Welcome to the new school year!

Being dead is not the worst thing I can think of.  I'm not going to tell you the worst thing I can think of.  But any number of things seem to me worse than being dead.  Dying.  Dying is worse than being dead.  The actual process of getting from here to there is no fun for most people, and often is fraught with pain and anxiety, and I'd just as soon skip that part all together.  Torture is probably worse than being dead.  A close second to torture is wearing heels.  Also, the Boston Red Sox.  I'd rather be dead than have to watch the Red Sox win anything. 

In any event, I submit that there are worse things than being dead, and that, given the chance, most people would not choose to live forever.  This thesis has been corroborated by no less an authority than Miss Alabama, who, in the 1994 Miss Universe contest, answered the question, If you could live forever, would you and why? by saying

I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.

There isn’t much to add to that.

So, I am not so sure being Lazarus would have been so great.  There's been many a morning when I woke up one monkey short of a barrel, but for Lazarus, it must have been a heck of a wake-up call.  If heaven is all it's cracked up to be, he probably wasn't all that thrilled to be called back to earth.  All sorts of folks claim to have had Lazarus' experience--to have died and come back to life--and one and all, they say they didn't want to return.  I wonder if Lazarus was all that happy to be the poster boy for Jesus' healing powers.  Maybe he was glad to get away from his two whiny sisters.

Some people are more ready than others.  My grandmother on my father's side spent most of her life getting ready to be dead.  She had her outfit and hairdresser and coffin chosen by the time she was forty.  She would come to visit on holidays and spend hours with my father in his study, directing him how to handle her demise.  She would recite the litany of her health problems, noting which celebrities suffered from the same ailments and how likely they were to carry her off.  The old bat lived until she was 93, leaving nothing behind but relief. 

Most folks fall somewhere between my cynicism and my grandmother's.  Death is for many people frightening, portentous, mysterious, and uninvited.  And if you are among them, then religion is the thing for you. Around the globe and down through the ages, religion has sought to answer the two great questions:  What will happen when I die? and  How do I make sure that what happens is something good?  Every religion worth its salt has wrestled with this deep human angst and provides some answer. Some explain the mystery in terms of  enlightenment;  others talk of salvation.  For some, death brings reincarnation in an ongoing progression toward perfection;  for others, death is but an illusion; for Christians, death marks a one-time-only "promotion to glory," as the Salvation Army calls it. 

Jesus' message in today's gospel--or at least John's message--is clear:  death is a terminus and a part of the human condition and not a good thing.  But it can be transcended through belief in Jesus.  (Only through belief in Jesus, we might note. No room for those other religions in this schema.)  Moreover, the way of this salvation is resurrection.  That is, the effects of death can be flat-out undone. 

The story of Lazarus' resurrection of course prefigures that of Jesus--literal, physical miracles of re-quickening.  People who were stone-cold dead walking and talking again.  For many centuries, that's how it's been written, and how it's been taught, and how we've believed.  And that was okay, because we didn't want to be dead.  If we had to die, then at least we wanted to believe we’d get another go-round sometime. And so great care was taken with the burial of Christian bodies, so that the dust into which they turned could be gathered up again and given new life at the final resurrection.  Even better, there was a wonderful place you went after you died.  If you were a Mormon, you could even have your own planet to be god over. 

In our post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, scientific-method age, we have a harder time with heaven.  We are less likely to pay for perpetual care of a plot of ground for the dust to accumulate in, and more likely to keep it in an urn or scatter it across the sea.  We are somewhat more inclined to give a metaphorical spin to the story of the resurrection of the body.  But we still don't want to be dead. 

We take this feeling out on Easter.  And so this feast has become for all too many Christians the rather grisly adoration of a bloody but resuscitated corpse in whose steps we hope to follow.  Why we would want to do that I can't imagine.  While there may be comfort in this vision, it is cold comfort indeed.  Surely it can’t be healthy to, as the hymn says, gaze with rapture on those glorious scars.  Surely we are capable of understanding our myths and metaphors in a richer, more promising way.

I, for one, am not prepared to go to the stake over the empty tomb--not Lazarus', certainly not my own and, frankly, not the one in which the women laid Jesus.   I don't need to see the corpse to see the effects of the resurrection.   Jesus was surely raised.  It seems incidental to me whether that included a physical revivification.  How much more meaningful and hopeful it is to say, with Jack Spong, that "Jesus was raised into the meaning of God."

Now there's a resurrection I could look forward to.  After 51 years, I pretty well know the meaning of the body.   But the meaning of God—now there’s something I would like to participate in.  Perhaps to see the resurrection this way is to shift from a Western emphasis on resurrection as salvation from death to a more Eastern view of resurrection as enlightenment. That might not be such a bad idea.  All in all, this seems to me a deeper, richer understanding than our naively literalistic notion of one day popping up from our graves like zombies.

What does resurrection mean for you?  What do you want to be resurrected into?  Where do you start and where do you end?  For Jesus, I really believe, life was a long search to realize his relationship with the parent God he knew dwelt with and within him; his death was the occasion of his connection with that deep reality;  his resurrection was the ultimate realization of his oneness with that transcendent mystery.

Yes, I know that sounds like theological, metaphysical, insubstantial nonsense.  But at some point, we must come face-to-face with our rather silly dependence on the image, rather than the meaning of our metaphors.  Do you really want to drag that overweight, unpredictable, achy-breaky carcass around on its sore feet for eternity?  What, really, do you rejoice in through the resurrection of the bones in the valley, or of the brother of Mary and Martha, or of the body of Jesus?  What, really, do you hope to find in your own resurrection? 

I anticipate in the promise of Jesus nothing so boring as eternally gazing upon a god, nothing so jejeune as singing and flying, nothing so plastic as being glad to have my body back.  These things are, in the long run, mere magicians' tricks.  The real joy of the resurrection lies in its promise of something much truer--not just learning the meaning of life, but sharing in the meaning of God.  

To talk of the meaning of God is not just hot air, idle speculation, fuzzy terminology.  We might not grasp it now, but we sense it, feel it, every time we get in touch with the spark of God within ourselves and others.  Those moments of revelation, of spiritual fulfillment, of joy in giving, or insight into something deeper--we've all had those.  We all share in what Asians call Buddha-nature.  To be resurrected is to find the completion of that serenity, love, and creative energy.  To be resurrected is to be raised into the meaning of God.  We don't need our bodies for that.