“God is About the Business of Raising the Dead”
Luke 7:11-17
6/10/07
Picture, if you will, a child being told by his
father that for his birthday he was not only going to get a lot of
presents, but that he was also going to get to go to a Giants game as
well. Do you know any child who at that point would say to his
father, “Well, I’ll take the presents, but I don’t
want to go to the game”? Or picture an employee being told
by his boss that he was not only going to get a raise, but that he was
also going to be promoted. Do you know anyone who would take the
raise but turn down the promotion? Or picture a wife being told
by her husband on their anniversary that he was not only going to take
her to a fancy restaurant for dinner, but that he was also going to
give her an anniversary diamond. Do you know any woman who would
take the dinner but turn down the diamond? Though there may be
odd exceptions in cases like these, for the most part, we rarely turn
down gifts. The more, the better. However, when it comes to
the gifts that God gives us, we tend to play with some while leaving
others nearly unwrapped.
This is the case when God gives us not only the
forgiveness of our sins, life, and salvation for Christ’s sake,
but also the promise of our bodily resurrection from the dead. In
the Lutheran Church we often focus so much on the former gifts that we
forget the latter. But today’s Gospel reading would remind
us that God is not only in the business of delivering forgiveness,
life, and salvation to us, but also resurrection from the dead,
restoration of the body, and a new physical, solid, tangible creation.
Now, if I were to ask you if you believed that these
physical gifts too were yours in Jesus Christ, you’d probably
answer ‘Yes.’ We betray our neglect of them, however,
when at someone’s death, for example, we talk more about that
person being with the Lord in heaven now than the resurrection of his
or her body to come. And yet in the Apostles’ Creed we
don’t confess, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins, going
to heaven when I die, and the life everlasting.” No, we
confess the resurrection of the body. Likewise, in the Nicene
Creed we also confess “the resurrection of the dead and the life
of the world to come.” Now, that’s not to deny or in
any way diminish the fact that we do go to be with the Lord when we die
and that our departed loved ones in Christ are with Him even now.
It does, however, show that we tend to emphasize going to be with Lord
when we die above and even to the exclusion of the resurrection of our
bodies on the Last Day. In doing this, we end up making Jesus
merely a Savior of our souls rather than a Savior of both our souls and
our bodies. You can’t come to today’s Gospel reading
and simply conclude that by raising this man from the dead Jesus is
showing us that He simply has the power to raise us from spiritual
death. Does it teach this? Yes! But that’s not
all the gifts that Jesus has to give. He’s not only in the
business of raising people from spiritual death, but from physical
death as well.
By raising this man physically from the dead, Jesus
shows that you have a Lord who’s in the business of saving the
whole you. He shows you that He cares not only for your soul, but
for your body as well. After all, He took upon Himself your human
nature, complete with both soul and body. He did this so that He
might redeem not just part of you but all of you. It was all of
you, you see, that needed to be redeemed. Both your body and your
soul were created by God. But you and I have corrupted both of
them with our sin. Physical death is the visible evidence of
this. We die physically because we are sinners; the wages of sin
is death, as the Apostle Paul writes. But physical death is not
the only kind of death that results from sin; spiritual death results
as well. Our souls are not unaffected by our sin, but are also
corrupted through and through. We all came into this world
spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins, even though physical death
has not yet happened to us. (For this reason, no one can say that
he chose to believe in God by his own free will. Just as little
as this dead man could help himself back to physical life, so little
could we help ourselves back to spiritual life.) But Jesus is the
Savior of both our soul and our body, and He has brought us back from
spiritual death all by Himself with the words of the Gospel and our
Baptism into His death and resurrection.
We are now spiritually alive, because Jesus had
compassion on us and spoke the word “Arise!” to us through
the Gospel. But His business of raising the dead isn’t done
yet. Our spiritual resurrection is only half the job. The
other half is yet to come on the Last Day, when He says
“Arise!” to our dead bodies and we come out of our coffins
just like this young man came out of his. And as sure as you can
be that you have eternal life now by faith, so sure can you be that on
that day you will have new physical life, when your body, which was
also baptized along with your soul, will be brought up from the dead
and transformed, so that it will be like Christ’s glorious
resurrected body, a body of flesh and blood, a body that will never
grow old or experience pain or hunger ever again, a body fit for a new
physical creation - the new heaven and the new earth that God is going
to create on that day.
