I Am The Resurrection and the Life

John 11:25-26; 20:26-28; 1 John 3:2-3
Easter Sunday Sermon, April 12, 2009
John Turner

The Dead Are Raised

Jesus was not the first person who served as the human agent in God’s restoring the dead to life. Elijah and Elisha had done so. Lazarus was not the first dead person Jesus had restored. He had restored the son of the widow of Nain and the daughter of Jairus, perhaps many more. Jesus, in reciting to messengers from John the Baptist the signs of his being the Messiah, had said, “the dead are raised,” as though it were not uncommon in his ministry.

Lazarus Is Raised

Nevertheless, the raising of Lazarus is unique in several regards:

(1) It required that Jesus return to Bethany, just two miles outside Jerusalem, where his life had been in danger just months before. And, indeed, John’s Gospel presents the raising of Lazarus as a precipitating event leading to the crucifixion.

(2) Jesus deliberately delayed his arrival until Lazarus should have been dead four days; the common belief in first century Judaism was that the soul departed the body on the third day and that such a raising could not have happened after that, and as Martha so delicately put it, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” This delay heightened the drama and the impact of raising Lazarus.

(3) The raising of Lazarus sets the stage a bit later for Lazarus’ and Martha’s sister, Mary of Bethany, to anoint Jesus with the expensive ointment, which is both a celebration of who Jesus is and an anticipation of his anointing for burial a few days later. All in all, the point is that this man who has the power to give life, who in fact is the divine power of life, nonetheless will allow himself to undergo the agonizing death of a criminal revolutionary, and nonetheless will himself be raised from the dead, and in an utterly new way that will set the pattern for all eternity. Lazarus was restored to this life and would undergo physical death a second time. Jesus was raised to a new dimension of life.

Taking It All In

There is a lot to get one’s head around here:

(1) the fully divine Son of God, agent of God’s kingdom, able to raise the dead,

(2) the fully human and vulnerable Suffering Servant, the atoning sacrifice for human sin, Savior of the world, and

(3) the one who will soon be risen and exalted Lord, ruler of the universe, judge of human history, first citizen of the eternal new creation.

A person who gets his or her head around all this is not of this world, but of God. A person who gets his or her head around all this will see the world and all life not according to the flesh, but according to the way God sees things. A person who gets his or her head around all this is a Spirit-led, born-again child of God. If we really believe the foundational facts of Christian faith, not just accepting them mentally, but letting them become the basic convictions about life on which we take our stand and from which we draw our daily lives, we will be new creations, real Christians, something the world does not see often enough.

Decline in Those Who Identify Themselves as Christian

Two decades ago 86% of Americans identified themselves as Christian. Today, 76% of Americans identify themselves as Christian, a 10% drop in twenty years. I doubt that the people who stopped identifying themselves as Christian were ever really Christian to begin with. Furthermore, I suspect that many who are still calling themselves Christian are not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. Something like 35% of the American population attend a Christian worship service during a given week, and some of those are not there out of any deep conviction.

My guess is that the numbers of Christians who actually base their lives on deeply held convictions about Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord is somewhere in the vicinity of 20%. But it is possible that this minority is more solidly grounded and more deeply committed to living out their faith in mission than ever before. If it’s true that the core is more committed, it’s about time!

I’m not so sure that the world is much helped by people who casually say, “Oh yeah, I’m a Christian.” I am far more interested in seeing the number grow of those whose lives have been changed by an authentic relationship with Jesus Christ, by their knowing firsthand who Jesus is. The change of which I am speaking, is centered in who Jesus is.

Who Jesus Is

I want us to look at three short passages that illuminate who he is.

The first passage, beginning with John 11:25, occurs perhaps several weeks before Resurrection Sunday. Jesus said to Martha, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

This passage tells us that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life, that he is himself the power that can raise the dead and give eternal life to whomever he wills, that he acts with both the power and the authority of God, that he can deliver on any promise that he makes, that he can overcome any obstacle that stands in the way, even death itself. We can trust him to direct our lives even when the path moves through the valley of the shadow of death. In the end he wins, and those who trust him win.

The second passage, beginning with John 20:26, occurs eight days after Resurrection Sunday when Jesus had first appeared to ten of his disciples, Judas and Thomas being absent: Eight days later, his disciples were inside again, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

This passage goes several directions at once:

(1) This passage tells us that Jesus’ resurrection body does not have the same limitations as his previous body. The resurrected Jesus can enter rooms to which all the normal entrances are securely locked. It appears that he can at will transfer from matter to energy and back to matter. When the disciples behold the bodily presence of the resurrected Jesus, they are seeing a visitor from another dimension of reality.

