Early yesterday, I stopped into a Quick Trip for coffee and breakfast to go, enroute a Commission on Ministry meeting in Oklahoma City. A gent in a farm cap spied my blacks, sidled up to me quietly, and said, "Sir, why is there so much evil in the world?" That is not a theological question I was keen to dig into at 7 a.m. before coffee. But I couldn't ignore the question, so I talked about a free universe in which bad things can happen and noted that our task is to fight evil. He said he does that every day, and with that our encounter ended.
Often when we think of evil, we think of death. And while it is true that death can be seemingly unjust and untimely, even tragic, depending on the timing and circumstances, and while it can be accompanied by horrible pain and suffering, death is natural, part of the endless cycle of summer, autumn, winter and spring -- of birth, life, death and rebirth. Most of us would agree with the great philosopher Woody Allen who said, "I don't mind dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens." But, sorry, we don't have the option of absence.
Often we hear the old saw about the inevitably of death and taxes, but in our modern day we know that if one has the best tax lawyers and accountants money can buy, it is possible to avoid paying taxes at all. Death, however, is the one inevitable eventuation. Two of today's pericopes [Ezekiel 37: 1-14, John 11: 1-45], the story of the dry bones and the story of the raising of Lazarus, symbolize for us the themes of death and rebirth.
As Catholic Christians, we acknowledge the biblical and theological reality that eternal life, which is the free gift of God, begins when we surrender our hearts and lives to God in Christ. Eternal life is a present gift that goes on giving forever. New and unending life begins, not when we check out of this world, but when we check in.
That Catholic vision also owns that we are a Resurrection People. The Church is the "womb of salvation," in which we are born and fed with Word and Sacrament to live into God's eternal life. We journey together to God. Contrast that with the popular protestant notion that each of us is a lone ranger who must possess certain opinions in order for God to love us and to save us at the end of life by rapturing us onto another planet; whereas, if we don't have those opinions, we are sentenced to torture forever. For us the question must not be, 'is there life after death?', but 'is there life before death?' Years ago a rabbi friend was asked what Reform Jews believe about the afterlife and he said there is too much work to be done to heal the world (i.e. build the Kingdom of God) for us to waste time obsessing about afterlife, because if we live right, we can trust God with whatever comes after. Now that's a God we can believe in.
In our Ezekiel passage, the boneyard comes to life when God's breath blows over the bones and Israel comes back to life. As the New Israel, we too have been in exile to sin in a terrain of false religion. When God breathes over us, we revive to be his people again. And we resist the power of death even in this life: the spiritual death that comes from greed, self-promotion, addiction -- all the things that sap life out of us. When God breathes over us, we revive to be his reborn People here and now in this life, trusting God with the encore.
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