Getting Closer to God: The Gift We Dare Not Ask For

The scriptures referred to are Matthew 28:1-10.

Two things are certain: death and taxes. Except that some people and companies have become quite adept at avoiding taxes. But nobody can avoid death.

And at a certain point in childhood, we all grasp this. We realize that those we love will someday die. And then, with icy horror, we realize we will die. There will be a day we cease to exist. And most of us try not to think about it any more than we have to.

The Bible mentions it more than we like. Part of that is because, as we said recently, people didn't live as long in the past and died from things we can treat or even cure. These days we are getting a glimpse of what it was like before modern medicine, with people dying everyday from a plague we can't control. At least not yet.

But the main reason the Bible talks about death so often is that it is concerned with ultimate things and ultimate values. Death is about as ultimate as this life gets.

For most of the Old Testament, death was accepted as the natural end of life. The only glimpse of an afterlife is Sheol, which means “pit” and “destruction.” It is pictured, in the words of the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, as “a realm of sleepy, shadowy existence in the depths of the earth.” Though it is said that Sheol is the fate of the wicked in Psalm 49:14-15, in other places seems that all the dead end up there. (Psalm 89:48; Ecclesiastes 9:10)

Resurrection does appear here and there in the Old Testament, though many scholars think it is mostly used as a metaphor for the revival of the nation of Israel. Yet Isaiah says, “Your dead shall live; their corpses shall rise. Wake up and sing for joy, dwellers of the dust, for your dew is a celestial dew, and the earth will give birth to dead spirits.” (Isaiah 26:19) And in Daniel it says, “And many from those sleeping in the dusty ground will awake, some to everlasting life and some to disgrace and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2) But these revelations are not built upon in the Old Testament.

If the Old Testament concept of the afterlife seems as murky as Sheol, things get a lot clearer in the New Testament. The belief in the resurrection was common among the Pharisees and many Jews. (Acts 23:8) But it was something set on the last day of the present evil age and the dawn of the Messianic age. The idea of someone rising from the dead before that was unthinkable. (John 11:23-24) That's one reason the disciples had trouble with Jesus talking about rising on the third day. As it says in Mark, “But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.” (Mark 9:32)

And N. T. Wright points out something that shows just how unprecedented Jesus' resurrection was. He says that whereas the gospels tend to quote the Old Testament to show how everything Jesus did was prophesied long ago, those quotations stop when we get to the resurrection. They did not see this coming. Which also shows that the disciples did not contrive the story of Jesus' resurrection. It's not anything they would have expected.

Jesus is unique among religious figures. Buddha was not resurrected, nor Mohammed, nor the Bab. They left behind wise words and ideas that people are free to adopt or debate or reject. But Jesus came back from the dead. Had he not, he would have been another martyr to the the truth, in the same category as Socrates or Gandhi. He would be revered but his words would have a “take it or leave it” option. But if he is the conqueror of death, if he returned from that “undiscovered country,” then above all, we must sit up and take notice of what he said and did. It's the difference between reading an article about a great event and listening to the person who was there and made it happen.

The resurrection immediately became the center of the Christian faith. In the earliest piece of Christian writing we have, the first letter to the Thessalonians, in the first chapter Paul writes, “For people everywhere report how you welcomed us and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus our deliverer from the coming wrath.” (I Thessalonians 1:9-10) He mentions Jesus' resurrection in most of his letters. And this makes sense since Paul encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Paul, the highly educated, scrupulously observant Pharisee, was not converted by arguments but seeing and talking to the living Christ.

In the gospels, the first witnesses to the resurrection are the women who went to the tomb to anoint his body. They see him and believe. When they tell the male disciples, they don't believe...until Jesus appears to them. Even after the others have seen that Jesus has been raised, Thomas who was absent doesn't believe—until he sees and touches him himself. These were not credulous people buying into wish fulfillment. These were normal rational people who know that folks don't come back from the dead. Until Jesus did. Then everything changed.

Because the implications were that if Jesus rose, so will those who follow him. Yes, many Jews believed in the resurrection on the last day. But that was a distant and unproven hope. It's like some of the features of Einstein's theories. Physicists accepted that they would turn out to be true, but it took decades to actually observe them and prove that they were more than mathematical concepts. It's one thing to accept that there will someday be a bodily resurrection; it's another to see and hear and touch and eat with someone you just saw die 3 days ago.

Let's face it: when you read about the disciples in the gospels there are times you wonder what Jesus saw in these guys. They are pathetic! And Peter, Jesus' second-in-command, is all over the place, being brave and then cowardly, loyal and then denying he even knew Jesus. What about them made Christ think they could set up and spread his kingdom?

And then he is killed and buried and raised to new life. And that's when we see it. Their encounters with the resurrected Jesus galvanizes them. It's like the difference between a lump of soft dough and the loaf of bread coming out of the oven or the malleability of pure iron and its hardness when combined with carbon and heat to make tempered steel. By the book of Acts we see these ordinary men doing extraordinary things.

We have been talking about getting closer to God during the recent church season of Lent. We talked of what we can do for God and what God has done for us. We called the self-sacrifice of Jesus to save us from our slavery to sin the gift we didn't know we needed. His bodily resurrection is the gift we dared not ask for. All living things die. We wish it were not so but eventually we have to accept it. A recent Book TV panel of scientists on longevity said that no one was seriously thinking about achieving immortality. They weren't even primarily interested in lengthening life. They were trying to make people healthier for a longer part of their lives so that they wouldn't be sick and invalided for the last 8 years of life as so many of us are. This body has its limits.

As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection body is different. And we see from what the risen Christ does that he is not limited by time and space, being on the road to Emmaus one moment and inside a locked room in Jerusalem the next. Defeat death and the other limitations of this life are next to go.

Death is real. Many of us are surrounded by its undeniable reality during this plague. Some may not make it. And for those who do, death is just delayed. We will all face it eventually.

But whereas death was murky and dark and frightening before, now we know that it is not to be feared. Because on the other side of the tomb is someone who has been there and done that and is waiting for us. One day like Lazarus we will hear his voice and awaken from the sleep of death and rise and walk out into the light to see the face of the One who is the resurrection and the life.