By Pastor Joshua Hankins
“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.” John 11:25
Christian funerals are a time to embrace what feels like two conflicting theological realities all at once. One sentiment often repeated in funerals that never quite sits right with me is, “he’s not really dead”. Of course, I know what the pastor means, our departed brother’s soul is in heaven in the presence of God. But I can’t shake the feeling that this sentiment contradicts the reality that stares us in the face, the reality that brought us all together at this funeral— someone is actually dead. Their soul has been separated from their body and that isn’t supposed to happen. How are we to balance the reality of being alive in Christ and also being truly dead?
We need not look further than Jesus’s own attendance at a funeral in John 11. Jesus came to Bethany and encountered a decaying corpse, he cried, he comforted, he prayed. Jesus engaged with the physical reality of death, then made the death crushing proclamation, “I am the resurrection and the life”, and raised his dead friend back to life.
Later, Jesus himself would die, his soul being separated from his body. To say “he wasn’t really dead” would be to repeat a heretical sentiment long decried by the church. His lifeless corpse would be conditioned for decay and placed in a tomb. Actually dead. But three days later his dead heart began beating again and his lungs filled with air, providing oxygen for his living brain. Jesus was totally dead and then was totally alive. This is resurrection. Praise God that this is what awaits all believers who have gone before us in death.
But doesn’t Ephesians 2 speak of being alive with Christ? Doesn’t Colossians 2 and 3 describe our resurrection as being achieved? We must do the hard work to read these passages in concert with other passages like 1 Corinthians 15 that speak vividly of the reality of physical resurrection that will occur at the return of Jesus. Jesus himself spoke truly of both realities when he said at Lazarus’s tomb “he who believes in me will live, even if he dies”.
When we speak of resurrection in strictly spiritual terms we miss the glories of resurrection in its fullness. If the words “I am the resurrection and the life” only spoke to a spiritual reality, why would they be accompanied by a story of Jesus confronting a corpse instead of a story of a man turning from his sin and professing faith?
“I am the resurrection and the life” speaks against a prevailing theology that the end goal of man is his soul’s escape from the body into heaven through death. The truth of resurrection is so much more beautiful. Resurrection looks to the return of Jesus and the ushering in of the New Creation, where the earth itself is made new, and the members of the family of God will live in physical bodies in this paradise where heaven meets earth.
“I am the resurrection and the life” has much to say to the grieving widow sitting at the funeral. It tells her that she will be with her husband again, not merely as disembodied souls, but as fully embodied humans! It tells her that her bodily pain in her old age will not “be healed” through death, but through Jesus himself making her body new when he raises it from the dead! It tells her that it is okay for her to grieve the death of her husband because death is real and is an enemy. But it also tells her to rejoice because death itself is the last enemy that will be destroyed through resurrection! It reminds her to fix her eyes on the return of Christ as the fulfillment of her hope rather than her own death as an escape from earthly pain.
Let us not rob ourselves of the fulness of our hope by forgetting the words of our Lord “I am the resurrection and the life”. Just as he has gone before us in death, he has also surely gone before us in resurrection.