The Last Word and Then...

I am the resurrection and the life … whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this? (John 11:25-26).

It can be one of the worst places on earth: the fresh grave of one we love.  Even in the midst of fellow-mourners, it can feel so desperately and awfully lonely.  And perhaps we have ringing in our ears something we heard in church once: “God is never late, but he’s never early, either.  He’s the God of 11:59!”  

For Martha and Mary, it’s been four days since their brother Lazarus’s “11:59.”

“I am the resurrection and the life … whoever lives and believes in me will never die.  Do you believe this?” Jesus says to the grieving Martha.  “Yes,” she replies, somewhat indirectly, “I believe you are the Messiah …”  But not even the Messiah, as Martha understood it, could do anything about death, at least not in our here and now.

Jesus didn’t ask Martha if she believed he was the Messiah; he asked if she believed that he was the resurrection and the life, that whoever believes in him will live, even though he dies, and that whoever lives and believes in him will never die.  Martha is not at all sure she believes that, at least not yet.

But, as Jesus is about to demonstrate, death does not have the last word; Jesus does.  Life in Christ does not grant us “immunity” from mortality, does not give us a “pass” around the grave.  But the Word by whom all things were spoken into existence, the Word who sustains all things in their existence, is also the Word that speaks a better word than Death.  Not by skipping over death, but by going directly into it, defeating it, and coming out, alive in resurrection life.

We experience death in many ways throughout our lives: the death of hopes and dreams, the death of relationships, of businesses, of justice, of parents, siblings, and, hardest of all, children.  All the things – so many of them the good gifts of God! – we trust and rely upon to deliver us from death cannot fulfill the trust we place in them.  Stuff can’t do it, people can’t do it, wealth, health, education, religiosity, achievement can’t do it.  

Our world constantly bombards us with messages and images of how “alive!” we will be if we only do this or buy that.  However, this world is nevertheless shadowed and haunted by death, and has no answer for it other than to kneel to it in submission and defeat.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus says.  There is another Word speaking over all the graves of our lives, over all the shattered, ruined and ravaged places where we have experienced death in some way.  The final Word, the word beyond the last word of death, is Life.  Resurrection life.

There is a Day coming when Jesus the Word will command all who have entrusted their lives to him to “Come out!” of our graves.  Perhaps we should learn to live each day in the light of that Day, to face each of our encounters with death with the sound of that Command ringing in the ears of our hearts, to learn to live in this Light, that the Final Word belongs to Jesus.  

“Take off the grave clothes and let him go!” are Jesus’s final words in this chapter.

Are there any kinds of graves you’re lying in, or grave clothes you’re tied up in?  What might believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life look like as you face the various ‘deaths’ you have experienced or will be facing?

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