What does it mean to be "dead" while still breathing, still walking, still speaking? And what would it mean to be "alive" in a sense that has nothing to do with biology? These are not theological questions but psychological ones — questions about the quality of consciousness itself. The meditation that follows reads today's scriptures as a confrontation between two entirely different meanings of the words "life" and "death," and asks whether the love spoken of in John's epistle is not a sentiment at all, but a force that changes the very substance of a human being.
First reading
1 John 4:7-16
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God.
He that loves not knows not God; for God is love.
In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwells in him, and he in God.
And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.
Gospel
John 11:19-27
And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother.
Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house.
Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother had not died.
But I know, that even now, whatsoever you will ask of God, God will give it you.
Jesus saith unto her, Your brother shall rise again.
Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.
Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
And whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Believ you this?
She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.
— Interpretation —
Let us begin with a strange fact that is nearly always overlooked. In today’s Gospel, when Christ says to Martha, “Your brother shall rise again,” Martha hears this in one way, and Christ means it in another. Martha immediately translates his words into the language of conventional religious expectation: “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” She pushes the meaning away from the present moment into a remote future — into doctrine, into theology, into something safely distant. And Christ’s response is extraordinary. He does not say, “Yes, and I will make that day come sooner.” He says something that cancels the very framework Martha is using. He says: “I am the resurrection, and the life.”
Not “I will be.” Not “I will bring.” But I am. Now. Here. In this moment, standing before you in the road.
This is the key to everything. Martha is thinking in terms of time — some great event at the end of history when all the dead will rise. Christ is speaking about a state of being that exists outside of time, or rather, that is available at any point within it. He is saying that what Martha calls “resurrection” is not an event that will happen to corpses at the end of the world. It is a quality of consciousness that can be entered into now, in this life, while one still breathes.
And then he adds something even more startling. He says: “He that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” Here are two different statements, and they use the words “dead,” “live,” and “die” in ways that seem contradictory unless we understand that Christ is using these words at two different levels simultaneously. A man can be dead — that is, asleep, mechanical, living entirely from his first nature, his habitual reactions, his self-love — and yet, through some turning of understanding, some reception of a higher influence, he can come alive. Conversely, a man who has come alive in this inner sense — who lives and believes — shall never die. That is, the quality of being he has received is not subject to the death of the body, because it was never produced by the body in the first place.
Now let us turn to the first reading, the passage from the first epistle of John, and notice how it illuminates the same teaching from a different angle. “God is love; and he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him.” This is commonly read as an exhortation to be kind. But read it more carefully. John is describing a mutual indwelling — “we dwell in him, and he in us.” This is the language of a transformed state. It is not saying that if you are pleasant to your neighbor, God will approve of you. It is saying that love, of a certain quality, is itself the medium through which a higher level of being enters a person. Love is not the reward. Love is the means of transformation.
And what kind of love is this? John is very specific: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That is, this love does not originate in our ordinary nature. It does not come from effort or will or good intention. It comes from above, from a level higher than our mechanical personality. Our task is not to manufacture it but to receive it — to become permeable to it. And we can only become permeable to it when something in us has died: some hardness, some insistence on our own way, some determination to keep everything at the level of the known and the familiar.
Martha, standing in the road, knows that her brother is dead. She knows conventional religious teaching about what will happen at the end of time. She has good intentions, even faith of a kind. But she has not yet understood. Christ is not offering her a future consolation. He is offering her a present revolution. He is saying: the death you are grieving is real at one level, but at another level there is something in your brother — and in you — that was never subject to death in the first place. Can you receive that? Can you understand it? “Believe you this?”
The question hangs in the air. It hangs in the air still. It is addressed not to Martha alone but to something in each of us that is capable of hearing it — something that already suspects, in its quietest moments, that we have been using the words “alive” and “dead” the wrong way round.
Photo by Paulina Herpel on Unsplash
Scripture: King James Version
