Death and resurrection
John Chapter 11 – 12:11
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
This extraordinary claim by Jesus is at the heart of the Lazarus story—a story that paves the way for our understanding of Jesus’s own death and resurrection that will soon come.
For the Jews of the time of Jesus, resurrection was a controversial idea. Some believed the death of an individual was final…that person ceased to exist except as a memory. Others believed that in the future, at the coming of the Messiah, the faithful dead would again be raised to life.
It was an era where death was more familiar to people than it is in our time, where the messiness of death is hidden away. At that time most people would have died in their homes, and the slaughter of animals took place in the open.
In our day, people hide from the reality of death, shutting it away out of sight and out of mind. More and more memorial services are held without the body present or skipped altogether. We speak of people “passing away” or “passing on” rather than dying.
Theologically the problem with the softening of our understanding of death is that it undermines the miraculousness of resurrection. Resurrection isn’t a vague claim that death isn’t real: it recognizes that death is real, final and painful—which is exactly why the gift of resurrection is so great.
We each will die. Even Lazarus, raised from the dead, presumably aged and died according to the way of all people. But he had witnessed first-hand what we can witness through the testimony of scripture, that death does not have to be the end of the story. For those who live in Jesus Christ, there is a new life to come in the resurrection. Praise be to God.