Easter reflection (3.29)
In today’s Lectio Divina meditation (John 11:1-44), the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus, I was reminded of a few years ago when I was the Young Adult pastor at my previous church and we had received word about a beloved member in our community, who had died in a freak hiking accident in South America. I called a prayer meeting as a time to grieve together, that first Sunday after we found out and one by one people came in and we just sat there silently for 20 minutes or so. There are really no human words to comfort, so I felt God leading me to read John 11. We had never experienced the vividness of the story of a tragic death of someone we cared about like we did when the story was read. It was powerful for me to read Jesus’ response to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
I wonder at times if we don’t take the story of John 11 and resurrection concretely enough in the land of plenty. Sadly, it took a tragic death of someone who was young and full of life to remind me that more than the tragedy of one person’s death, is the tragedy of never meeting one of my grandfathers, the cousin who dies from cancer, the explosion in the tower, the HIV+ babies of Swaziland, tribes of peoples in Darfur, humanity itself is under a death sentence brought on by self-destruction. Are we in a denial of death here because we don’t smell it constantly in the air, like an oncology ward? I AM the resurrection and the life is not just talking about vague hope, or fulfillment of Maslow’s highest order of needs–it’s talking about seeing your loved one again, it’s about not having hospitals anymore, no more life insurance, no more morgues, no more eulogies. Easter is about the resurrection–that in Jesus Christ, because he as the second Adam rose again from the dead, it means that we too can rise again from the dead and have an immortal life. Do you believe this?