Fictional
heroes rarely die. Or stay dead. It used to be different. Beowulf dies fighting
a dragon. King Arthur dies at the battle of Camlann. Robin Hood dies
and is buried where his arrow falls. Hercule Poirot dies. The notable
exception is Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sick of his
creation and thought Holmes kept him from being recognized for his
more serious works. Holmes had been saved before by the author's
mother. But with her passing, Doyle felt he could finally put an end
to the Master Detective and did so in the story The Final Problem.
It is said that British readers wore black arm bands showing that
they were in mourning for Sherlock Holmes. Ten years later, Doyle had
a great story in mind which he could not get to work. Then he realized
it would be a perfect story for Holmes and Watson. He dated it before
Holmes' demise but the publication of the Hound of the
Baskervilles renewed public clamor for more stories about the
sleuth of Baker Street. So Doyle resumed the adventures. Originally,
he had written Holmes' death so that it wasn't so much witnessed as
deduced by Watson. Using that loophole he resurrected Sherlock Holmes
and the game was afoot once more.
Since then it's
been popular to kill off or appear to kill and then resurrect pop culture heroes. James Bond, Mr. Spock,
Magnum P.I., Neo, and every comicbook superhero from Superman to the
majority of the X-Men have died or seemed to and come back again. For
the titular character of Doctor Who,
it's part of his DNA. As a Time Lord, the Doctor can regenerate after
an otherwise fatal injury up to 12 times. We just found out that the
Eleventh Doctor will die and regenerate on this year's Christmas
special. Look for the writers to figure out a way to get past that
number 12 when the next actor decides to move on.
The
reason modern day heroes get resurrected is the same reason Doyle
brought his creation back—popularity and money. But the idea of resurrecting a hero probably goes back to Jesus.
Before
Jesus, there is no religion that posits bodily resurrection. The
early Jews' concept of the afterlife was shadowy Sheol, where all the
dead go. Even in Jesus' day, not all Jews believed in resurrection.
Hinduism does have reincarnation but that is not a joyful concept. It
is karma. If you come back it's not a reward but an ordeal you have to undergo to be a better person. You want to be a good Hindu so that
you can progress upward through the cycle of death and rebirth until
you achieve Nirvana, literally the “blowing out” of the flame of
life, at least as an individual. You are absorbed into the world soul. Be a good Buddhist and you can skip
reincarnation altogether and get to Nirvana in one lifetime.
Exceptional Norse warriors who died in battle were selected by the Valkyrie to go to Valhalla so they can fight in a doomed attempt to
prevent the deaths of Odin, Thor and all the major gods at the end of
the world at Ragnarok. In all of these religions you ultimately end
up dead forever.
But
with Jesus, things change. The afterlife is not just being a memory
and a name to your descendants or some shadowy existence as a
disembodied ghost. God will bring you back completely in a new and
improved body, as he did with Jesus. Theologians disagree as to
whether we sleep or are awake in our interim state but in either case
the faithful are with God up to the time of their resurrection. (Nowhere in the Bible are the dead depicted
as having wings and halos or walking about on clouds, playing harps.)
Resurrection
does have at least 3 major implications. First, it affirms God's
power. Secondly, it affirms God's nature. Thirdly, it affirms the
goodness of creation. Let's examine these as we look at our Old
Testament and Gospel readings.
Our
passage from 1 Kings 17 picks up in the middle of a contest between
Yahweh, the God of Israel, and Baal, the Phoenician god of fertility,
rain and storms. Ahab has come to the throne of the northern kingdom
of Israel. He built a temple to Baal in Samaria, the political and
religious capital of Israel. Child sacrifice is being practiced in Israel. This
is probably due to the influence of Ahab's wife Jezebel, daughter of
the pagan king of Sidon. We find out in the next chapter that she is
systematically killing off the prophets of Israel's true God.
So
through Elijah, whose name means “Yahweh is my God,” the Lord
issues a challenge. He will bring a drought upon the land. No rain
shall fall for 3 years. In other words, God will negate the power of the storm
and fertility god, Baal. To protect him from Jezebel, God tells
Elijah to hide in the Kerith Ravine, where he can drink from the
brook and obtain food from the ravens. We're not sure if the ravens
brought food directly to Elijah or if he simply observed where they
hid their food in the rocky crags of the ravine. The arrangement
works until the drought causes the brook to run dry. So God sends
Elijah to the last place you'd expect him to be: a Phoenician town
belonging to Sidon, Jezebel's hometown! God is bearding Baal in his
own den, so to speak.
Ezekiel
comes to Zarephath and as he approaches the town gate, he sees a
widow gathering sticks. He can tell she is poor by the fact that she
is gathering sticks not under trees but in the gate, where they must
have fallen from the bundles others were bringing in. He asks her to
bring him water, a normal request according to the customs of
hospitality. But when he asks for bread, the widow bursts out with
the information that she only has a handful of flour and a dollop of
olive oil, evidence of the drought. She was going to make a last meal
for her and her son. Elijah assures her that God will not let her and
her son starve but will stretch her food supplies till the drought
ends.
Elijah
stays in an upper room and this arrangement works until the widow's
son gets gravely ill. When the boy could no longer breathe, the widow
takes this for some kind of divine punishment. Elijah asks for the
boy and takes him up to his room.
