This article was first publised in HomeLife magazine.
He stood over the earthen casket, the stench rising as the top was lifted. Bending over, feelings of anger and rage rose up within His soul. Jesus looked in on the very still, very gray, very much dead body. He knew it was His friend, Lazarus, in that grave, but the decaying corpse didn’t much look like His friend, the one who had stood by Him when others left.
The sisters were weeping. They clung to the Jewish idea of resurrection at the end of the age, and they knew their friend was more than a part-time carpenter and itinerant rabbi. Jesus fulfilled all of the qualifications for that Son of God predicted by the ancient prophets. And yet, in their greatest hour of need, when that healing power was most needed, Jesus was miles away and didn’t exactly rush over.
Jesus gave them words that echo forward to us 2,000 years later: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live” (John 11:25). Jesus then commanded Lazarus with all of the authority of heaven, as the one who alone breathes life into death, and brought His friend back from the grave. This was a sign of His own coming resurrection and a promise that those who believe in Him will also one day rise again, body and soul.
"Easter tells us that the sickness that cripples and distorts, the violence that robs and steals, the pain that so ravages people will one day give way to full and final healing for those who believe."
Daniel Darling
Around Easter, we rightly focus on Jesus’ salvation of our souls. But Jesus also came to rescue our bodies. He didn’t arrive on earth as a disembodied spirit but as a fully human being, as if to say that human bodies aren’t temporal or unimportant, but beautiful. God, after all, designed and created human bodies and Jesus is rescuing them from sin.
This means that Easter isn’t just some escapist, wishful thinking. Easter tells us that the sickness that cripples and distorts, the violence that robs and steals, the pain that so ravages people will one day give way to full and final healing for those who believe. There is hope for those who suffer, for those who experience more fully the corruption of the fall. God has visited us in our pain and Jesus has defeated the ugly death that haunts the human experience.
Jesus was angry at death — this, the work of the enemy — and so should we be. Death steals, but Jesus came to give life. So this Easter, let’s live in the reality of a fallen and painful world, but take hope that one day this same Jesus will call us forth from our graves into what He has made new.
This article was first publised in HomeLife magazine.