The Promise of Life

 The Promise of Life

John 11:1-45[1]

Last week we talked about the challenge that evil and suffering presents to our faith. One of the hardest things we may be called to do is to trust that God can and will bring good out of the worst things that can happen to us in this life. But there’s another specter that can undermine our faith. It’s the fact that we are all dust and to dust we will all return. Our mortality can haunt us just as much as any of the hardships we may have to suffer. At times, death can seem like a mercy. Especially when someone we love is suffering. But when it comes suddenly, and especially when death takes someone “before their time,” it can be difficult if not impossible to hold onto our faith. And this isn’t just a modern problem. The human family has wrestled with death as long as we’ve been around.

Part of the reason for this is that when we realize that one day every one of us will die, it threatens to erase any meaning we may find in our lives. Again, this isn’t a problem that has come up only recently. The “preacher” of Ecclesiastes said it centuries ago: “Everyone will die someday. Death comes to godly and sinful people alike. It comes to good and bad people alike” (Eccl 9:1, NIrV). And so he concluded that everything in this life is “vanity” or “nonsense” or “useless” or “meaningless,” depending on how you translate it. I’d have to admit that if death really is the end of all hope, then those who despair of finding any meaning in our lives are right. If all there is to life is that “you pay your taxes and then you die,” it doesn’t matter much what you do or how you live.

Our gospel lesson for this week addresses the problem of death and how it affects not only our faith but also our outlook on life. It’s the story about how Jesus raised his friend Lazarus to life after he had died. The heart of the story is found in Jesus’ dialogue with Lazarus’ sister, Martha. When she learned that Jesus was approaching their village, she went out to meet him. And she said what may sound like a complaint, but I think was simply an expression of her grief: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (Jn 11:21). In response, Jesus promised her “Your brother will rise again,” which she thought meant that Lazarus would rise “in the resurrection on the last day” (Jn 11:23-24). But Jesus had something more immediate in mind!

We should recall again that in John’s Gospel, the basic premise of the promise of life is that Jesus is God in human flesh. That means that “just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (Jn 5:26). So it is that Jesus tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live” (Jn 11:25). And he proceeds to demonstrate the truth of that promise by raising Lazarus from death! Just to be clear, this was no ordinary “near death” experience where someone was “clinically dead” for a while but was somehow “brought back.” Lazarus was dead and buried. He’d been in the tomb for four days. I’d say that makes the fact that Jesus brought him back to life even more dramatic a demonstration of the promise that Jesus is “the resurrection and the life.”

There’s another aspect of this story we need to understand in order to grasp the impact of Jesus’ promise. Their view of death was different from ours. Faithful people like Martha didn’t have a hope that those who died would “go to heaven” where they would be comforted in the presence of God. Their understanding of death was summed up in the concept of Sheol, which some English Bibles sometimes translate as “hell.” But the idea of Sheol was really something more like “the grave.” It was a kind of prolonged waiting for something else. And they didn’t even have much of a concept of what the dead might be waiting for in the grave. They were just dead. Some of them, like Martha, believed that “at the last day” those who had died would be raised to life. But in the meanwhile, they were still just dead.

But Jesus clears away that uncertainty about death. He showed that God’s promise to the family of that dead man on that day was life. And that promise not only applied to Lazarus, it applies to all who trust in God’s promise, whether in this life or the next! Because he was and is God who became human, Jesus has the power to give life that can only come from God: new life, eternal life, everlasting life. More than that, because he was lifted up on the cross, lifted up to new life in his resurrection, and lifted up to reign at God’s right hand, nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Not. Even. Death!

One of the challenges to our faith is how we live in the face of our mortality. We don’t resign ourselves to a fatalism that allows death to determine when it’s “your time to go.” And we don’t give in to despair that lets death have the last word and therefore makes whatever we may do in this life meaningless. Rather, our faith in Jesus as the “resurrection and the life” calls us to live in the hope and trust that God’s promise of life has the last word for all of us. Living from this promise of life in Jesus gives the lie to fatalism and breaks the spell of despair. The promise of life in Jesus enables us to live with hope even in the face of death. This choice between despair and hope determines just about every aspect of your life, from whether it matters how you live, to what you plan to do with your life, to how you relate to other people. It all boils down to the choice between despair and hope. It all boils down to whether you believe that the last word is God’s promise of life.

I’m not talking about living in denial of death and the heartbreak it can cause. The sorrow and grief that attends death are very real. Most of us have some experience with that. What I’m talking about is that we have nothing to fear from death, because Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior overcame death on that hill outside Jerusalem so long ago. We have nothing to fear from death because Jesus reigns as Lord over life and death even now, and will always. We have nothing to fear from death because we know that the one whom we will face is our God who has loved us from before the foundation of the world. Our God is the one who has chosen to be “God-who-is-with-us” and therefore also has chosen us to be with him for all eternity.[2] Our God is the one who from before all time and to time without ending has determined to be true to his character, which is “God-who-is-for-us,” even and especially in death. Our God who claimed us before we were ever born, as we demonstrated by baptizing this boy today, claims us as “his own” even in death, especially in death.[3] It’s this promise of life that Jesus demonstrated on that day in Judea by raising Lazarus from the dead. And it is this promise of life that we can hold fast even and especially when we come face-to-face with our own mortality.

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[1] © 2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/26/2023 for Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 2.1, 274: God “does not will to be without us, and He does not will that we should be without Him.” Cf. also, “The Study Catechism: Full Version with Biblical References,” Approved by the 210th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA (1998), question 27, where the affirmation of “life everlasting” means that “God does not will to be God without us.”

[3] Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.4, 593: “The real reason why we need not and cannot and must not far death any longer is that, at the point where we shall cease to be, God the Lord intervenes for us and awaits us and comes to meet us and summons us to secure and recognize and grasp our opportunity. This means, however, that He, the eternal God, lays claim to us … as his own chosen possession.