Many people in Christ Jesus’ day, not unlike today, saw resurrection as a mystical event happening far in the future, if at all. But Jesus knew differently. When his friend Lazarus died, Jesus assured Lazarus’ sister Martha, “Thy brother shall rise again.” Martha, perhaps not daring to hope that she would see her brother again, said, “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” But Jesus, ever tender to those who sorrowed, opened Martha’s thought to a more profound and present view of resurrection with these words: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (see John 11:1–44). Jesus then visited Lazarus’ tomb and brought him, walking, out of his grave.
In the time that followed, Jesus continued to prove that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). And when he presented himself alive after his own crucifixion and burial, he proved conclusively that the Christ, the spiritual idea of God and its manifestation in human affairs, is what raises humanity from death. He showed that man can no more lose life than numbers can lose the principle that governs them. Our life is eternal now because it is spiritual, the reflection of God, who is Life itself.
The major task before each of us, therefore, is to work toward our own resurrection from a mortal sense of life. We have the capacity to do this because the Christ is here now, enabling us to understand and demonstrate our oneness with God and rise from the material, beginning-and-ending sense of life to our indestructible spiritual life as God’s reflection. Each time we demonstrate the all-power of God, divine Truth and Love, in healing some discordant condition through the divine Science of Christ, we rise in the demonstration of eternal Life and take a step toward our complete resurrection from the belief of living in matter.
