Can we hope for life beyond death?

Stanley Hauerwas delivered the following sermon at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. The readings for the day were Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8:6-11; and John 11: 1-44.

At the beginning of Lent, we were told that we are dust and to dust we shall return. Emblazoned with ashes on our foreheads we were reminded that ours is a cruciform faith. I always find it odd that some characterize Christianity as an escapist faith because we allegedly deny the grim character of life. I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

Even our readings for today are drenched in death. You might doubt this claim, however. I am sure, like me, when you heard the reading from Ezekiel 37 you could not resist recalling the familiar refrain, “Dem bones, dem bones, them dry bones, gon’ rise again.” That song seems to suggest that Ezekiel’s vision is not about death, but rather about the overcoming of death through the prophetic word. The bones are reunited by the sinews of the prophetic word. They are given breath by the prophet’s calling on the four winds to give life. Surely this is about life, not death.

But ask yourself, what must have happened for such a valley of dry bones to exist? This is a horrible image. A valley filled with skulls and bones so scattered that there is no clear indication of which arm belongs to which body. The valley is no cemetery. The valley is a site of massacre. That is why these bones are described as the bones of the slain. These folk did not die a natural death. They were slaughtered. These are the bones of those who have died a meaningless death in a country that is not their country. These bones may be brought back to life, but death – death in a foreign land – was and will be again their fate.

Yet surely, you may object, the story of the raising of Lazarus is not drenched with death (John 11:1-44). The very description – “the raising of Lazarus” – suggests this is a story about the triumph of life over death. To be sure, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, but Lazarus’s reprieve will not last long. This is the resuscitation of a corpse, but Lazarus will not be spared death. Lazarus may be one of the most unfortunate of human beings to have ever existed. He will have to die twice. What good is that? His second death is still to come, but he must now experience life having already tasted death.

Jesus makes clear in every exchange he has regarding Lazarus’s death that this miracle is not about Lazarus – it is about Jesus. If we fail to note that this is primarily about Jesus, we will miss some of the oddities of the text. For example, we are told that Lazarus was someone that Jesus loved. But when Jesus is told that Lazarus was sick – indeed, he was so sick he might die – Jesus “stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” It seems that Jesus, who says Lazarus’s illness is “not unto death,” but rather is for “God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified trough it,” is in no hurry to help Lazarus. He waits two days before moving to Judea where Lazarus lives because he seems to want to make sure that when he arrives there will be no question that Lazarus is dead.

We dare not miss, moreover, that the trip to Lazarus’s home in Judea is a journey fraught with danger and, as it turns out, death. Jesus tells his disciples that it is time to go to Judea, but the disciples suggest to him that this is not a good idea. To go to Judea is to make oneself vulnerable to being arrested and killed by those in Judaism that find him to be a threat. To go to Judea is to enter again the politics of the world, and the politics of the world is a politics determined by the fear of death. Yet Jesus says he is going to make this journey through death because Lazarus has “fallen asleep.”

The disciples find that a hopeful description. If Lazarus has only fallen asleep, then he may recover without the help of Jesus. If Lazarus is only sick, they can stay where they are and not risk the death that awaits them in Jerusalem. And so Jesus tells them plainly that “Lazarus is dead.” He must go to Judea and the disciples must follow. The disciples are in the process of learning that there is no alternative. They must follow Jesus to Judea – “Let us go, that we may also die with him.”

Arriving at Bethany, Jesus is met by Martha. She tells Jesus that if he had been there Lazarus would not have died. We do not know why Martha thought Jesus could have saved Lazarus, but all we need to know is that Martha believes Jesus could have saved Lazarus from dying. Jesus seems to underwrite Martha’s understanding of his power, but again a mistake seems to have been made. Martha responds to Jesus’s claim that Lazarus will be raised saying they know that all will rise again on the last day. Jesus, however, is not in the least interested in such speculative accounts of life beyond death. Instead, he tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

Martha responds with an enthusiastic avowal that she understands that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who is coming into the world, but she clearly does not “get it.” Mary joins Martha in the exchange with Jesus, but that only results in further speculation about what would have happened to Lazarus if Jesus had been there. Jesus is, as we say in the South, none too pleased by the ongoing discussion about what difference his “being there” might have made. We are told he was “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” and even shed tears. Whether they were tears of sadness or of frustration, we cannot tell. What we know for sure is that he raised Lazarus – whose body had already begun to rot – from the grave. He commanded them to unbind the cloth that held him and to “let him go.”