(2) But the risen Jesus’ dimension of reality has some significant continuity with our dimension of reality. As a sign to his disciples, his wounds from the cross can still be seen and touched. Elsewhere we see that the risen Christ can still eat fish and cook breakfast. He is not a ghost. He is not a mere vision. His resurrection is embodied, even if the rules for his body differ from the rules for bodies in our experience. When the disciples see and touch the risen Jesus, they are in fact glimpsing the nature of resurrection bodies in the future new heaven and new earth. Jesus is the firstborn of the new creation, the model of the reality into which those who trust him to be their Savior and Lord will enter.

(3) When Thomas at last believes, he declares Jesus to be his Lord and his God. That is perfectly fitting because anyone who has seen Jesus has seen his divine heavenly Father. The point of this Resurrection Sunday is to enable us to make the same declaration and to be accordingly transformed by having a real God who knows the kinds of bodies and the kind of world we inhabit, who has given himself for our redemption at immense cost, and yet has emerged victorious. When we believe as the basic conviction of our lives that Jesus is both Lord and God, we enter into a new life and a new way of experiencing this life. I recommend it!

The third passage, beginning with 1 John 3:2, is written by the same John whose memories produced the Gospel of John. He is writing many decades after the resurrection to readers who had not yet had the experience of seeing the resurrected Jesus: “Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”

True believers are heading toward a future. What is that future like?

At the time of the 9-11 suicide missions, we learned that at least some Muslim men believe that martyrs for righteous causes will be sated with every sensual pleasure in their future life. They may be partly right. The perfect future will certainly be more pleasurable than we can imagine from earth. But that is the problem with their teaching. Their imagination about what we will find pleasurable in that world is far too limited by what they have desired in this world. Remove the fallenness from us, and then our desires and satisfactions will be greatly transformed. We cannot even guess what that will be like. To limit our future to what our sinful selves desire on earth might be to describe the place of eternal torture rather than of eternal pleasure.

Popular Christianity has often focused on our meetings on the other side with our loved ones as though that is the most important thing about the perfect future. My point is not to deny that such reunions will take place and be pleasurable, but that focus for our dream of a perfect future is as limited as the imaginations of the Muslims and might not have a much better result. Are we really sure that we want our enternity to consist mostly of a big family reunion? How long does it take at your family reunions before someone suffers hurt feelings? And that is your vision of a perfect eternity?!! Okay, so maybe we will be transformed so that we are not inclined to give or receive hurt feelings. Still, a family reunion is a fairly limited view of what might make a perfect future.

What Makes a Perfect Future?

Let me suggest that what makes a perfect future is nothing other than the Father and the Son. When we see Jesus in eternity, we will become little brothers and sisters whose renewal in his image is then at last completed. That is the beginning point for real satisfaction. We will have his purified heart and purpose. We will have satisfying ways to contribute to the richness and enjoyment of our eternal dwelling place. We will rejoice to glorify our Creator with every moment of our lives.

John recommends that a good way to spend this life is to anticipate insofar as possible what that future purification will be like and then to devote ourselves now to pursuing that purification. John’s way of putting it is, “Everyone who hopes in him, purifies himself as he is pure.”

For what do we hope? Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we hope to share his resurrected life. Because Jesus is perfectly righteous, we hope to share his perfection.

In the Bible’s language, hope is not merely wishful thinking, but is a confident expectation based on firm conviction. Our firm conviction is based on the fact that Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life, that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead, and that Jesus Christ is in fact the first-born of the new creation that will be.

As the Apostle Peter wrote, God has caused us to be born anew “to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” On that solid hope we take our stand.

As the Apostle Paul wrote that our hope of glory is grounded in Christ being formed in us so that we are in his likeness; his phrase was, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” He also wrote that this hope will be fulfilled when Jesus is revealed in glory at the fulfillment of all things: “(We are) waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

So, the Apostle John is in company with the other apostles when he invites us to let our Easter hopes shape our life in this world. He is inviting us to live now by that for which we hope. He is inviting us to be Easter people now that we may reign with Christ for eternity.

I invite and challenge you: be an Easter person every day of the year! Live in the hope of glory!