How sad it is … that after two thousand years, the church has gotten most Christians only to the point to which the Pharisees got Martha: resurrection in the future, resurrection a week from some Tuesday. Only a handful have ever gotten past that point and made the leap of faith that Jesus got Martha to make: the leap to resurrection now—to resurrection as the fundamental mystery of creation finally manifest in his own flesh. And yet that mystery is all over the pages of the New Testament. Not only is it in such epistles as Ephesians and Colossians. It is also perfectly plain in the Gospels: Jesus never meets a corpse that doesn’t sit up right on the spot. Consider. There is the widow of Nain’s son; there is Jairus’s daughter; and there is Lazarus himself. They all rise not because Jesus does a number on them, not because he puts some magical resurrection machinery into gear, but simply because he has that effect on the dead. They rise because he is the Resurrection even before he himself rises—because, in other words, he is the grand sacrament, the real presence, of the mystery of a kingdom in which everybody rises.
Robert Farrar Capon
The Parables of Judgment
