Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, February 22, 2026
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Our own resurrection is not only a thing to be expected after death but a life to be lived, here and now.
Any good showman knows that you always save the best for last and never do the same trick twice. Jesus already broke the first rule during the wedding at Cana, and here he appears to be breaking the second. Perhaps in part for this reason, the raising of Lazarus has led to much fussing over the nature of the miracle Christ performs in today’s gospel. I know a number of pastors who insist that this should not be considered a resurrection but something else (the term resuscitation was thrown around). The reasoning for this distinction is that the resurrection of Christ needs to be the first instance of true resurrection; otherwise, he would not be the “firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18). They also note that, since Lazarus will (presumably) die again, this is certainly not the same thing as what is promised to us, which is resurrection to eternal life.
What is missing from the above distinction is what the theologian Paul Tillich is getting at when he describes Christ as the “final revelation” of God. What makes Jesus as the Christ the final revelation is not that revelation ceased with Christ but that we understand all revelation through Christ, both what came before him and what came after him, and whatever will come. In the immediate, we only understand the raising of Lazarus as competing with Jesus’s own resurrection because of it. The cry of the centurion in Matthew 27:24 (“He saved others; he cannot save himself”) still needed an answer. Or to put it differently, the resurrection of Lazarus only means something because we see it through Jesus’s resurrection, just as the promise of our own resurrected life is grounded in Christ’s resurrection.
But we do not need to go all the way to Tillich to arrive at an understanding of Jesus as the final revelation. We have it here in his encounter with Martha. When Jesus arrives, Martha is angry with him that he delayed, complaining that if he had only been punctual, Lazarus would not have died. Jesus tells her that her brother will rise again, but she brushes it off as a platitude, believing that resurrection is something that will only come on the last day. Jesus’s response to her—“I am the resurrection and the life”—points to the way in which Jesus’s resurrection is a truth already felt in this moment. Even though, as a discrete moment in time, he has not yet died and risen, the power of that resurrection is that it touches every moment of time such that he can come to Martha (and soon Lazarus) as the power of that promise of resurrection, even as it has not yet been fulfilled in time.
Our proclamation of the resurrection should be no less bold than this. We are not preaching the fullness of the resurrection of Christ if all it inaugurates is a kingdom/reign of God that is somewhere off in the future, hidden behind a cloud. When we preach Christ crucified and risen for us, we preach a resurrection that is here and now, even as we await the fulfilment of that promise. Today is a day to remind your people that they have already died and been raised in Christ, and that today is already a moment of resurrection living.