This is why Jesus is able to tell this widow not to
weep, because He is the resurrection and the life, and He’s about
to demonstrate that by raising her son physically from the dead.
Jesus holds the keys to death and hell, because with His own death and
resurrection He has unlocked both of them for us. Jesus has both
the power and authority to loose us not only from our sins, but also
the wages of sin - death, both spiritual and physical, temporal and
eternal. We, too, therefore, do not need to weep as the
unbelievers do when physical death occurs, either when it comes upon us
or upon our brothers and sisters in Christ. This doesn’t
mean that we mustn't be sad when a loved one in the Lord dies.
The Scripture itself says that there is a time for mourning. But
the kind of weeping we do for the dead in Christ is not the kind where
we despair of their salvation, the kind which believes that all is
lost, and that there is no hope of the life to come. We weep,
because we are parted from them for a time. But we know we will
see them again at the resurrection. We have our resurrected
Lord’s promise on this. He is called the fruit-fruits from
the dead, meaning there’s more to follow.
By raising people like this young man, Lazarus, and
Jairus’ daughter from the dead, Jesus shows that He has come not
only to bring forgiveness for our sins, but to usher in a new creation,
the restoration of all things. God created all things, and in
Christ He has redeemed all things, including our physical bodies.
He has done all this out of His compassion for us. It was out of
His compassion for this widow that Jesus brought her son back to
life. God does not approve of or look with pleasure on our
suffering, pain, and death. It was never part of God’s
creation; He didn’t speak it into being. It exists because
of our sin. God now can and does use it for our good, but He
doesn’t enjoy seeing us hurt. And yet, physical and
temporal suffering and death isn’t the greatest evil there
is. Spiritual and eternal death is. So, because God is not
willing that any perish, but that all be saved and come to the
knowledge of the truth, Jesus took on your suffering and death - both
spiritual and physical - on the cross, so that He might deliver you
from both. He was forsaken by God and suffered under God’s
wrath - that’s spiritual death, and His body shut down and died,
when He gave up His spirit. But He was also raised from the dead
on the third day, not just spiritually, but bodily as well. The
whole Jesus came back to life, assuring you who are in Him that the
whole you will come back to life when He raises you from the dead.
And you are in Christ by His having put Himself -
body and soul - into you by way of His Word, by way of your Baptism,
and by way of His Holy Supper. To the latter He adds the promise
that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life and
He will raise him up on the Last Day. Because Jesus has put His
physical body and blood into your physical body and blood by way of
your physical mouth, you have the sure hope of a physical resurrection
to eternal life on the Last Day. In the meantime, if you die
before that day, yes, you will go to be with the Lord in paradise, just
as Jesus promised the thief on the cross. But that state between
your death and your resurrection is a temporary one, and the Apostle
Paul talks about this state in which we are without our bodies as an
undesirable condition. In his words, it’s like being
naked. We don’t want to be naked, but clothed with
immortality, and in Jesus we have the promise that we will be so
clothed, just as He is, when He returns to raise our bodies from the
dead and usher in the new creation.
Now, when the crowds saw what Jesus had done, they
reacted with fear and by giving glory to God. The fear they
experienced was not fear in the sense of being afraid of God, but the
fear of being in awe in the presence of God. Where people are
being brought back from the dead - both spiritually and physically -
there God is present at work through His Word and His Sacraments.
And He’s doing that here among us today as He imparts life to
both our bodies and our souls through the body and blood of His Son and
His words. God is present here among us in the flesh, granting
life and salvation to us! This should not only awaken a sense of
awe and wonder in us, but should also result in praise and thanksgiving
to God that He has visited us in His compassion. Such thanks and
praise for all His gifts and benefits towards us gives glory to
God. It honors and exalts Him as we receive by faith and confess
with our mouths His works on our behalf.
And so, God is more generous in His gifts towards us
than we are willing to receive. Not only is He in the business of
giving us the forgiveness of our sins, life, and salvation now, but He
also gives us the promise of bodily resurrection, the healing of all
harms, and a new creation, the restoration of paradise, a place in
which we will see Him in the flesh, face to face with our own physical
eyes, these eyes, which along with the rest of our bodies will come
forth from the grave when our crucified and risen Savior calls to us on
the Last Day and says, “Arise!” No need to weep,
then. There’s more than a prophet among us. God
Himself has visited us. Amen.