I AM the resurrection...

17th Week OT (Fri): John 11.19-27
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
Church of the Incarnation


Do you think of yourself as a revelation of God to the world? Do you think of yourself as showing to others the nature of our Father’s love for His creatures? More pointedly, are you a revelation of the Father’s love? Does your life shine brightly as evidence of the work of the Holy Trinity?

If you are a normal Catholic, the answer to these questions is most likely, “Yes!…well, sometimes…well, OK…not as much as I should, but I’m getting there with God’s help.” This is the perfect answer for a good Catholic—enthusiasm for doing the Good, a confession of falleness and laxity, and an expectation of progressing in holiness through grace.

And we have Martha to thank for showing us how this life of revealing God to the world is begun! Martha is a bit irritated with Jesus for not showing up sooner to save her brother from death. Despite this, she says, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” Jesus assures Martha that her brother will rise and she expresses her faith in the notion common among the Jews of that time that her brother would rise again on the last day. Jesus—as he was prone to do—took her raw faith and gave it shape, gave it a powerful content, a direction. He revealed to her the full Truth of her shadowed belief in a resurrection sometime far away. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live…” He does not say “I will be the resurrection” or “I was the resurrection” or “I would have been the resurrection,” no; he says: “I AM the resurrection…” Right here, right now, I am the restoration of life, I am the revelation of my Father, I am the death of Death and the beginning of new life. Of Martha he asks, “Do you believe this?” And her answer, and our answer, begins a life of revealing God to the world. She says, we say: “Yes, Lord!”

The fallout from saying Yes to the Lord, from confessing an unshakable faith in Him as the Christ is both devastating and comforting. Saying Yes to the Lord lays waste to a personal history of falleness, laxity, disreputation, the hard-headedness and hard-heartedness of pride. Saying Yes to the Lord destroys the strangle-hold of sin and helps us to live lives in freedom. Saying Yes to the Lord, confessing his Sonship, his Mastery of our souls, is our resurrection from the decay of death due to disobedience and our entry into everlasting life.

Please note that Martha needed no miracle to prove Jesus worthy of her faith. She didn’t wait for Jesus to raise her brother before calling him “Lord.” She was confident enough in his connections with God to get the job done…but it was only after he revealed to her his true nature—I am the resurrection and the life—that she proclaimed him Christ, Son of God, Lord. This is the moment of grace, the gift of trust, of faith, the openness to be taught, to be shown the way, and to be corrected with the Truth.

Martha began by simply trusting Jesus’ ability to get things done with God’s help. She ended by naming him Lord. What happened in between is what must happen in our own lives before we can become revelations of God to world: we must welcome God’s gift of faith by confessing his Lordship. Then everything we do and everything we say everyday becomes a showing of His love, a demonstration of his mercy and forgiveness. We become the living, breathing evidence that God moves in His creation, signs that the Christ is indeed coming into his world.