Life and death. Most of us probably don’t spend a huge amount of time thinking about it – which is probably all to the good. Those who do find themselves thinking a lot about the death part of the duo are often not in a good place and need help or support. But as we enter the run up to Holy Week we are confronted with the most basic questions about what it is to be human, what it means to be alive, and what it means to be dead.
Since we are a very literal generation, we typically have a very limited perspective on what it means to be dead or alive, and we certainly know you are either one or the other. Whether that’s true even in a limited scientific sense I’ll leave to others better qualified than I to debate – and like most scientific questions it’s not as clear cut as many non-scientists imagine. But when it comes to scripture it is clear that the understanding of life and death is much more subtle than our modern rationalist perspective accommodates.
For Jesus, for Paul, and for many writers of scripture the distinction between death and sleep was very blurred. Yes, this was partly because they had little understanding of what was happening in our bodies or brains when we are asleep and how it differed from being awake or being dead. We actually don’t have much more understanding today, despite all our increased understanding of the body and the brain and the mind. But that isn’t really the point. None of those people were trying to solve a scientific puzzle, or create scientific theories. They were trying to help us understand how to live and how to understand what it meant to be alive or not. For them it made perfect sense to think in terms of stones and trees crying out, mountains moving, and for people to move between life and death (Ezekiel 37:12-14). That wasn’t a simple one-way street, a door that only opened one way.
Paul told the Romans that a body could be dead while the spirit was alive, and that a dead body could come back to life (Romans 8:8-11). Jesus told Martha “whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live” (John 11:1-45). Both of them were emphasizing that this wasn’t a matter of coming back to life at some point in the future – as we and Martha believe. Yes Lazarus could come back to life, as did daughter of Jarius in the other gospels. But Paul wants to explain that we can be dead to God while we are still alive: “the body is dead because of sin”, but that if we accept the Spirit then we become alive – truly alive.
If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also,
through his Spirit dwelling in you.
Jesus chooses not to explain in words but to demonstrate, as he so often does. Life and death are about the here and now, not about something that happens in the future. Resurrection is a current reality, not a future possibility.