Again, we are tempted to see Lazarus being given new life as the climax of this event. But Lazarus, like you and me, still awaits death. The ever-present reality of death – our deaths – is something that we surround with a shroud of silence. Notice, for example, how difficult it is for us to talk candidly with the gravely ill about their approaching death. We say we do not want to rob them of hope, but in fact we do not want to confront their death. We do not want to acknowledge they are dying because we do not know what we should say. Death threatens our speech with futility because death is not just a biological event – it is a reality we fear may rob our living of any significance.

Our difficulty with comprehending our death and the death of others has resulted in what William May has astutely identified as the pornographic character of death in our culture. The pornography of sex is the depiction of sex abstracted from the human emotions that save sex from reduction to technical gymnastic skills that finally cannot escape being boring. When sex becomes separated from the intimacy that a history of faithfulness has made possible, all that is left is speculative possibilities about what might be done with how many. In a similar fashion, when death is abstracted from human emotion, all that is left are the infinite possibilities of killing as many as possible in ever increasing imaginative ways. Death, particularly as displayed in movies and video games, reflects our loss of the relation of death and grief.

Or consider how death is reported in the news. Those that produce the news seem to know that we have a morbid desire to know how someone died because, as Tolstoy observed, a passion for finding the “cause” of someone else’s death can be a way of satisfying ourselves that they died accidentally or fortuitously by virtue of special circumstances affecting the one who died (but not me). It seems that we are at once obsessed by death while striving in every way possible to conceal its power over our lives. Accordingly, we ask those charged to care for us when we are ill to do everything they can to get us out of life alive. This is yet another form of self-protection, as it means we then get to blame health care providers for any miseries related to keeping us alive at all costs.

Yet the reality of our deaths is hard to repress for a life time. I am seventy-three. I am beginning to realize that death is not just a theoretical possibility – even for me. One strategy for dealing with our impending deaths is expressed in Martha’s presumption that death can be comprehended by a general theory about life after death. Martha believed that we are all slated to rise at a specific time. Most of us believe that we possess some aspect of eternity that will insure some kind of survival beyond death. The only problem with those strategies is they forget that only God is eternal. We are finite.

Jesus does not say that we are eternal. Rather he says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Rather than supplying us with a theory to satisfy our longing for life after death, Jesus asks us to follow him to Judea where we will face those that would kill us for refusing to live as though death can be fought off through violence.

If Christian hope amounts to little more than an expectation that everything is going to be alright in the end, then Christian faith will not be powerful enough to resist the impulse to defend life by enacting violence. Our hope in life beyond death is a hope made possible, not by some general sentimental belief in life after death, but by our participation in the life of Christ. This is why life must always be viewed fundamentally as a gift and not a “right” to which we are entitled. We cannot participate in “rights” – we can only exercise them in self-destructive ways.

Such a participation is surely what Paul meant by contrasting our life in the Spirit with that of the flesh (Romans 8:6-11). Paul’s contrast between the Spirit and the flesh is not a contrast between the ephemeral and the material. Life in the Spirit is a fleshly life if it is the flesh of Christ’s body. That flesh, the flesh of Christ’s body, is the flesh animated by the Spirit. Paul, therefore, says that to set the mind on the flesh – a flesh that is not Christ’s – is death, but to set our minds on the Spirit is life and peace. That the Spirit for Paul produces peace is an indication that this miracle is about the formation of a people who Paul believes can make a difference in the world of violence.

The Spirit is a body. We call that body “the body of Christ.” That same Spirit is the agent that through baptism joins us to Christ’s resurrected body, gathering our dry bones and enlivening them unto the One through whom and for whom we are made. This is the life – life with Christ – made possible in the Spirit who insures that, whatever death lies before us, we will not die alone. It is this shared hope that gathers and sends us out courageously to follow Jesus on the way to Jerusalem.

As we approach ever closer to Easter, let us not forget that it is only by our hope in the One who goes before us that we may look upon his death and participate in his singular victory over our own death. May we no longer cling to the frail theories that offer little hope to a world enslaved to the fear of death. Instead, let us cling to the Lord Jesus Christ who by his life, death and resurrection remains the only hope we have that our bones will be reunited in common worship of the one true God.

Stanley Hauerwas is Senior Research Fellow at the Duke University Divinity School. His most recent books areApproaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics and Life and Without Apology: Sermons for Christ’s Church.