The famous Christian writer C.S. Lewis once suggested that Lazarus was the first Christian martyr. Why did he make this unusual claim? His contention was that Lazarus had already gone through the experience of death when Jesus called him back to life. Lazarus would then need to go through the process of dying again at a later time. By being brought back to life, Lazarus was, Lewis suggested, the first disciple who was called upon to commit to dying for Christ.
This take by Lewis might seem a bit strange, but it points to a deeper reality. Our physical life in this world is not our final end. It is not the ultimate life we hope for. As is often the case in The Gospel of John, there are layers of meaning in the passage for this Sunday.
On the one hand, there is our physical life, which ends in death. At the time of Jesus, the Sadducees, the Israelite group that controlled the Temple, believed that physical death was the end and that there would be no afterlife. But another school of thought, cultivated by the Pharisees, who were the leaders of the local synagogues, held a different perspective. They believed in the resurrection of the dead. After the death of the body, each person would enter into a sort of stasis until all the dead would be raised. Moreover, resurrection wasn't just for the good, but for evildoers as well. All would rise. The evil would rise to a new life of punishment. The good would rise to a blessed life, a perfected earthly paradise.
The Pharisees were on the right track. The Church teaches that our current physical world will not continue eternally but will come to an end. At the end of time, Christ will return and remake the world, transforming it into a perfected realm imbued with his love and glory, which is described in The Book of Revelation as the New Jerusalem or the New Heaven and New Earth.
When the world is remade, all human beings will also be resurrected. Our physical bodies will come back to life and will be reunited with our souls. In our culture, we see three different depiction of the physical body coming back to life after death. One is what we might call revivification, which is the stuff of Zombie movies. In this scenario, the dead body is given the power to move around but still retains its state of decomposition. The second depiction is what we can call resuscitation, when a dead body is restored to regular human life.
Resurrection is clearly not the first of these options, the Zombie-like revivification of a corpse. Nor is resurrection the second option, mere resuscitation. When Jesus raises the dead in the Gospels, he does not yet resurrect them. He returns them to ordinary biological human life. In the case of Lazarus, Jesus restores the body from any corruption that had already set in, given that Lazarus was in the tomb for four days, but Jesus gives him the kind of body we all have on this earth.
By contrast, in the resurrection, we receive a glorified body. As we see from the resurrection narratives, the resurrected body of Christ is still physical. He is able to eat with the disciples. He invites Thomas, who is initially doubtful, to touch his wounds. At the same time, his resurrected body also transcends the restrictions of our physical world. He can appear and disappear. He can enter the room despite the locked door.
In the resurrection, our physical body is perfected and is reunited with our soul. For those who have embraced God's love and have chosen to be eternally united with God, the resurrected body will create a sense of completion. The wholeness of our being is restored, which deepens our experience of the joy, peace, and contentment of Heaven.
Unlike in our earthly life, our physical body will no longer be a source of suffering. We will no longer grow tired or hungry. We will not age or get ill. We will never die again. But what Jesus offers is much more than just continued human life. He invites us to become partakers of his own divine life. What he offers is not simply the continuation of human life in a perfected state, but divine life itself. When we are baptized into Christ, we start partaking of his divine life in our earthly life already. We increase our participation by orienting our lives on him, through our prayers, the sacraments, acts of love, and all the many elements of the practice of our faith.
When we die, even though our body dies, we are spiritually assumed into that full union with Christ, without losing our sense of individual identity. Then, at the end of the world, when the whole cosmos is remade, our body will be resurrected along with all the bodies of all people who have ever lived. Our soul will be united with our resurrected body and we will live eternally in Christ. In the Gospel passage for this Sunday, Jesus resuscitates Lazarus as a sign of the resurrection to come. He gives him back his earthly life to show the disciples that new life is awaiting them after death. Our goal should be not to cling to this earthly life at all cost, but to live always in anticipation of our resurrected life, when we will live united with Christ, eternally imbued with God's infinite love, absolutely fulfilled, fully at peace, in unending joy.
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The readings for the Fifth Suday of Lent, Cycle A, are:
Ez 37:12-14
Psalm 130:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8
Rom 8:8-11
Jn 11:1-45
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: First Century Jewish Tomb by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.