name, as the tradition of the Church has always held, was a prophecy.
Who Lazarus Was
There are two men named Lazarus in the New Testament, and both of them matter to the theology of the name.
The first is the Lazarus of the parable — the poor man covered in sores who lay at the gate of the rich man, longing for the scraps from his table, whom the dogs came to lick. He died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and from Hades looked up and saw Lazarus in comfort and cried out for mercy and was told: between us and you a great chasm has been fixed (Luke 16:26). This Lazarus is the patron of the reversed fortunes of the Kingdom: the last who will be first, the poor who inherit the Kingdom, the man whose suffering in this life was not the final word about his worth or his destiny.
The second Lazarus — the Lazarus whose name Devasahayam was given — is the Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Martha and Mary, the friend whom Christ loved, the man who died and was raised. His story is told in the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John with the fullness and detail that John reserves for the events most laden with theological significance — and it is one of the most theologically dense passages in the entire New Testament.
The Story of Lazarus of Bethany
Lazarus fell ill. His sisters sent word to Jesus: "Lord, he whom you love is ill." The phrasing is exact and important — they do not say come quickly or he is dying or please heal him. They say only: the one you love is ill. They trust the love to do the rest.
Jesus did not come immediately. He stayed where He was two more days. And then He said to His disciples: "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awaken him." And when they misunderstood Him, He said plainly: "Lazarus has died, and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him."
For your sake I am glad that I was not there.
This sentence is the hardest in the passage, and the most important. Jesus was not glad that Lazarus was dead. He wept at Lazarus's tomb — the shortest verse in the English Bible (Jesus wept, John 11:35), and one of the most theologically freighted. God made man wept. He wept because He was standing at the grave of a man He loved and the weight of death — of all death, of every grave, of the grief of Martha and Mary and the mourners and the whole of humanity standing at the edge of what it cannot cross — was upon Him. He wept because He was fully human. And then He raised Lazarus because He was fully God.
For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.
The delay was not indifference. The delay was Providence. The two days that Jesus waited while Lazarus died and was entombed and began to be given back to the earth — those two days were not a failure of love but its fullest expression: the willingness to let the death happen, to let the grief be real, to let the tomb be sealed and the stone be rolled and the four days of decomposition begin, so that when the power of God acted it would act against something real and total and undeniable — not a near-death, not a coma, not an apparent death that a sceptic could explain away, but the actual death of a man whose body was already, as Martha warned, beginning to smell.
"Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?"
Jesus stood before the sealed tomb and prayed — aloud, for the sake of those standing around Him, so that they would know that what was about to happen was not His own power operating independently but the Father's power working through Him in response to prayer. And then He cried with a loud voice:
"Lazarus, come out."
And the dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, his face wrapped with a cloth. And Jesus said: "Unbind him, and let him go."
What the Name Gave Neelakandan
Fr. Buttari gave Neelakandan the name of this man.
Not casually. Not because it was next on a list of available baptismal names. Because the name was a reading of the man standing before him at the font — a reading of where he had come from, what had happened to him, and where he was going.
Neelakandan had come to the font through death. Not his own physical death — he was thirty-three years old and in full health — but the death of everything that had defined him: the cattle dead, the crops failed, the relatives gone, the rituals exhausted and empty, the life of the successful palace official undone from the inside by the suffering that the rituals could not address and the gods could not resolve.
He had experienced what the mystics call the dark night — the stripping away of the supports and consolations that make ordinary life feel secure, leaving the soul exposed to the question it had been too comfortable to ask. And in that exposure he had been reached — by De Lannoy, by the Book of Job, by the God who speaks from whirlwinds and weeps at graves and says to the dead: come out.
He was, in the deepest sense, a man who had been called out of death into life before he ever stood at the font. The baptism was the sacramental confirmation of what grace had already begun. And the name was the sacramental declaration of what it meant: you are Lazarus. You are the man who died and was raised. You are the man to whom God said come out — and you came.
But the name was also a prophecy about what was coming.
Lazarus was raised and then he died again. The tradition of the Church — preserved in the ancient accounts that are not in the canonical Gospels but are part of the deep memory of the Church in the East — tells us that after the resurrection Lazarus lived for thirty more years, serving the Church he had been given back to. But he died. The raising was not an exemption from death. It was a sign — a sign pointing forward to the Resurrection of Christ, which is the only resurrection that does not end.
Devasahayam received the name Lazarus at the font and he too died. Seven years after his baptism. He was thirty-nine years old. He was shot on a mountain in the jungle. His body was left in the jungle and recovered on the fifth day by priests who found his bones and his incorrupt tongue.
He died. And then — in the way the Church means when she canonises a man and places his name in her calendar and builds shrines at the places he lived and died and invites the faithful of every century to bring him their needs — he was raised. Not from the particular death on the mountain, as Lazarus was raised from the particular death in the tomb at Bethany. From the general death that claims every human body, into the particular, unrepeatable, eternal life that Christ's own Resurrection opened.
Jesus, save me — his last words — were answered. He was saved. He is alive. The name was fulfilled.
