• Ezekiel 37: 1-14

A poet prone to visions, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley littered with the bones of fallen fighters for Israel.  He lives in a time when the humiliated, defeated King and most of the people of Israel had been marched into exile.  The poet/prophet sees new life emerging, even though he is surrounded now by the remains of death and destruction.

• Psalm 130

The psalmist makes a concise assertion of Yahweh’s total, perfect power and equally perfect, complete forgiveness.  The vivid image of a watchman huddled in a tower, peering into the gray, sullen horizon, looking for the first sliver of sunlight so he can announce the dawn of a new day captures the stance the faithful ought to maintain.  Although he knows from past experience that dawn always comes, he still is renewed, restored with its daily appearance.  Then he has the privilege of conveying the news.  His announcement to those below the watch tower means that all can start a new day (even before they have seen light themselves); life begins anew with every sunrise.

• Romans 8: 6-11

Reflecting his era’s obsession with the transience and arbitrariness of life, Paul juxtaposes the body, which fails and finally dies, with the “Spirit,” which comes from outside this life and, for those who believe, “gives life to our mortal bodies.”

• John 11: 1-45

Because the common belief of the day was that the spirit left the body on the third day, Jesus waits until the fourth day, despite his own personal grief at the loss of his friend and the distress it causes Lazarus’s sisters, to dramatize the point of his raising his friend from the dead:  God’s power to undo the ravages and certainty of death is absolute.  The raising of Lazarus is a precursor to Jesus’ own death and being raised by God, which is imminent in John’s narrative.

Whether from the prophets in the bleakest circumstances and with no  obvious reason for hope to Jesus himself and those who believed his witness, biblical texts assert boldly over and over that meaning persists in human life.  Is life merely a fragile artifice that finally returns to dust or is there more?  Some post-Modern writers find in biblical texts an unequivocal “Yes!” in response to that kind of question.

Take one example, John Milbank, who writes that biblical accounts of resurrection instigate a sweeping assertion of ethics and community.  He writes:

“Resurrection is no proof of divinity, nor a kind of vindication of Jesus’ mission.  And not very good ‘evidence’ survives, only the record of some strongly insisted-upon personal testimonies.”  “To remember the resurrection, to hope for universal resurrection, is a ‘political’ act: for it is the ultimate refusal of all denials of community.”  “The resurrection is about the persistence of the ordinary…”  (The Postmodern God, p. 273)

What makes assertion of resurrection ‘political’ is its significance not for life after death, but life before death!  To believe/accept/assert is to make a decision that human life is something more than mere struggle, survival and then demise.  This belief always must seem somehow “miraculous,” that is, from beyond anything humankind could achieve.  It must be from God and by God.  And it sanctifies the “persistence of the ordinary.”  

Just as reliably as the sunrise each morning, so we are to always be on the lookout for new life, even when surrounded by despair and death.