One gloomy afternoon in the Springs many years ago, my life and my mind and my heart were in many pieces. Phil, my then-new father-in-law of about a few weeks, who was probably questioning giving his daughter to a man who was not coming out of the blocks real strong, took me up on a blustery knoll behind Jim and Patty Sampson’s house. Braced for a tongue-lashing, what I experienced was the snugging sensation of a tender and gentle shepherd’s crook hooking under my arms, trying to lift me out of a hole. I haven’t experienced that kind of courageous, kind, and intentional soul spelunking maneuvers like that, but a few times in my life. It requires a great deal of hand strength and wingspan to hold onto a lip of heaven and reach down into Sheol.
Tender words to an imprisoned soul smelled fresh and grassy to me, and many of you have experienced in your own ears the -chink- sound of a spade digging out your soul buried in gerief or despair or loneliness, and found the shovel in Phil’s strong hands.
When Phil went into hospice, some of us were praying that the Lord would take Phil on Easter Sunday. Seemed fitting, as getting people raised from the dead was his life’s work. Perhaps that was selfish of us to want to keep the dying from living. God doesn’t share his Google calendar with us.
When Jesus’s friend Lazarus died, Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters, took issue with his timing. He did not come promptly to heal Lazarus, who subsequently died. Being only seventeen miles away, with a sturdy jog, Jesus could have covered the distance in just over two and a half hours, assuming an average of an 8-minute mile, which is not unreasonable when considering he is God incarnate. Hurt, Martha stated the obvious and spiced it with accusation: if you had been here, he would not have died. She was probably right.
When Jesus tells her Lazarus will rise again, Martha acknowledges a formal, general resurrection in the future, distant and cold, with about as much hope to heat her heart as a pinprick star. As often happens, the sepulcher of our loved ones doubles as a memorial to dead hope.
But Jesus corrects her. Resurrection is not far off. It is not nameless or cold. It does not tarry.
“I am the resurrection and the life,” he says. “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall live. And he who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Resurrection is not merely a future event, a cosmic olly-olly-oxen free at the end of time to call out those hiding in graves. Resurrection is a person. Life is a person. Access to this person, and the resurrection of dead things into living things, including all the years and decades the locusts have eaten, is very simple. Four words Jesus asks Martha, Do you believe this?, are the same ones he asked Phil, the same ones he asks us. Do you believe this? Phil’s answer was- is YES.
Because of his affirmation, we know three things that we hold paradoxically at once. One, Phil has died. Two, Phil will never die. Three, because he is dead and will never die, he is Living. He has met the two preconditions to be included in that group of patriarchs Jesus spoke of to the resurrection-denying Sadducees.
And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.
Mark 12:26-27
And if I may be bold enough to extrapolate on the logic of Jesus’s words: God is the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and the God of Phil Thompson. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.
Thought Butter 