HW: why do we really believe in the resurrection of the dead? Lazarus revisited.

A reflection on the story of Lazarus, John 11:1-45, written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA. 

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
22 March 2026
The raising of Lazarus
John 11:1-45

Welcome
Even if we don’t know Latin, usually we are familiar with the term “homo sapiens” —that evolutionary stage of our species, from which we are all descended. Sapiens points to knowing or understanding and might seem ironic today. Not everyone is happy with the term and some cultural commentators propose a different one — “homo narrans” or story-telling man — as an alternative.

The scripture readings this Lent have given us a mighty series of stories, starting on the first Sunday of Lent with Adam and Eve and ending today with Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Part of the Adam and Eve mythology is the discovery of mortality — not just death but awareness of death. The Lazarus story is a moving portrait of hope in the resurrection: Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.

Topic
The journey towards Easter is a journey of hope. We could ask: on what is our hope of resurrection founded?

Steps
As often, a bit of history can help. Ancient Israelite religion was in its day a kind of oddity. For most of the biblical period, ancient Israelites believed in God and even in a robust relationship with God but did not, it would seem,  believe in life after death. That probably seems very strange to us because we usually make a close link between faith in God and the possibility of life after death but evidently they did not.

Towards the end of the biblical period an evolution took place. About 170 years before the birth of Jesus, belief in life after death emerged. The context was a very violent persecution of Jews for their faith, perhaps the first in history. Some, as we read in the books of the Maccabees, were faithful to the point of death, they were martyrs. The question arose, how could God be faithful to those who had been faithful to him to the point of death if there was no life after death? From that time, we have the first evidence of belief in resurrection from dead in the book of Daniel.

By the time of Jesus, the teaching has spread fairly widely. Pharisees, such as Paul before his conversion, believed in the resurrection of the dead, as did Jesus himself. Not everyone was convinced. Luke tells a story in his Gospel about the Sadducees. Their argument was also in the form of story: a woman, in tragic circumstances, married a sequence of seven brothers who all died before the woman herself finally died. Whose husband will she be in the next life? Jesus’ reply is worth quoting:

And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.  (Luke 20:37–38)

We Christians have inherited this tradition. It is not too much to say that faith in the resurrection is  a cornerstone of Christian doctrine and identity. Our greatest feast is Easter, not Christmas, and our journey through Lent is a spiritual camino, a great season of grace, so we can celebrate Jesus risen with minds and hearts renewed.

Such robust hope does not exclude realism. The long story of Mary, Martha and Lazarus portrays the tragedy of the human condition. We will recognise our own experience in a few phrases:

So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, “Lord, he whom you love is ill.”  (John 11:3)
Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.  (John 11:21)
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  (John 11:32)
Jesus began to weep.  (John 11:35)
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. (John 11:38)

Who has not felt like this at some point in their lives? 

At the heart of this Gospel reading is a spectacular advance in teaching: our Christian teaching about the resurrection is not simply a doctrine but a person. Differently put, it is not something we believe but someone in whom we place our trust. Part of the genius of the Fourth Gospel is that all truths are personal and relational. In our Gospel reading we heard, “I am the resurrection and the life,” one of the seven great “I Am” sentences in this Gospel. The consequences for us all are spelt out by St Paul in our second reading:

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. (Romans 8:11)

This teaching is a further deepening of what Paul said to the Corinthians:

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.  (1 Corinthians 15:20)

Conclusion
Our human story could easily be one of bleakness: we are born to die or as Samuel Beckett graphically expressed it, we are born astride the grave. But there is an alternative story and, this time, the story teller is God: the God of faithfulness and love, who raised Jesus from the dead, for whom all of us are alive. 

Merciful God, 
you showed your glory to our fallen race by sending your Son 
to confound the powers of death.

Call us forth from sin’s dark tomb: 
break the bonds which hold us, 
that we may believe and proclaim Christ 
the cause of our freedom and the source of life, 
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, 
God for ever and ever. Amen.