Resurrection Life

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14 Other texts: John 11:1-45

Hooray. A warm sunny day. Spring finally has forced its way to the front, pushing winter to the back of the line. The crocuses’ prematurity has been vindicated. We can breath again. A fitting day for texts whose theme is clearly resurrection and rebirth.

Things like to live. The grasses pushes up to shatter the asphalt. The trees thrive even in their urban four square feet of soil. Our bodies crumble and are rebuilt constantly. We get sick, we get well. Forests encroach on formerly cleared land. In the history of our earth, great calamity has destroyed almost all species, and the remainder has re-covered the earth more than once. The Noah story repeats. Life in the aggregate is strong, and against it death is irrelevant.

The miracle of resurrection is matched by the miracle of creation. The wonder of re-birth is exceeded by the wonder of the first birth. Thinking about being born again reminds us of the astonishing fact that we are born at all.

The bones lie in the valley. Ezekiel is led there by God. There are very many bones, it says. Very dry, no marrow, no life left in them. Ezekiel walks around all around them. A desperate and creepy image. The bones represent despair. Northern Israel has been conquered and turned into oblivion. Judea is left alone, bereft. Our bones are dried up, they lament. Our hope is lost. We are cut off from God completely. They mourn in advance the prospect of their certain end from their separation from God.

This theme of displacement is one of the great themes of the Bible, a common pathology of sorrow in the story of God and humans. The theme of being far from home, from the nourishing and true spiritual center, from the source of life. Adam and Eve tossed from the Garden. The Israelites enslaved in Egypt, and then later exiled to Babylon. The fear of eternal judgment that would separate us from God forever.

Out of the depths I call to you, O Lord, we sang in today’s psalm. Hear my pleas, I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for God.

Yet the bones rise. The bones live. Ezekiel speaks to the bones, the Lord speaks to the bones. The destruction is undone, reversed. The organs of strength and motion—muscle and ligaments—grow again, re-organized. Form emerges out of chaos.

And finally, lifeless form is given life by the breath of God. Ezekiel speaks to the winds, the Lord speaks to the four winds. The word for breath is the word for wind is the word for spirit, appearing nine times in these fourteen verses. The wind, breath, spirit of God comes into them, and they live.

The story reiterates the creation, the creation of form from chaos, the speaking of things into existence, the spirit as the carrier of the power of life. This wind/breath/spirit word is the same as the wind that blew over the waters of chaos in the first chapter of Genesis. God the creator in Genesis is the healer in Ezekiel. God the creator, the redeemer, and the breath of life are all the same.

Yet the stories are not quite the same. Resurrection is not the same as first creation. It is not new life, but renewed life. Just as risen Lazarus is not a reborn baby Lazarus, but a restored grown-up person, with memories and unrequited desires and old scars. (As resurrected Jesus came with scars and wounds to show disciple Thomas). Resurrection is an impure process—like everything else in life. The resurrection of the bones in the valley and the friend of Jesus in the tomb restores something that was lost. Repairs something that was broken.

In this way it conforms to John’s notion of eternal life, which is not something that comes after life but which is part of life. Resurrection is therefore likewise not something post-life but part of life. It is not an exception or an aberration, but rather the long-term consequence of the breath of God that animates all the universe. It is built in.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus tells Martha. Both resurrection and life. Lazarus is raised, and later eats with Jesus. Both the restoration of loss and also the new life that follows.

Resurrection in this way is the chief model of Christian life. It is the basis for our confidence in words like renewal, revival, restoration, and even repentance. It is the force behind Desmond Tutu’s hymn: Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.

Resurrection describes our experience of being lost and then found by God. Of recovering a life destroyed by grief or anxiety. Of being freed from addiction. Of finding grace when burdened by self-hatred. Our experience of being saved not after death but from despair and hopelessness now is evidence that resurrection is the norm, not the exception.

What kind of God would create the world and yet never rescue it in times of trouble? What kind of God would push the cosmos off on a long, sometimes treacherous, and always surprising journey without a guide?

The Spirit of God dwells in us, Paul reminds us in Romans. God’s spirit/breath is in all of us. Some people dismiss the Lazarus story as mere resuscitation. But that is mean-spirited. The story, like the one in Ezekiel, like the whole arc of the Bible, is one of an always-near God whose love of life infuses all of creation.

Thanks be to God.