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I have also included the sermon text below. Most of what I said is here, but not all of it.
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Resurrection From the series
Die Like A Man/WomanJohn 11:1-26 • I Corinthians 15 • Romans 6:1-11Zombie literature and movies are everywhere. I would like to know how many of you are fans of The Walking Dead. Go ahead—this is a safe place. You can own it. Here is a quote from one of the truly wise characters in the series, a veterinarian and farmer named Herschel.
"I can't profess to understand God's plan; Christ promised the resurrection of the dead. I just thought he had something a little different in mind.” – Herschel Greene
Tonight, we are going to consider resurrection. We mentioned it in our two previous sermons in this series, Die Like A Man. Speaking Christianly or thinking biblically about death means discussing the resurrection.
On a more personal level, we have to speak of resurrection because all of us are confronted with the loss of those we love sooner or later and more than we want. We need hope, a way to think about what comes next, and the ability to look at our own impending deaths clearly and honestly. So, the question for us tonight is, “Why resurrection?”
Prayer – May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight. O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen.
Where does our belief in resurrection begin? It begins in the beginning, with Genesis. This may seem an odd place to start. But, there is an important phrase in Genesis 1 that is repeated at least seven times. And this phrase speaks to the hope of resurrection. Do you know what it is?
“God saw it was good.”
Creation is a good thing. The pinnacle of God’s creation is us—humanity. We bear his image. Our hope for a resurrection begins with what God says about creation. God says that creation is good, all of it. (Even us.)
Creation may be fallen and damaged, but it is still good. The image of God in humanity may be marred, but it is not obliterated. Creation’s healing occurs as God enters creation through Jesus. This is the Incarnation. We believe in resurrection, in part because we cannot imagine God entering a human body and then simply discarding it like an old suit.
Genesis 1 starts with, “In the beginning God created . . .” and John 1 does the same thing, “In the beginning was the Word…” who we know to be Jesus of Nazareth. And that Word became “flesh and dwelt among us.” ‘He became what we are so that we might become what He is’1 (This means that we become incorruptible through Christ’s incarnation and through the resurrection. We do not become “gods.”)
Of course, God will resurrect humans in some kind of body. These bodies are described as spiritual, transformed, incorruptible, and glorified bodies. God will raise us from the dead in a renewed creation because creation is good, and God has entered into it to save it. A bodily resurrection makes sense because God is the creator and will not leave creation to decay. (This is a point that Athanasius makes over and over again.)
Did the Israelites believe in the resurrection? The answer is: kinda. In the early history of Israel, there’s not much information about what happens after one dies. You go to the abode of the dead, Sheol. And it is unclear whether one is aware of one’s presence in such a place. In other instances, it appears that Israelites believed they would go to be with their ancestors at death. When King David’s infant son dies, he speaks of “going to him.”2
But, in time, the idea of resurrection emerged among most of Judaism. By the time Jesus was on the scene, “they saw resurrection not as an event occurring to an individual, but as something the whole company of God’s people would experience. They were to be fully restored to life in a renewed creation.”3 The exception to this belief was the Sadducees. This is clear in various places through the Gospels and Acts.4
Our Gospel reading today demonstrates that one of these Jewish people believed in the resurrection when Martha said to Jesus,
Master, if you’d been here, my brother wouldn’t have died. Even now, I know that whatever you ask God he will give you.
True to form, Martha both compliments Jesus and takes an understandable jab at him. If only you had been here. But now it’s too late. But, still, I know that God listens to you, so God will do whatever you ask. And Jesus tells her that God will raise Lazarus. Martha then says,
I know that he will be raised up in the resurrection at the end of time.
Here it is: Martha’s clear recognition of the Jewish hope of resurrection at the end of time. God’s work would culminate in bringing Israel back into a new creation.
But Martha wants Lazarus back now. She was not completely without hope, but she wanted Jesus there quicker so that he might keep her brother from dying in the first place. Yet she hopes that God will answer Jesus’ prayer—and God does.
Of course, Lazarus’s resurrection, while amazing, was not permanent. He died again and will be raised again. (That will be an interesting conversation. I would love to ask him about that experience of dying and being raised twice.)
I share this information about Judaism so that we can understand that Jesus’ resurrection did not come out of the blue. There was some sense of resurrection on the distant horizon for God’s people. But Jesus was the first. This was unexpected. And Paul calls this firstness “the first fruits.” Jesus is the first of a great harvest of the dead. Paul speaks this way in I Corinthians 15.
Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, 14 and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.
What the early church thought about resurrection.Some people did not believe in the resurrection at the church in Corinth. There was a Jewish population there, but there were those, whether Jewish or not, that did not buy a resurrection from the dead. They rejected it in principle. And, Paul says, if there is no resurrection (the one Martha hoped for), then Jesus was not raised from the dead. So, when Paul describes Jesus’ resurrection, he considers it part of the same tradition of the Jews who believed God would raise his people from the grave. In Jesus’s case, he is the advanced version of that, the down payment, or, in the words of Paul, “the first fruits of those who have died.”
