Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
Martha had great faith in Jesus. Even in tragedy she still believed enough to say, "even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you." Her expectation, like that of many Christians, was that the reward of the righteous would be something in the distant future. She correctly realized that suffering would often have to be endured in the short term for the sake of the joy that the future would bring.
Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.”
Martha's belief was strong, but it was missing something. The love, joy, and peace of the Kingdom was not to be a reality only on the last day. It was a reality that could be found in Jesus himself.
Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”
The point was not so much the resurrection of one person who would go on to die again. Rather, Jesus was definitively demonstrating the truth of his words by raising Lazarus as a sign of something deeper. We can come to a place where our faith in Jesus means that death has no power over us, even if we, as mortals, will still die.
Because we are united with Jesus we will live again after we die, both body and spirit. But even before that, we can become so united with he who is the resurrection and the life that the reality of that union overcomes even our fear of death. This is what it means when Jesus tells us that if we believe in him we will never die, because in the deepest part of our being we will live on. Eventually, on the last day, our body too will no longer rebel against the life that fills our souls. Our bodies may indeed have to wait for the last day, but Jesus does not want us to be content with only that future directed hope. He wants us to be united to him here and now, so that his peace and fearlessness can define us as well.
She said to him, “Yes, Lord.
I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God,
the one who is coming into the world.”
To really grasp that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, to experience that here and now, we do need to spend some time at his feet. Service is important as well, but we must not neglect the fact that we are offered an experience that even Moses could not have. When the cloud of glory filled the meeting tent even Moses could not enter, not even he, who spoke to God as a friend, whose face shone with the glory of the Lord. In Jesus, the veil is torn and we are permitted to enter into this glory. This is the promise of contemplative prayer. We need not wait to heaven to begin to see that glory, though only there will its fullness be revealed.
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord, mighty God!
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