(Source from 40 Days & 40 Ways Daily Meditation for Lent – Year A)

…if Christ is in you then your spirit is life itself because you have been justified; and if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, then he who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you.

In our progress through the history of salvation on the Sundays of Lent we now come to the final stage, the New Covenant promised by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. As this is the Sunday of the Raising of Lazarus it is appropriate that the Old Testament passage chosen should be the promise of being raised to life. This whole passage of Ezekiel 37:1-14 is a splendid vision of Israel raised to new life (of which we here read only the conclusion). This is in fact a prophecy of the nation being raised to new life in the return from the Exile, rather than a prophecy of personal resurrection, but this Vision of the Valley of the Dead Bones is still a vivid and gripping presage of the personal resurrection of the dead.

In the earlier period of Israel’s history there was no concept of resurrection from the dead; the belief develops in the course of the Old Testament. At first it was thought that the dead simply returned to the stock of the ancestors. Then came the idea of Sheol, a place where the dead gathered for a sort of half-life without power, almost like dead leaves, where no one could even praise God. But a yearning to be for ever with God then begins to be felt, and an appreciation that God will somehow deliver his own. This yearning for life with God is particularly strong in Job and in the Psalms. There is no clear idea of rising to new personal life until the early second century BC, and then there are two conceptions: either that only the good will rise again to life (2 M 7:9), or that all will rise again, some to everlasting life, some to everlasting shame and disgrace (Dn 12:2).

Chapter 8 of Romans is the chapter of the Spirit, where Paul writes more about the Spirit of God living in us than anywhere else; it is also the climax of his explanation of our salvation by being re-born into Christ. This begins in Romans 6, where he teaches that that by faith and Baptism we are plunged (‘baptise’ means ‘dip’ or ‘plunge’ into water) into Christ’s death and rise with him to new life. But, as today’s reading explains, we have not come back to life, but have gone forward to a new life in the Spirit of God. In the Resurrection our animating spirit will no longer be the human spirit, but the Spirit of God. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is already living in us, and we live with a new Law, the Law of the Spirit, by whom our whole life is transformed.