If God is going to resurrect his people, it is because Jesus is the first one to be raised. Our resurrection is bound up with and is in Jesus’ resurrection. Our resurrection is “inside” Jesus’ resurrection in the same way that our baptism is “inside” Jesus’ baptism, the same way our prayers and worship are “inside” the prayer and worship that Jesus continually offers to the Father. We don’t raise ourselves from the dead any more than we baptize ourselves.
Romans 6:3-5 says,
Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
So, if we are buried with Christ in baptism, we are raised from the water to live a new kind of life. And, likewise, buried with him in baptism, we will be united with him in his resurrection.
Death is related to sin. Sin and corruption are in the world. Sin and corruption mar and deform and deface the image of God. We all go through this! But Jesus’ resurrection has defeated both and brought them to an end. So, in v. 8,
But if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 The death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
As God’s image bearers, when we die to sin, we are made alive because of Jesus’ resurrection. This is not something that happens because of our efforts. And the image of God is restored and renewed. Along these lines, St. Athanasius said this,
What, then was God to do? What else could He possibly do, being God, but renew His Image in mankind, so that though it men might once more come to know Him? And how could this be done save by the coming of the very Image Himself, our Saviour Jesus Christ? Men could not have done it, for they are only made after Image; nor could angels have done it, for they are not the images of God. The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image.5
Dying to sin and all its effects restores God's image. It’s not something we do or can do but what Jesus, the Image of God, has done.
When Jesus is raised from the dead, he is raised incorruptible. Lazarus was raised from the dead and then died again. Yet, the resurrection we read about in I Corinthians 15 and at the end of each of the Gospels describes a resurrection body that,
is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.
Upon hearing those words, we may be tempted to think, well — the Bible says that our bodies will be “spiritual.” Why must we think that they would be material, too? You’ll see that “spiritual” in this instance doesn’t only describe what the body is like but where it originates.
45 Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46 But it is not the spiritual that is first but the physical and then the spiritual. 47 The first man was from the earth, made of dust; the second man is from heaven.
Our bodies are going to be made alive by God’s Spirit. They will be physical, but more. They will be tangible, yet glorified. They can be touched, but they will be capable of doing things that we can barely imagine. Keep in mind what Jesus’ body was like after the resurrection. He appears and then rapidly disappears. He walks through doors that are closed. He even goes incognito. But, then, he eats. His body does things that no human body can normally do, and then he does the stuff we all do.
It is fair to say that we will have more substance, depth, and reality than ever in our resurrection bodies—more of what we were created to be. We are made in God’s image and intend to show that image to a world that needs to see it. In the resurrection, you will still be you—only turned up to 11.
As one of dust, so are those who are of the dust, and as one of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49 Just as we have borne the image of the one of dust, we will also bear the image of the one of heaven. (I Cor 15:48-49)
This doesn’t happen to us by death alone. But by resurrection.
The hope of resurrection doesn’t take the sting of loss away. But we have hope. So, when we see them in the resurrection, those we lose will be more of who they are and who they were created to be. Not less. Because the image of God is restored in them, the intensity of their personhood will be magnified. They will be as they were created to be, only more so. This is because the image of God is fully and completely restored in the resurrection.
We will be more real in the resurrection. This is an idea that C.S. Lewis works with in his book, The Great Divorce. If you’ve not already read it, I encourage you to. It is all about “thickening people up” for the reality of God’s coming world. Though it seems so far away from us, the resurrection is more real than the reality we currently live in.
So, let’s go back to The Walking Dead. Hershel, bless his heart, keeps some of the “walkers” alive in his barn because they are people he knew and loved. He hoped for a cure. Maybe something would be found for them to heal what they had become. The whole point of Zombie Literature (and I am sure there is a degree that you can get in that somewhere) is that the zombie/walker used to be someone we knew—the mailman, the school teacher, the preacher—and has become something that only faintly resembles the original person. One recognizes who the zombie is on the surface, but that person has otherwise become a ghastly monster bent on mindless killing. (I suppose zombies are a commentary on how TV, smartphones, social media, overreaching governments, etc., turn us into mindless monsters.)
But the resurrection of the dead, according to Scripture and according to the example of Jesus, is just the opposite. In the resurrection, we won’t faintly resemble the person we once were. Instead, we will explode with the truth and beauty of who we have been and who we were created to be.
So yes, when it comes to the resurrection, God has something “a little different in mind.” Something better, deeper, richer, and more wonderful.
“And God saw that it was good.”1
Athanasius, On the Incarnation
2
II Samuel 12:23
3
Drama of Scripture, pg. 181
4
Matthew 22:23, Mark 12:8, Luke 20:27, Acts 23:6-8
5
Athanasius, On the Incarnation
