From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Debie Thomas, When Jesus Wept (2023); Sr. Nancy Usselmann, FSP, The Spirit Gives Life (2017); Dan Clendenin, Remembering Death, Confessing Life: Jesus Raises Lazarus (2014) and Lazarus and the “Haunting Hypothetical” (2011).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.  

Romans 8:6: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

Brent and I were standing in the foyer of the church. It is an 1880s church that also serves as a food pantry and a dining hall for our Community Meal. The foyer, on this particular day, was piled high with boxes of apples and oranges and a couple fifty-pound bags of onions. Someone had brought a garbage sack of donated clothes that people who come to the food pantry like to look through on their way out. On the other side of the foyer were piles of cardboard, and Brent and I were breaking down boxes to take them out to a waiting pickup truck for recycling. 

I’d met Brent several months earlier at the Community Meal, and then I heard him speak at a City Council meeting on our local housing crisis. “I was homeless since I was 14 years old,” he said. His dignity and self-possession had struck me, his willingness to speak painful truths in a straightforward way. With his neck tattoo and close-cropped hair, he could be an intimidating presence. But his demeanor betrayed a gentleness so complete that I had never felt frightened of him. He’d started reading me poems that he composed on his phone. He had hundreds of poems there and chose a few to read out loud to me every once in a while. 

“You know,” he said amidst the cardboard, “I was resurrected.” 

Wall painting of Jesus raising Lazarus, late 3rd century catacomb.

Brent told me that some years ago he had decided to end his life. His relationships with his children had deteriorated. His son was in prison. Everything seemed dark and unlikely to get better. He was using opioids then, and he decided to intentionally overdose, drift off, and not come back. He was in a park where there were many other people without homes, in similar circumstances to his own. He chose his spot, laid down, took his drugs, and died. 

The next thing he knew, police officers were surrounding him. They had revived him. “You were dead,” they told him. “We don’t know for how long.” 

“What’s it like to be resurrected?” I asked Brent. 

“It’s not easy,” he said. “I don’t know why the police chose me. There were probably other people who died in the park that day and weren’t brought back to life. I know that I was given this life back for a reason. That I’m meant to go on living. But I really don’t know how. One thing is I am not afraid of death. Death is nice. I just know it’s not my time to go there. But sometimes I wish I could.”

Jesus raises Lazarus, medieval fresco.

It’s not every day that you get to talk with the recently resurrected. I felt like I should have asked him more questions, but there was something so matter-of-fact in his description that I didn’t probe further. 

Jesus’ words before Lazarus was raised from the dead were words that I was taught to memorize on Awana nights at my Baptist church. “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, though they die, yet shall they live” (John 11:25). In high school, my youth group went to a concert by the Christian artist Carmen who had a song about Lazarus’ resurrection that was emotionally stirring to my teenaged self. I can still remember the chills I got when Carmen echoed Jesus’ words, “Lazarus, Come forth!”

But as I approach this story again, with Brent’s resurrection in my mind, I don’t actually know what to do with it. Every day, living in the Christian tradition, I’m confronted by the need to wrestle with the literal and the metaphoric. I feel like this is a problem at least somewhat uniquely given to Christians. In the story of Ezekiel and the dry bones, we understand at once that this is a powerful vision, poetically told. “Mortal, can these bones live?” the Lord says to Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:3). “Suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone” (Ezekiel 37:7). It’s an image so striking, so startling, so apt — with all the power of metaphor and all the tangibility of bones — that it has rattled down through the ages, captivating each generation with its revitalizing power. 

Jesus raises Lazarus, 6th-century mosaic, Ravenna.

But the story of Lazarus is different. It isn’t so obviously metaphorical. There’s no vision and almost no poetry. There’s the stink of death and the misery of those left behind. Jesus weeps. Once Lazarus is risen from the dead, we hear no more about him. What we hear a lot more about is belief. “Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25). Even though, of course, they will die. This is the world we live in. Brent, even though resurrected, will die, as he well knows. And meanwhile he has to get up every day and go about his life. He has to decide whether to break down boxes in the church foyer or argue with his landlord about a broken pipe. Belief just doesn’t seem like enough to hold up to it. 

