Will not come from the mouth of Death, but from the mouth of Life. One day the lungs of God will take in a deep breath, sucking up all the oxygen in the universe, and let out one final bellowing guffaw as Death itself dies.
That is the surprisingly great Christian hope—not that we will go to heaven when we die, but that we will come back to life. A physical, earthy, feet-on-the-ground kind of life. Not some disembodied existence off in the ether. Death is real, but it is not the ultimate reality. We will all die, but Life is our destiny.
Of course, in the face of the death of loved ones, in the reality of this blood-soaked world, in the midst of the steady decline and decay of our own bodies, all that seems too good to be true. Honestly, it does. It sounds like a fairy tale. Like Tolkien writing that Gandalf the Grey [spoiler alert!] dies and comes back as Gandalf the White, more powerful than ever. Or it sounds like a metaphor. Like all this business about resurrection (as N.T. Wright puts it) is just a fancy way of saying “going to heaven when we die.”
But it’s not a fairy tale, and it’s not a metaphor. For all his round-about-ways of saying things, Jesus actually means for us to take his talk about resurrection and never dying quite literally.
The question becomes as plain and direct as his question to Martha, in the throes of her own grief because her brother had died: “Do you believe this?”
That is to say, “Even as you weep, do you believe that I—the presence and embodiment of Life itself—will have the last laugh?”