El-Azar Across the Bible
The name El-azar — of which Devasahayam is the Tamil form — appears throughout the Hebrew Bible in ways that illuminate the full theological weight of what Buttari was giving Neelakandan.
Eleazar, the son of Aaron, who inherited the high priesthood after his brothers Nadab and Abihu were struck down for offering unauthorized fire before the Lord. He served faithfully through the wilderness years and into the conquest of Canaan, the priestly mediator between the people and the God they were still learning to approach. El-azar: God has helped — the priest whose ministry was itself a declaration that it was not his own power that sustained the relationship between God and Israel, but God's.
Eleazar the scribe, in the Second Book of Maccabees, who accepted death under Antiochus Epiphanes rather than eat pork and violate the Law of God. He was ninety years old. Those administering the ordeal offered to bring him meat he was permitted to eat and to pretend it was pork, so that he could satisfy his captors without actually violating the Law — a face-saving compromise that would have preserved his life and harmed no one, outwardly. He refused. "Such pretence is not worthy of our time of life," he said, "lest many of the young should suppose that Eleazar in his ninetieth year has gone over to an alien religion, and through my pretence, for the sake of living a brief moment longer, they should be led astray because of me." He accepted the blows and died. His name was El-azar: God has helped.
The pattern is consistent. The name belongs to priests and martyrs — to men who stood at the boundary between the human and the divine, who served as mediators, who refused to allow the comfortable compromise to displace the truth, who found that God has helped was most fully true precisely in the moment when every human help had been exhausted and the only remaining resource was God Himself.
Devasahayam stands in this line. The high-caste Hindu official who became a lay apostle. The court administrator who became a martyr. The man who refused the comfortable compromise — deny the Faith and your position and your comfort will be restored to you — at the cost of everything the world could take from him. The man who found, in chains and in wounds and in the final moment on the mountain, that God has helped was the truest thing that could be said about his life.
El-azar. Lazaros. Lazarus. Devasahayam.
The same name. The same truth. Across three thousand years of Scripture and tradition and martyrology, the same declaration: the help that finally matters, the help that reaches into the places where human help cannot go, the help that speaks to the dead and the help that raises them — that help is God's.
The Name and the Patron
When a Catholic receives a baptismal name, they receive not only the meaning of the name but the saint who bore it — a heavenly patron, a specific intercessor, a person already in the presence of God who is asked to accompany and pray for the newly baptised through the rest of their earthly life.
Neelakandan's heavenly patron, from the moment of his baptism, was Lazarus of Bethany — the man Christ wept for, the man Christ raised, the man to whom Christ said come out and who came. The man whose resurrection is the last and greatest of the seven signs of John's Gospel, the sign that immediately precedes the Passion narrative, the sign that makes the authorities determined to kill Jesus — because a man who can raise the dead cannot be managed, cannot be contained, cannot be safely ignored.
Lazarus of Bethany spent the rest of his earthly life as a sign — not a sign he manufactured or performed, but a sign he simply was, by existing. He was the man who had been dead and was alive. Every person who looked at him was looking at the evidence of what Jesus of Nazareth had done. He couldn't stop being that. He didn't need to do anything. He just needed to be present, and his presence was the testimony.
Devasahayam, after his baptism, was the same kind of sign in Travancore. He was the man who had been dead — in the deeper, more important sense of the word — and was alive. He had been given a new name and a new life and a heavenly patron who had been through death and been brought back by the One who is the resurrection and the life. He just needed to be present. And his presence — in the courts of Travancore, at table with the marginalized, in the chains of Aralvaimozhi — was the testimony.
The Name Is Still Being Fulfilled
On 15 May 2022, Pope Francis stood in Saint Peter's Square and spoke a name in the list of the canonised: Devasahayam.
The name echoed across the square, across the live-stream screens in the parishes of Kanyakumari, across the centuries of prayers and pilgrimages and petitions that had preceded this moment. The Church declared: this man is in the presence of God. This man is alive. The death on the mountain was not the last word. The last word is the same word that was spoken outside the tomb at Bethany, the same word that echoes through every canonisation, the same word that the Church stakes her entire existence on:
He is risen.
Not from the specific tomb. From death itself. Into the life that Christ's own resurrection opened — the life that has no end, the life in which the name Devasahayam is still El-azar, still God has helped, still the declaration of the one truth that the martyrdom was given to proclaim.
God has helped.
In the losses that brought Neelakandan to De Lannoy. In the nine months of instruction that formed him for the font. In the baptism that made him Devasahayam. In the four years of apostolate. In the three years of chains. In the thirty-two wounds that did not break him. In the five bullets on the mountain. In the incorrupt tongue found among the bones. In the Te Deum sung across the churches of Kanyakumari. In the 270 years of petitions and cause and diocesan inquiries and Vatican commissions and the miracle of the child healed in the womb. In the canonisation in Saint Peter's Square.
At every point, at every turn, in every circumstance where human help was exhausted and the only remaining resource was God's:
God has helped.
El-azar. Devasahayam.
The name was given at a font in Vadakkankulam in 1745. It is still true.
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