Elijah
is upset as well. He asks God why is he letting this disaster come
upon his landlady. Then
he does something odd by modern standards. He lays himself out at
full length upon the child 3 times. The prophet's successor, Elisha,
does the same thing and we get a fuller description of the procedure:
he lays mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes and hand to hand with the dead
child. It was believed that demons entered people that way and the
prophet may have been trying to drive them out by transferring his
vitality or the Holy Spirit to the child. This would be akin to
sympathetic magic except for the prayers Elijah cries to God to
bring the boy back. When the boy is alive again, the widow recognizes
the power of the Lord. Again God bests Baal, the fertility god, in
his own territory.
In
Luke 7, Jesus deals with a more severe case with a lot less drama. He
is going to Nain, a town a couple of miles south of Nazareth. As he
approaches the gate of this town, he sees a widow following the bier
carrying her only son to be buried. Jesus has compassion on her
(wasn't his own mother a widow by now?) and tells her not to weep.
Then he touches the bier, making himself ritually unclean for at
least a day, a week if he actually touched the corpse. He says to the
body, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” And the man sits up and
talks. And Jesus gives him to his mother. The people are awe-struck
and praise God.
Let's
look at the 3 things we mentioned earlier in the light of these
events. Resurrection affirms God's power. We speak of the power of
life and death belonging to God. But it's bringing people back to
life impresses others as the work of God and causes them to praise him. It's not like it happens very often. The Elijah account is the first in the Bible that
depicts someone coming back to life. In 66 books the Bible only
records 10 instances of people being raised to life: this one with
Elijah, 2 attributed to his protege Elisha, 3 people raised by Jesus,
and 1 each attributed to Peter and to Paul. That leaves the events of
Holy Week. Matthew mentions that “the bodies of many holy people
who had died were raised to life.” Just how many and who we aren't
told. And God raised Jesus, of course. Each of these are displays of
the power of God. Only God can give life, especially after death.
I've performed CPR on a patient—unsuccessfully I might add.
Statistically, between 2 and 30% of those receiving CPR are revived,
with the variations depending on the underlying health and age of the
victim, the cause of their cardiac or respiratory arrest, the elapsed
time between arrest and the start of CPR and the technique of the
person giving CPR. Averaging them all out, only 8% survive. It's
better than 0% but it shows that we have not yet mastered death.
Only
God gives life. And that speaks to the nature of God. God gives us
good things. Life is the first gift, the gift one must have to enjoy
all of his other gifts. God is generous, giving this gift to all. But
he expects us to use it in the spirit in which it was given: to make
creation better, more beautiful, to make our relationships and
communities more loving, more reflective of his nature. He sent Jesus
that we might have life and have it more abundantly.
By
raising Jesus from the dead, God not only vindicates what Jesus is
and says but he also shows the importance he places on life. He is
not fixated on death or only on the immaterial. To paraphrase C.S.
Lewis, contrary to what some people think, God likes bodies and
matter and this world. He invented them. He doesn't want to abandon
the material world for the spiritual but to wed the 2, to bring them
together, so that the material gives form to the spiritual and so
that the spiritual gives meaning to the material. Mostly, as he did
with his battered, abused, and dead son, he wants to resurrect this
broken world. He wants to redeem and restore the planet he created as
a paradise and the people he created to take care of it.
We've
anticipated the third thing that resurrection implies: that creation,
all the creatures that inhabit it, and our bodies, which were created
good and pronounced to be such by our Creator, are still valued by
him. So much so, that he sent his son to redeem them at the cost of
his life. And in Jesus' resurrection, God reveals how he will do
that. Paul tells us that we need to die with Christ in baptism to be
raised with him. And that's what God will do with his ailing
creation. Some people get hung up on the end of the world stuff in
the Bible. But it's no more the end than Jesus' death was the end.
Things will get bad, we are told in the gospels and the Book of
Revelation, but the point is that God's will for us cannot be
thwarted. He can take the worst we can do to his world, to each other
and to ourselves and give it new life. The end result of his salvation: a new creation--a new heaven and a new earth populated by his people made new.
I
mentioned that Paul saw in baptism, where we become dead to sin and
alive in the Spirit, a parallel to Christ's death and resurrection.
Nor is it merely a metaphor. Just as Jesus physically died and rose
again to new physical life (or perhaps we should say, physical life
Plus!) we really die spiritually to sin and its consequences when we
let Christ into our lives and really find ourselves come alive
spiritually. As Paul says in Galatians 2:20, “ I have
been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in
me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of
God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” If I receive a new
heart, both I and the donor must die. My diseased heart is removed
and only when the new heart is implanted and hooked up and started
up, do I begin to really live again. Jesus died to give us his life,
life eternal, so we may live like him, alive to God and in God.
It's
weird but many heart transplant recipients report picking up the
habits and interests of their donors, like music, art, vegetarianism,
and career choice. A 47 year old man who received the heart of a 14
year old girl now giggles as she did. A seven month old who received
the heart of a 16 month old walked up to a strange man at church,
hugged him and called him daddy. It was the donor's father whom he
had never met. A 56 year old college professor who received the heart
of a 34 year old police officer has vivid dreams of a flash of light
in his face and then seeing Jesus. The officer was killed when he was
shot in the face. With Christ's Spirit within us, our lives also
change and his interests and qualities become ours.
And we know that in the end God will make everything right. No one who seeks him will be lost, no one who asks for him will be unanswered, no one who knocks will be barred from the kingdom. Whatever is beautiful, though it be destroyed, will be restored; whatever is true, though it be shouted down, will be heard; and whoever relies on God totally, though he dies, yet he will live again.
The resurrection of Jesus says that ultimately nothing and no one can kill those God loves. And if you are in Christ, that includes you.
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