Lazarus Saturday and the resurrection of the dead
The Orthodox Church celebrated the resurrection of Lazarus one day before Palm Sunday, named the Saturday of Lazarus. At every commemoration of the ones asleep, Lazarus is called to pray for them: “…for the prayers of the Holy and Righteous Lazarus, who resurrected from the dead on the fourth day …”
Painful for us is the fact that we got used so much with death that we have come to regard it as natural. We don’t realize that man was not created to die, that the death has been swallowed up in victory of Christ through resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:50-54). Lazarus’s resurrection is the invitation or the call to come out of death and enter into Life through Christ, the Lord of Life. This resurrection showed that Christ, Who accomplished this great miracle through His Divinity, can raise up the people from death on the day He chooses. He is the powerful and sawyer God.
Through Lazarus resurrection, Christ prefigures the resurrection of the human bodies. He who raised Lazarus, who had been dead for four days and was smelling, can also raise the people whose bodies decomposed after their soul had left them. Besides, the future resurrection of the bodies is also called rebirth or resurrection, because it is a new creation. This new creation does not mean that the bodies will gain another form, for, while remaining the same, they will be saved from corruption and the domination of the death, becoming spiritual bodies.
Between the resurrection of Lazarus and the resurrection of people at the second coming of Christ there is no doubt a fundamental difference. After the resurrection, Lazarus did not get a spiritual body, but the same body he had before his death, with all the characteristic features of wickedness and obedience to death, still needing food and everything necessary to maintain the biological body. This also results from the fact that later on he died again. So despite his resurrection, he got a mortal and temporary flesh. But after the second coming of Christ, when the bodies will resurrect, they will be spiritual, without needing food, sleep, water or clothing.
Source: www.ziarullumina.ro