Resurrection appears on the surface to be the exact opposite of ordinary living and ordinary dying. In our world, the dead do not come back to life. Death is final. And yet there is also a hidden logic to resurrection that isn’t at odds at all with the world we know. The sun returns every morning, without fail. The spring comes; green shoots appear where there had been only dry ground. Cycles of living and dying and living again seem to testify to the strange truth that nothing is ever lost.

Gravestone of a Christian named Datus, 3rd century catacomb, with Jesus raising Lazarus.

When my son was about four years old, we were walking home from church one day when we came across a dead bird on the sidewalk. We used two sticks to scoop the bird up and put it into the grass. “Now the bird gets a chance to go into the grass and then come back as something else,” I said. I knew that my version of life and death didn’t exactly mesh with any particular religious tradition. It wasn’t exactly resurrection and it wasn’t exactly reincarnation. But I was trying to tell Sam something true: our bodies break apart and are reabsorbed into the earth. Then those same bits are taken up again by the earth and reformed as something else. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, but it is infinitely reformed. That much I’d grasped from high school science. 

We walked the rest of the way home. I got Sam a snack, and we sat on the couch. Suddenly he said, “When I die and I go into the grass, I want to come back as a bad guy!” Resurrection — blurring of the line between life and death — made complete sense to Sam. He was on board: life is transformed through death. He took it in stride just as Brent did when he told me about his own personal resurrection. It just is. 

Brent’s task post-resurrection was in many ways the same as it was pre-resurrection: to care for the present moment. To attend to the ordinary business of living. Pre-resurrection, he didn’t take this job very seriously. He thought of life as survival, and he didn’t particularly want to survive. But post-resurrection, he does know the ordinary in a new way, even if it’s still the same ordinary. If we need more evidence that everyday life is sacred, hallowed in its own right, maybe it is this: that those who have been resurrected go on living just as the rest of us do. Maybe after Lazarus was raised from the dead and everyone had gone home from the big spectacle, one of the sisters said, “Well, maybe we should make some supper?” And then there was evening and there was morning. And it was good.

Weekly Prayer

Howard Thurman (1899–1981)

Our Little Lives

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!
The quietness in Thy Temple of Silence again and again rebuffs us:
For some there is no discipline to hold them steady in the waiting
And the minds reject the noiseless invasion of Thy Spirit.
For some there is no will to offer that is central in the thoughts—
The confusion is so manifest, there is no starting place to take hold.
For some the evils of the world tear down all concentrations
And scatter the focus of the high resolves.

War and the threat of war has covered us with heavy shadows,
Making the days big with forebodings—
The nights crowded with frenzied dreams and restless churnings.
We do not know how to do what we know to do.
We do not know how to be what we know to be.

Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!
Brood over our spirits, Our Father,
Blow upon whatever dream Thou hast for us
That there may glow once again upon our hearths
The light from Thy altar.
Pour out upon us whatever our spirits need of shock, of lift, of release
That we may find strength for these days—
Courage and hope for tomorrow. 
In confidence we rest in Thy sustaining grace
Which makes possible triumph in defeat, gain in loss, and love in hate.
We rejoice this day to say:
Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) was an American philosopher, theologian, mystic, and Civil Rights leader who was a key mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. and whose work grows in significance in contemporary contemplative movements. Among his many books are Jesus and the Disinherited (1951) and The Inward Journey: Meditations on the Spiritual Quest (1961). This poem is from Meditations of the Heart (Beacon, 1953), p.83–84. 

AmyFrykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Brooklyn College; (2) ChristusRex.org; (3) Wordpress.com; and (4) University of the Holy Land.