Please read the passage before the commentary.
In the year 587 B.C. the Babylonians attacked and captured Jerusalem, deposed its king and sent the inhabitants into exile. They destroyed the kingdom. David’s ancestral line of kings was dead. Would the Israelite people all die? Was this the total end of life for them? Had God abandoned them? Was this the end?
Enter Ezekiel to say, “I will open your graves and make you rise from them and you shall know that I am the Lord. In the year 538 B.C. Cyrus king of Person allowed the Israelites to return and rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple. The nation would come alive once again.
We had a similar experience of dying and rising as a nation. Abraham Lincoln expressed his hope for “a new birth of freedom” in his Gettysburg address.
These symbolic rebirths or resurrections of nations testify to a deeper concern we have with death. Does death end it all? What happens after death? Is there no resurrection from the dead, no after life?
Jesús stood at death’s door and bid Lazarus to come out alive. Jesús stood at death’s door and entered into the realm of the dead himself. Lazarus had to die once again; Jesús died once for all.
Those seeking baptism at the Easter Vigil have come to know Jesús as the resurrection and the life, that is, the source of life and hope. We who have received baptism have experienced the resurrection of new life in Jesús. We have received baptism have died with Jesús in baptism so that we can rise with him in the fulness of his resurrection.
We treat dead human bodies with respect because we await the fulness of resurrection, somehow with our bodies, in the fulness of time.
Ezekiel’s vision is fulfilled in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesús. The hope of Abraham Lincoln finds its fulness in the resurrection of the Lord Jesús. We have been baptized into this fulness. Our sisters and brothers who are seeking baptism at the Easter Vigil have come to believe in Jesús as the resurrection and the life, as the source of our life and existence.
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