The Victory of Christ’s Resurrection
Christ can resurrect us anywhere at any time and we can live and express that. He raises us in our death and gives life to us all. So the question is: while we live physically, in what aspect of our lives are we dead? The story of Lazarus leads us to unlock the perception of our temporal reality and the power of the Resurrection.
Saturday of Lazarus
Resurrections performed by Christ signify that He can raise or heal anyone at any time. In those resurrections, there is a progression in terms of the age of the persons dead, the amount of time passed and publicity around the death. First, there is a little girl who just dies. Second, there is a young man who has been dead for hours. Third, Lazarus, an older man, already in the tomb, has been dead for 4 days. The resurrections are done in the privacy of the little girl’s home; the public funeral procession of the young man; and in the widely known tomb of Lazarus.
St. Gregory relates these resurrections to how sin kills and creates spiritual death (sin=anything that causes separation from God, from others and within ourselves from who we are really):
1) in privacy, in the hidden, personal relationship with God
2) in public, when our sins are apparent to everyone, they carry us to death
3) in decay, when sins that go unchecked cause us to stink such that no one wants to be around us (In contrast, notice how people want to be around those who emanate the Holy Spirit.)
Relationship with Christ
Jesus does not want us to predicate faith on something He has done for us. He downplays the miracles and often tells his disciples not to speak of them. He wants us to rely on our relationship with Him. That relationship is to be predicated first on His Word, and not His acts, accepting more who He is and less what He does. In other words, that relationship is not to be conditioned on just giving us what we want or pray for. Rather, that we love Him unconditionally as He loves us because that is true love. St. John Kronstadt says: Seek the Giver, not the gift.
Dysfunction in relationships with others and within own selves came into the world when Adam and Eve acted separate from God thus breaking that relationship. Christ came to forgive Adam and Eve and us, their progeny, and heal and restore this broken relationship. It is up to us to accept that forgiveness, lose our defensiveness or hardness and take the opportunity Christ gives us to be in relationship with Him. We each need to do our part in healing our relationship with God and with the rest of creation, i.e. other people and nature itself so that loving harmony is restored.
At the little girl’s death, people laughed at Jesus, and He puts them out. St. John Chrysostom explains that even Jesus does not do miracles in the middle of unbelievers. One has to be open to Jesus so that He can work His miracles. He cannot have an impact on our lives if we do not have a relationship with Him. And, as Jesus is free, He respects our freedom or “free will”, therefore, He chooses not to impose His power without our permission.
What is the greatest power on earth? Holy Communion. Why? because it represents the Love of Christ, in constant sacrifice of Himself for us.
The Message of Easter
Christ who is the source of Life today comes to live in us through His Resurrection. The power of Easter is our spiritual resurrection.
Easter, therefore, is a Passover from death into life, not physical but spiritual. It is not our aging bodies that are the focus since we will all still die someday, as did Lazarus at a later time. There are some people in nursing homes imprisoned by their broken bodies yet free in their souls and with more life and spirit in them than some of the physically healthy. While we live here on earth, without Christ we can be dead. With Christ, whether we live or we die, yet we still live. In life or in death, His Kingdom is upon us and in us.
The relationship with Jesus is life-giving and life-sustaining even in the midst of difficulty. We tend to reach for Jesus more in tough times and this is why He allows the struggles. When we accept Him and rely on Him, He gives us the power to overcome whatever comes our way. He does not take the difficulty away but helps us grow stronger from it. He lets us fall, so that when He helps us up, we rise higher. With each of these, He prunes us to become like Him from Whom we were fashioned. He resurrects us from our fallen humanity to our original humanity so that we grow into what each of us was created for, communion with God and with life. We can be in communion with God but only if we are Christ-like. This means humbly sharing in His Cross and his death by dying to our self-centeredness, pretentiousness, hypocrisy, ingratitude, impulsiveness (symptoms of fallen humanity) so that we may rise with Him in His Resurrection and share His Joy and His Life. Orthodox theology is summed up in this statement: “God became man, so man can become god.”
Who dies on the Cross? Jesus dies in His humanity and ours. Jesus as God does not die because God cannot die nor does He need to do so. We in our fallen humanity need to die, because we are the ones that need resurrection. Only Jesus as God can rise and lead us home with Him back to
Our fears, struggles, insecurities around death or concerns of this world fall away when we confront it with the truth of the Resurrection. The truth is Christ can be anywhere, and if we feel His Presence, no matter what the location, the physical state of our body, the emotional state of our heart, or the circumstances of our occupation, age, marital status, we share His joy and His life. He is the light in the darkness of our souls. Nothing else has power over us if we permit the victorious and omnipotent Christ to come and live within us. Through His Resurrection, the purpose of which is really our resurrection, we become victorious in death and in life.
OTHER QUESTIONS/TOPICS:
Orthodox theology of death
When a person dies, he/she leave the realm of time and space. There is no linear continuum. Death is likened to sleep. For someone who is not asleep, time ticks away. For the one in deep sleep, there is no sense of the passage of time. Time stands still in death. The person who dies sees and is with everyone else who has ever died or will die. According to the thinking of Church Fathers as expressed in the hymns, Lazarus sees the dead of all ages. Likewise, as Jesus dies, all people who ever lived and those who will live die and resurrect in the same instant in Him.
Heaven and Hell: Heaven and hell in Orthodoxy is not a location, but a spectrum. Heaven is moving towards God. Hell is moving away from God. Those are the 2 trajectories that continue eternally. After death, the state of one’s soul is the basis for that person’s trajectory.
Holy Trinity
Jesus wants us to hear him praying to the Father to raise Lazarus. The Holy Trinity in one essence always acts in harmony. As three persons, they have different roles:
God, the Father wills it
God, the Son does it
God, the Holy Spirit perfects it
The Father worked in the Old Testament period, the Son in the New Testament period and the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal period or current times which began with Pentecost or after the New Testament. Jesus does everything according to the will of the Father. Jesus, as the second Adam, does in obedience what the first Adam did in disobedience. The Holy Spirit gives the power or the energy to do the Father’s will. He imbues us with Grace. We are being perfected in these times.